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its own nuclear project, but Bush felt that it did no harm. He met with Gunn at Anacostia on 14 January 1943, and explained the situation to him. Gunn responded that the navy was interested in nuclear marine propulsion for nuclear submarines. Liquid thermal diffusion was a viable means of producing enriched uranium, and all he needed was details about nuclear reactor design, which he knew was being pursued by the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. He was unaware that it had already built Chicago Pile-1, a working nuclear reactor. Bush was unwilling to provide the requested data, but arranged with Rear Admiral William R. Purnell, a fellow member of the Military Policy Committee that ran the Manhattan Project, for Abelson's efforts to receive additional support.
The following week, Briggs, Urey, and Eger V. Murphree from the S-1 Executive Committee, along with Karl Cohen and W. I. Thompson from Standard Oil, visited the pilot plant at Anacostia. They were impressed with the simplicity of the process, but disappointed that no enriched uranium product had been withdrawn from the plant; production had been calculated by measuring the difference in concentration. They calculated that a liquid thermal diffusion plant capable of producing 1 kg per day of uranium enriched to 90% uranium-235 would require 21,800 36-foot (11 m) columns, each with a separation factor of 30.7%. It would take 18 months to build, assuming the use of the Manhattan Project's overriding priority for materials. This included 1,700 short tons (1,500 t) of scarce copper for the outer tubes and nickel for the inner, which would be required to resist corrosion by the steam and uranium hexafluoride respectively.
The estimated cost of such a plant was around $32.6 million to build and $62,600 per day to run. What killed the proposal was that the plant would require 600 days to reach equilibrium, by which time $72 million would have been spent, which the S-1 Executive Committee rounded up to $75 million. Assuming that work started immediately, and the plant worked as designed, no enriched uranium could be produced before 1946. Murphree suggested that a liquid thermal diffusion plant producing uranium enriched to 10% uranium-235 might be a substitute for the lower stages of a gaseous diffusion plant, but the S-1 Executive Committee decided against this. Between February and July 1943 the Anacostia pilot plant produced 236 pounds (107 kg) of slightly enriched uranium hexafluoride, which was shipped to the Metallurgical Laboratory. In September 1943, the S-1 Executive Committee decided that no more uranium hexafluoride would be allocated to the NRL, although it would exchange enriched uranium hexafluoride for regular uranium hexafluoride. Groves turned down an order from the NRL for additional uranium hexafluoride in October 1943. When it was pointed out that the navy had developed the production process for uranium hexafluoride in the first place, the army reluctantly agreed to fulfil the order.
Philadelphia pilot plant [ edit ]
Abelson's studies indicated that in order to reduce the equilibrium time, he needed to have a much greater temperature gradient. The NRL considered building it at the Naval Engineering Experiment Station in Annapolis, Maryland, but this was estimated to cost $2.5 million, which the NRL regarded as too expensive. Other sites were canvassed, and it was decided to build a new pilot plant at the Naval Boiler and Turbine Laboratory (NBTL) at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where there was space, steam and cooling water, and, perhaps most important of all, engineers with experience with high-pressure steam. The cost was estimated at $500,000. The pilot plant was authorized by Rear Admiral Earle W. Mills, the Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Ships on 17 November 1943. Construction commenced on 1 January 1944, and was completed in July. The NBTL was responsible for the design, construction and operation of the steam and cooling water systems, while the NRL dealt with the columns and subsidiary equipment. Captain Thorvald A. Solberg from the Bureau of Ships was project officer.
The Philadelphia pilot plant occupied 13,000 square feet (1,200 m2) of space on a site one block west of Broad Street, near the Delaware River. The plant consisted of 102 48-foot (15 m) columns, known as a "rack", arranged into a cascade of seven stages. The plant was intended to be able to produce one gram per day of uranium enriched to 6% uranium-235. The outer copper tubes were cooled by 155 °F (68 °C) water flowing between them and the external 4-inch steel pipes. The inner nickel tubes were heated by high pressure steam at 545 °F (285 °C) and 1,000 pounds per square inch (6,900 kPa). Each column therefore held about 1.6 kilograms (3.5 lb) of uranium hexafluoride. This was driven by vapor pressure; the only working parts were the water pumps. In operation, the rack consumed 11.6 MW of power. Each column was connected to a reservoir of 3 to 170 kilograms (6.6 to 374.8 lb) of uranium hexafluoride. Because of the dangers involved in handling uranium hexafluoride, all work with it, such as replenishing the reservoirs from the shipping cylinders, was accomplished in a transfer room. The columns at the Philadelphia plant were operated in parallel instead of in series, so the Philadelphia pilot plant eventually produced over 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of uranium hexafluoride enriched to 0.86 percent uranium-235, which was handed over to the Manhattan Project. The Philadelphia pilot plant was disposed of in September 1946, with salvageable equipment being returned to the NRL, while the rest was dumped at sea.
Construction [ edit ]
Thermal Diffusion Process Building (F01) at S-50 under construction
In early 1944, news of the Philadelphia pilot plant reached Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory. Oppenheimer wrote to Conant on 4 March 1944, and asked for the reports on the liquid thermal diffusion project, which Conant forwarded. Like nearly everyone else, Oppenheimer had been thinking of uranium enrichment in terms of a process to produce weapons grade uranium suitable for use in an atomic bomb, but now he considered another option. If the columns at the Philadelphia plant were operated in parallel instead of in series, then it might produce 12 kg per day of uranium enriched to 1 percent. This could be valuable because an electromagnetic enrichment process that could produce one gram of uranium enriched to 40 percent uranium-235 from natural uranium, could produce two grams per day of uranium enriched to 80 percent uranium-235 if the feed was enriched to 1.4 percent uranium-235, double the 0.7 percent of natural uranium. On 28 April, he wrote to Groves, pointing out that "the production of the Y-12 plant could be increased by some 30 or 40 percent, and its enhancement somewhat improved, many months earlier than the scheduled date for K-25 production."
Groves obtained permission from the Military Policy Committee to renew contact with the navy, and on 31 May 1944 he appointed a review committee consisting of Murphree, Lewis, and his scientific advisor, Richard Tolman, to investigate. The review committee visited the Philadelphia pilot plant the following day. They reported that while Oppenheimer was fundamentally correct, his estimates were optimistic. Adding an additional two racks to the pilot plant would take two months, but would not produce enough feed to meet the requirements of the Y-12 electromagnetic plant at the Clinton Engineer Works. They therefore recommended that a full-scale liquid thermal diffusion plant be built. Groves therefore asked Murphree on 12 June for a costing of a production plant capable of producing 50 kg of uranium enriched to between 0.9 and 3.0 percent uranium-235 per day. Murphree, Tolman, Cohen and Thompson estimated that a plant with 1,600 columns would cost $3.5 million. Groves approved its construction on 24 June 1944, and informed the Military Policy Committee that it would be operational by 1 January 1945.
Diffusion columns, S-50 Liquid Thermal Diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1945
Sites at Watts Bar Dam, Muscle Shoals and Detroit were considered, but it was decided to build it at the Clinton Engineer Works, where water could be obtained from the Clinch River and steam from the K-25 powerhouse. The thermal diffusion project was codenamed S-50. An S-50 Division was created at the Manhattan District headquarters in June under Lieutenant Colonel Mark C. Fox, with Major Thomas J. Evans, Jr., as his assistant with special authority for plant construction. Groves selected the H. K. Ferguson Company of Cleveland, Ohio, as the prime construction contractor on its record of finishing jobs on time, notably the Gulf Ordnance Plant in Mississippi, on a cost plus fixed fee contract. The H. A. Jones Construction Company would build the steam plant, with H. K. Ferguson as engineer-architect. Although his advisors had estimated that it would take six months to build the plant, Groves gave H. K. Ferguson just four, and he wanted operations to commence in just 75 days.
Groves, Tolman, Fox, and Wells N. Thompson from H. K. Ferguson, collected blueprints of the Philadelphia pilot from there on 26 June. The production plant would consist of twenty-one 102-column racks, arranged in three groups of seven, a total of 2,142 48-foot (15 m) columns. Each rack was a copy of the Philadelphia pilot plant. The columns had to be manufactured to fine tolerances; ±0.0003 inches (0.0076 mm) for the diameter of the inner nickel tubes, and ±0.002 inches (0.051 mm) between the inner nickel tubes and the outer copper tubes. The first orders for columns were placed on 5 July. Twenty-three companies were approached, and the Grinnell Company of Providence, Rhode Island, and the Mehring and Hanson Company of Washington, D.C., accepted the challenge.
Ground was broken at the site on 9 July 1944. By 16 September, with about a third of the plant complete, the first rack had commenced operation. Testing in September and October revealed problems with leaking pipes that required further welding. Nonetheless, all racks were installed and ready for operations in January 1945. The construction contract was terminated on 15 February, and the remaining insulation and electrical work was assigned to other firms in the Oak Ridge area. They also completed the auxiliary buildings, including the new steam plant. The plant became fully operational in March 1945. Construction of the new boiler plant was approved on 16 February 1945. The first boiler was started on 5 July 1945, and operations commenced on 13 July. Work was completed on 15 August 1945.
The S-50 Thermal Diffusion Process Building is the dark building. In front is the steam plant. The building in the background with the chimneys is the K-25 powerhouse. In the foreground is the Clinch River.
The Thermal Diffusion Process Building (F01) was a black structure 522 feet (159 m) long, 82 feet (25 m) wide, and 75 feet (23 m) high. There was one control room and one transfer room for each pair of racks, except for the final one, which had its own control and transfer rooms for training purposes. Four pumps drew 15,000 US gallons (57,000 l) per minute of cooling water from the Clinch River. Steam pumps were specially designed by Pacific Pumps Inc. The plant was designed to use the entire output of the K-25 powerhouse, but as K-25 stages came online there was competition for this. It was decided to build a new boiler plant. Twelve surplus 450 pounds per square inch (3,100 kPa) boilers originally intended for destroyer escorts were acquired from the navy. The lower hot wall temperature due to the reduced steam pressure (450 pounds per square inch (3,100 kPa) instead of the 1,000 pounds per square inch (6,900 kPa) of the pilot plant) was compensated for by the ease of operation. Because they were oil-fired, a 6,000,000-US-gallon (23,000,000 l) oil tank farm was added, with sufficient storage to operate the plant for 60 days. In addition to the Thermal Diffusion Process Building (F01) and the new steam plant (F06) buildings, structures in the S-50 area included the pumping station (F02), laboratories, a cafeteria, machine shop (F10), warehouses, a gas station, and a water treatment plant (F03).[55]
Production [ edit ]
For security reasons, Groves wanted H. K. Ferguson to operate the new plant, but it was a closed shop, and security regulations at the Clinton Engineer Works did not allow trade unions. To get around this, H. K. Ferguson created a wholly owned subsidiary, the Fercleve Corporation (from Ferguson of Cleveland), and the Manhattan District contracted it to operate the plant for $11,000 a month. Operating personnel for the new plant were initially trained at the Philadelphia pilot plant. In August 1944, Groves, Conant and Fox asked ten enlisted men of the Special Engineer Detachment (SED) at Oak Ridge for volunteers, warning that the job would be dangerous. All ten volunteered.[57] Along with four Fercleve employees, they were sent to Philadelphia to learn about the plant's operation.
Another view of the columns
On 2 September 1944, SED Private Arnold Kramish, and two civilians, Peter N. Bragg, Jr., an NRL chemical engineer, and Douglas P. Meigs, a Fercleve employee, were working in a transfer room when a 600-pound (270 kg) cylinder of uranium hexafluoride exploded, rupturing nearby steam pipes.[57][58] The steam reacted with the uranium hexafluoride to create hydrofluoric acid, and the three men were badly burned. Private John D. Hoffman ran through the toxic cloud to rescue them, but Bragg and Meigs died from their injuries. Another eleven men, including Kramish and four other soldiers, were injured but recovered. Hoffman, who suffered burns, was awarded the Soldier's Medal, the United States Army's highest award for an act of valor in a non-combat situation, and the only one awarded to a member of the Manhattan District.[57][58] Bragg was posthumously awarded the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award on 21 June 1993.[60]
Colonel Stafford L. Warren, the chief of the Manhattan District's Medical Section, removed the internal organs of the dead and sent them back to Oak Ridge for analysis. They were buried without them.[57] An investigation found that the accident was caused by the use of steel cylinders with nickel linings instead of seamless nickel cylinders because the army had pre-empted nickel production. The Navy Hospital did not have procedures for the treatment of people exposed to uranium hexafluoride, so Warren's Medical Section developed them. Groves ordered a halt to training at the Philadelphia pilot plant, so Abelson and 15 of his staff moved to Oak Ridge to train personnel there.
There were no fatal accidents at the production plant,[57] although it had a higher accident rate than other Manhattan Project production facilities due to the haste to get it into operation. When the crews attempted to start the first rack there was a loud noise and a cloud of vapor due to escaping steam. This would normally have resulted in a shutdown, but under the pressure to get the plant operational, the Fercleve plant manager had no choice but to press on. The plant produced just 10.5 pounds (4.8 kg) of 0.852% uranium-235 in October. Leaks limited production and forced shutdowns over the next few months, but in June 1945 it produced 12,730 pounds (5,770 kg). In normal operation, 1 pound (0.45 kg) of product was drawn from each circuit every 285 minutes. With four circuits per rack, each rack could produce 20 pounds (9.1 kg) per day.[62] By March 1945, all 21 production racks were operating. Initially the output of S-50 was fed into Y-12, but starting in March 1945 all three enrichment processes were run in series. S-50 became the first stage, enriching from 0.71% to 0.89%. This material was fed into the gaseous diffusion process in the K-25 plant, which produced a product enriched to about 23%. This was, in turn, fed into Y-12, which boosted it to about 89%, sufficient for nuclear weapons. Total S-50 production was 56,504 pounds (25,630 kg).[62] It was estimated that the S-50 plant had sped up production of enriched uranium used in the Little Boy bomb employed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by a week. "If I had appreciated the possibilities of thermal diffusion," Groves later wrote, "we would have gone ahead with it much sooner, taken a bit more time on the design of the plant and made it much bigger and better. Its effect on our production of U-235 in June and July 1945 would have been appreciable."
S-50 area, looking towards the Clinch River. New steam plant and the oil storage tanks
Post-war years [ edit ]
Soon after the war ended in August 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur V. Peterson, the Manhattan District officer with overall responsibility for the production of fissile material,[65] recommended that the S-50 plant be placed on stand-by. The Manhattan District ordered the plant shut down on 4 September 1945. It was the only production-scale liquid thermal diffusion plant ever built, but its efficiency could not compete with that of a gaseous diffusion plant.[66] The columns were drained and cleaned, and all employees were given two weeks' notice of impending termination of employment. All production had ceased by 9 September, and the last uranium hexafluoride feed was shipped to K-25 for processing. Layoffs began on 18 September. By this time, voluntary resignations had reduced the Fercleve payroll from its wartime peak of 1,600 workers to around 900. Only 241 remained at the end of September. Fercleve's contract was terminated on 31 October, and responsibility for the S-50 plant buildings was transferred to the K-25 office. Fercleve laid off the last employees on 16 February 1946.
Starting May 1946, the S-50 plant buildings were utilised, not as a production facility, but by the United States Army Air Forces' Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) project. Fairchild Aircraft conducted a series of experiments there involving beryllium.[67] Workers also fabricated blocks of enriched uranium and graphite.[66] NEPA operated until May 1951, when it was superseded by the joint Atomic Energy Commission-United States Air Force Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion project.[68] The S-50 plant was disassembled in the late 1940s. Equipment was taken to the K-25 powerhouse area, where it was stored before being salvaged or buried.[66]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:Charming & well cared character home in quiet & convenient upper Kits location. Close to W. Broadway shopping, transportation and good schools. Excellent use of space. Main floor: a living room, one bedroom and a bathroom, maple kitchen with eating area and a den.Upper floor: a spacious bedroom with air conditioning. Down: a family room, cozy two bedrooms, a bathroom and laundry area. Garage converted to storage. Completely renovated in 2003. Move-in ready condition. A must see.
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The data relating to real estate on this web site comes in part from the MLS Reciprocity program of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. Real estate listings held by participating real estate firms are marked with the MLSR logo and detailed information about the listing includes the name of the listing agent. This representation is based in whole or part on data generated by the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver which assumes no responsibility for its accuracy. The materials contained on this page may not be reproduced without the express written consent of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. Copyright 2019 by the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, Fraser Valley Real Estate Board, Chilliwack and District Real Estate Board, BC Northern Real Estate Board, and Kootenay Real Estate Board. All Rights Reserved.Nine Lives (released on Australian home media as Mr. Fuzzypants[5]) is a 2016 comedy film directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, written by Gwyn Lurie, Matt R. Allen, Caleb Wilson, Dan Antoniazzi and Ben Shiffrin, and starring Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Garner, Robbie Amell, Cheryl Hines, Malina Weissman and Christopher Walken. It is an international co-production between France and China. The plot follows a workaholic father who has his mind trapped inside his daughter's new cat. The film was released by EuropaCorp on 5 August 2016 and grossed $57 million.
Plot [ edit ]
Tom Brand (Kevin Spacey) is a major business tycoon in New York City whose workaholic attitude ruined his first marriage with Madison (Cheryl Hines) and caused a rift between him and his adult son David (Robbie Amell) who now works for him and strives for his approval. He now lives with his second wife Lara (Jennifer Garner), who is a little more tolerant of the fact that he is never at home, and his daughter Rebecca (Malina Weissman). His eponymous company FireBrand is nearing completion on its greatest achievement to date: the tallest skyscraper in the northern hemisphere that will be the new headquarters. In the opening scene, he skydives out of a plane and lands on the top of the new skyscraper. His son, who is his assistant, remains in the plane, refusing to jump.
Rebecca's 11th birthday is coming and she has always wanted a cat, but Tom has always refused as he hates cats. Not wanting to disappoint her, he rushes to get a last-minute present for his daughter's birthday, but as he is distracted, the GPS redirects him to a mysterious pet store called Purrkins Pet Shop, brimming with odd and exotic cats. The store's eccentric owner Felix Perkins (Christopher Walken) tells him he does not pick the cat, the cat picks him. The tomcat that picked him is called Mr. Fuzzypants. Perkins says he has used up seven of his nine lives. Tom takes the cat. Tom is on his way home for the party when he decides to see Ian Cox (Mark Consuelos), one of the top managers of the company in charge of the new building, and learns that another building in Chicago will be taller. They have an argument while on the roof that ends with Brand firing Cox, but lightning strikes the antenna. Brand is blown off the building along with the cat, and without any effort from Cox to save him, he plummets off the side of the skyscraper, but his leg gets snagged on some stray equipment and gets flung back inside through a window as he passes out. When he wakes up, he realizes that his human body is in the hospital in a state of coma, and his consciousness is trapped inside the cat's body.
Felix goes to visit Tom. He is able to talk to him and knows what happened. He is told by Felix that he must reevaluate his priorities, connect with his family, and avoid past mistakes within one week or else be stuck as a cat forever. Lara and Rebecca take him home. Mr. Fuzzypants acts in an odd and stubborn way to try to convince his wife and daughter that he’s actually Tom. This only drives them mad and he slowly comes to see how much he has ignored his family. He believes that his wife Laura was having an affair with Josh Myers (a model) and they had been looking at houses together as a prelude to divorcing him. This motivates him to try to make her happy. He also learns that Ian is trying to make the company public with the help of the board of directors to take power from Tom, even though David is trying to stop him. Ian has David fired from the company and plans to announce that the company will be sold at the party for the new tower opening.
Eventually Rebecca realizes that Mr. Fuzzypants is really her father. Meanwhile, Tom's body is in crisis at the hospital and Lara, David, and Rebecca all go there. Rebecca has the cat hidden in her backpack. In a moment alone, David tells Tom that he is sorry he failed to save the company and he takes Tom's ID badge. It is implied that David plans to commit suicide at the tower. At the hospital, Lara and Dr. Cole plan to disconnect Tom's respirator and let him die. Rebecca calls to the cat to come prove he's really Tom, but Tom remembers what Mr. Perkins said about love being sacrifice and decides to go after David instead, knowing that his human body will die and he will be trapped as a cat forever.
At the tower, David jumps off the building and the cat jumps after him pulling a cable. It is then revealed that David is wearing a BASE jumping parachute. He lands in the middle of the party, presents the articles of incorporation of the company, and announces that he now controls his father's 51% of the stock. He says the company will remain a family company and fires Ian. Although the cat is not seen landing, Tom wakes up from his coma just in time to see David's announcement on the television. Meanwhile, Ian passes Mr. Perkins who tells him to hang up his cell phone. Ian ignores him, but is then hit by a car, and his consciousness transfers into a cat that Mr. Perkins takes back to his shop.
Tom and Rebecca return to Perkins where Tom asks if he has any dogs. Perkins says he does not, but presents Mr. Fuzzypants who has one life left.
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
On 12 January 2015, it was announced Barry Sonnenfeld would direct the film.[13] On 28 January 2015, Kevin Spacey joined the cast.[6] On 25 March 2015, Malina Weissman joined the cast.[9] On 31 March 2015, Christopher Walken joined the cast to play Felix Perkins, the owner of a mystical pet shop,[10] and on 9 April 2015, Jennifer Garner and Robbie Amell joined as well.[7] On 13 April 2015, Mark Consuelos was cast in the film,[8] and on 27 April 2015, Talitha Bateman was cast as well.[11] Principal photography began on 4 May 2015, and ended on 24 July 2015.[14][15]
Release [ edit ]
The film was originally scheduled to be released on 29 April 2016, by EuropaCorp,[16] but was pushed back to 5 August 2016.[17]
Box office [ edit ]
Nine Lives grossed $19.7 million in North America and $38.1 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $57.8 million against a budget of $30 million.[18]
The film was released in North America on 5 August 2016 alongside Suicide Squad. The film was projected to gross $10 million from 2,264 theaters in its opening weekend.[19][18] The film made $2.4 million on its first day. It went on to gross $6.2 million in its opening weekend, finishing 6th at the box office.[20]
Critical reception [ edit ]
On Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, the film has an approval rating of 15% based on 66 reviews; the average rating is 2.9/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Not meow, not ever".[21] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 11 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike".[22] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[23]
IndieWire's David Ehrlich gave the film a grade of D, saying the film was “less funny than the average cat gif and approximately 1,000 times as long... Cats may have nine lives, but you only get one, and it’s too precious to waste on this drivel. You’re better off watching a gif of a cat whose face is stuck in a slice of bread. It will save you $20 and a few hours of your time".[24] David Palmer of The Reel Deal gave the film 3/10, writing, "The only reason this 'comedy' won’t derail Kevin Spacey’s career is no one will ever watch this outside of military interrogation rooms".[25] Rolling Stone's Peter Travers gave the film zero out of four stars and wrote, "At 87 torturous, laugh-free minutes, the film could change the most avid cat fancier into a kitty hater".[26]
Home media [ edit ]
The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray on 1 November 2016, by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment in the United States.[27] It was released on DVD and Blu-ray in Australia on 7 December 2016, by Madman Entertainment under the alternate title Mr. Fuzzypants.[5]Close
Surgeons were able to remove a total of 27 bags of heroin from a Lynn man's stomach and intestines on Tuesday, officials have reported.
The patient is Miguel Rodriguez, a 51-year-old man, who the police said had just arrived from the Dominican Republic.
The surgery was performed at the North Shore Medical Center Salem Hospital on Tuesday.
History Of Illness
Captain of Salem police Conrad Prosniewski said Rodriguez experience illness while he has having dinner at Lynn. The man then went to the hospital with symptoms of drug overdose.
The medical staff took over his care, but when they saw that there were foreign materials in the patient's stomach, they called the police department.
Police Presence
The hospital purportedly removed slightly more than 163 grams of the suspected drug. Two of Salem police officers stayed in the hospital to monitor the situation.
"They were actually outside of the room, viewing as the doctor was removing them and putting them into a tray," says Prosniewski.
The police thinks that one of the bags got destroyed inside the body of Rodriguez, causing him to experience signs and symptoms of drug overdose.
Rodriguez was incriminated on Thursday, while still admitted at the hospital. He pleaded not guilty. A judge deemed his bail to cost $500,000 and also directed him to surrender his passport.
The total street value of the 27 bags of heroin collected from Rodriguez' body is approximately more than $16,000.
Narcan Treatment
To reverse the overdose, Rodriguez was treated with antidote Narcan before heading into the surgery.
Rodriguez' situation was a close call as not everyone benefits from a Narcan therapy for drug overdose.
While Prosniewski said that Narcan is terrific, it is definitely not a cure. In fact, there was a time when authorities treated a person with Narcan six times, only to die afterwards.
Drug Problems In Salem
Rodriguez's case came in the midst of Salem and other North Shore locations facing several cases of heroin overdoses. Just this year, a total of 29 cases have already been reported in the city, of which 15 were recorded in March alone.
In 2015, three individuals died due to overdose.
Salem is not the only one. The Obama administration has even asked for a $1.1 billion funding to address the problems of heroin and other opioid drugs addiction in the entire country.
ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Original A Chorus Line Cast Members Plan NYC Reunion
Priscilla Lopez and Baayork Lee among scheduled attendees.
Members of the original cast and creative team of the 1975 Broadway musical A Chorus Line will hold a reunion, open to the public, at the New York Public Library branch at Lincoln Center.
The reunion will be held 6 PM March 23 at the Bruno Walter Auditorium in the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at 111 Amsterdam Avenue.
Among those scheduled to attend and take questions from the audience: Tony Award winner Priscilla Lopez and Baayork Lee, plus the original music director Don Pippin. Lee, who is organizing the event with the Library‘s Evan Leslie, told Playbill that the talk will focus on the contributions of the show’s songwriting team, the late Marvin Hamlisch and Ed Kleban. The talk will be illustrated with artifacts of the show drawn from the Library’s archives.
The last New York reunion of original ACL cast members occurred in April 2015, when they were invited to attend a special tribute performance of Hamilton at the Public Theater/Newman stage where both shows originated. At left: the original cast members of A Chorus Line join the Hamilton cast at the 5:33 mark.
Click here or here to order tickets for the reunion, which are free and required for entry.
Several of the original cast members have passed away, including Michel Stuart and Thommie Walsh.
LOVE MUSICALS? CHECK OUT PLAYBILL STORE FOR MERCHANDISE!It is important for the University of Virginia to take sexual assault seriously, and also to know the truth about what happened to Jackie.
Photo by Jay Paul/Getty Images
I’m told that this has been a bad couple of weeks for the anti-rape movement. “Rolling Stone just wrecked an incredible year of progress for rape victims,” Arielle Duhaime-Ross wrote at the Verge last week. Since the magazine’s November story about a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity began to unravel early this month, feminists have raised alarms that the magazine’s whiff will have devastating effects for past and future victims. The story “could be read as a setback for an entire movement,” campus activist Annie Clark wrote in BuzzFeed. UVA is “on its way to becoming the next Duke Lacrosse—a highly publicized incident that misogynists will point to as a way to discredit all people, especially young women and students, who experience rape,” Audrey White wrote at Autostraddle. According to Duhaime-Ross, “the credibility of rape victims will be put into question for years to come,” as Rolling Stone has helped to “perpetuate the dangerous and damaging myth that women lie about rape.”
I’m surprised that these activists and commentators are so quick to hand over the future of this movement to packs of roving social media misogynists. There are people on the fringe who believe that any rape story with any discrepancies is evidence of a vast feminist conspiracy aimed at inventing rapes and vilifying innocent men, but these rape truthers are not reasonable people, nor are they most people, and it is unwise to mold the conversation around their fantasies. I am, however, concerned with how some feminists and progressives have responded to the ever-expanding holes in Rolling Stone’s story.
At this point, it is clear that Rolling Stone failed to meet its basic journalistic requirements many times over. There is also compelling evidence that Jackie herself fabricated all or parts of her story. Neither of these scenarios serves to dismantle the anti-rape movement. Journalists have messed up reporting on rape since they began reporting on rape. In addition, there have been false rape allegations in the past, and there will be false allegations in the future. Any successful anti-rape activist or movement must be willing to accept that false accusations are not a “myth” and grapple with how to handle them appropriately. Whatever really happened at UVA one Saturday night in 2012 cannot possibly undermine a social justice movement because any understanding of justice must accommodate the truth.
Rolling Stone presented Jackie’s story as a powerful symbol for how rape victims are denied justice across America. When it was revealed that the magazine had torpedoed itself, Jackie, and UVA in its negligent reporting, it gave anti-rape activists the opportunity to disavow the false framework that Jackie is somehow emblematic of victims everywhere. Instead, many doubled down. Under the hashtags #IStandWithJackie and #IBelieveJackie, feminists lent their support for Jackie’s story, noting that certain aspects of her experience resonate with the way that other rape victims have been shamed and disbelieved. “We know institutions will bring their power to bear to obfuscate sexual violence. That’s why we stand with survivors. #IBelieveJackie,” the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence tweeted. By using Jackie’s individual story, which was already coming under legitimate scrutiny, to reinforce the movement’s broader narrative about how sexual assault operates, and boosting the message with activist hashtags, they bet the big story on the strength of one anecdote. That’s a mistake.
On Monday, after a weekend of the Washington Post reporting on a number of inconsistencies in the story, the NAESV released a full statement, saying that it “believes ‘Jackie’ ” because the NAESV is made up of “very experienced survivor advocates” who “do not take minor discrepancies in certain details of ‘Jackie’s’ story as any reason to begin doubting that she experienced horrific sexual violence by a number of perpetrators. The research on traumatic memories is clear: those who survive trauma can often have difficulty consolidating the details of the experience and discrepancies are not uncommon.” There is never a wrong time to highlight the effects of traumatic crimes on their victims or how PTSD affects testimony, but it is misleading to suggest that Jackie’s experience is somehow normative of sexual assault victims in general. The NAESV’s own advocates have presumably never counseled Jackie directly. They do not know what happened to Jackie and do not understand all the various possible explanations for her behavior. Right now, none of us do.
Rolling Stone’s editors have pledged to reinvestigate the tale themselves, and after the magazine’s disastrous first round, I suspect that their project will be about as useful as O.J. Simpson’s search for the real killers. But it is likely that more reporting on this story from other sources, as well as an investigation currently being undertaken by the Charlottesville, Virginia, police, will further illuminate what happened at UVA and how Rolling Stone got it so wrong. So it is confusing to me that since the story broke, activists on both sides |
or they stop caring after they leave High School or College. A mistake many Educational Resources take is making the learning process more of a chore than a pleasure for its students.
When we were children, we didn’t find it irritating to learn how to use the toilet, walk, and say our very first words. We didn’t see those lessons as a chore that had to be done because someone told us to. We did them because we found them enjoyable. Our parents or guardians may have been the source of encouragement to introduce us to our first lessons in life, but it was our desire to try something new that pushed us to stick with them.
A recent question we came across was “How to make learning fun again while in College.” During my time in school, there were moments where I didn’t have the motivation to continue studying because my teacher always taught the class with a monotone voice.
It would have been more exciting if a computer program had taught the class instead. So I had many difficult times finding the motivation to study mandatory subjects when the Professor themselves appeared bored of the subject.
Behaviorism
To start off explaining the concepts to how we learn, the learning process deals primarily with observable behavior, otherwise known as behaviorism. It’s how we learn from our social environments and develop the personalities we have today.
When we first learn how to kiss, we’re usually clumsy and don’t know what to do. But after a few more attempts and feedback, we naturally begin sharpening our skills and became better.
Such as kissing, we learn how to walk and talk through a repeated process of trial and error. To apply behaviorism when acquiring a new skill, try the repeated pattern method of doing something over and over until you begin understanding it.
Such as from Josh Kaufman TED speech about the concept of learning, it only takes 20 hours to learn how to do anything. During those 20 hours, don’t concentrate on trying to master every aspect to it. Just learn the essential roots to it so you could build your skills from there as you learn more about it.
Stimulus Association
The second form of learning is associating your mind to a new stimulus. It’s an automatic response when a smell, scent, or sight triggers a memory response. The concept was developed when Ivan Pavlov used a bell to stimulate a dog to drool every time he rang a bell. Humans are keen to connect their thoughts and memories to real-world stimulation rather than remembering random ideas because we’re told to.
When you’re struggling to learn a new subject, a method that works is connecting the subject to a real-world stimulation. An example would be hearing a certain type of sound as you look over a math equation. You won’t notice any difference at first, but after a few dozen times, it becomes easier to think of the equation after associating it with that unique sound.
If you want to trick yourself to enjoy learning, eat a meal with a unique smell before studying. It has to be a meal you could eat daily without endangering your health, but deliver a tasty treat to make you excited by thought. After smelling the dish, remember the scent as you begin studying.
Consequences Conditioning
This method is a favorite approach for a few friends of mine, and for effective reasons too. It’s when you give yourself either a consequential or reinforcement response after a behavior pattern. When we engage in activities that provide us with rewards, it tends to make us want to perform the same act again.
This works effectively because the reinforcement process towards a reward strengthen your motivation to get something done. It’s why when we treat a person with kindness and they give us the same treatment, we’re more likely to repeat the same process of kindness to others.
To use this method in learning something new, give yourself a reward every time you finish a task. It could be whenever you read a chapter from your Biology book you get 20 minutes of video game time. Create a balance of rewards and hard work so you won’t be stressed out while being productive simultaneously.
Provide yourself with reinforcements that strengthen your interest for learning, and eventually you’ll find the concept very enticing.
In final thoughts…
Based on your personal experience, you’ll have different reactions on how to learn than others. It’ll all depend on our beliefs, attitudes, and values that determine how our mind behaves in learning situations.
These values determine how we make decisions and what we could tolerate. It might be difficult for some to apply the strategies of behaviorism than a stimulus association and vice-versa. If you’re still wondering which approach works best for you, we recommend trying each one for a week and determine which was most effective for you.Posted 21 March 2012 - 05:45 PM
Whoops, here is a second e-mail from Richard McKim:"Dear Jim:Thank you. In fact I misunderstood your......-18LTL image, as I was looking more at the large light area you had artificially highlighted rather than the terminator projection. Before your blue image arrived on its own I had assumed, from quickly reading, that the artificial area was the new feature! It is all perfectly reasonable-looking now that I have your blue image and, although we don't see much phase visually yet there will be a slight and growing phase defect on the following side.Although quite evident the projection is no doubt standing out even more because the processing of any image has caused the terminator to darker somewhat (and in the case of Venus to recede) to leave the projection more visible. There is a history of high latitude martian projections. I am thinking of certain HST images from the 1990s, and visual observers have certainly detected many, and I can recall quite a few examples even in my own Mars reports. I don't think our amateur images were good enough to catch them before 2003. I have examples in the 2003 BAA Mars report which is posted as a pdf at www.britastro.org \mars...............This particular one you have caught so nicely is certainly on the large side, and I hope you will get the chance to repeat the observation at the same CM over several nights. And that brings me to ask if you can compute the CM and put it on each image because it does save looking it up. From the position of Propontis with regard to the morning terminator I would say that the attached image by Efrain Morales is really pretty similar to yours in CM but is dated two days earlier (March 19d 02h 31m UT). I notice that he shows the same effect but it is less visible. It is easily missed unless one enlarges the image.I will of course search for others. I receive a lot of material which is not uploaded to any of the image archiving websites.Let me know what you think.I am off to bed as it is getting late here and I must teach first thing in the morning!With regardsRichard"Rutgers engineers use microwaves to produce high-quality graphene
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Rutgers University engineers have found a simple method for producing high-quality graphene that can be used in next-generation electronic and energy devices: bake the compound in a microwave oven. The discovery is documented in a study published online today in the journal Science.
"This is a major advance in the graphene field," said Manish Chhowalla, professor and associate chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Rutgers' School of Engineering. "This simple microwave treatment leads to exceptionally high quality graphene with properties approaching those in pristine graphene."
The discovery was made by post-doctoral associates and undergraduate students in the department, said Chhowalla, who is also the director of the Rutgers Institute for Advanced Materials, Devices and Nanotechnology. Having undergraduates as co-authors of a Science paper is rare but he said "the Rutgers Materials Science and Engineering Department and the School of Engineering at Rutgers cultivate a culture of curiosity driven research in students with fresh ideas who are not afraid to try something new.''
Graphene - 100 times tougher than steel - conducts electricity better than copper and rapidly dissipates heat, making it useful for many applications. Large-scale production of graphene is necessary for applications such as printable electronics, electrodes for batteries and catalysts for fuel cells.
Graphene comes from graphite, a carbon-based material used by generations of students and teachers in the form of pencils. Graphite consists of sheets or layers of graphene.
The easiest way to make large quantities of graphene is to exfoliate graphite into individual graphene sheets by using chemicals. The downside of this approach is that side reactions occur with oxygen - forming graphene oxide that is electrically non-conducting, which makes it less useful for products.
Removing oxygen from graphene oxide to obtain high-quality graphene has been a major challenge over the past two decades for the scientific community working on graphene. Oxygen distorts the pristine atomic structure of graphene and degrades its properties.
Chhowalla and his group members found that baking the exfoliated graphene oxide for just one second in a 1,000-watt microwave oven, like those used in households across America, can eliminate virtually all of the oxygen from graphene oxide.(Crain's) — The Chicago Tribune cut about 15 editorial employees today as the media company continues to shrink its newsroom.
The employees dismissed included reporters, editors and managers, according to sources familiar with the layoffs. They follow an employee buyout last month and a round of staff reductions in July.
The paper, the biggest in the city and a unit of Chicago-based Tribune Co., is creating a leaner workforce to reduce costs and revive profits as it prepares to exit bankruptcy later this year under its new creditor-owners.
Shia Kapos Takes Names: "Sarah Beardsley leaves Tribune amid layoffs"
Tribune Co., which also owns the Los Angeles Times as well as 23 TV stations across the U.S., is trying to return to profitability at a time when newspaper companies have been hard-pressed to boost revenue after online alternatives diverted both advertisers and readers.
“The Chicago Tribune does not publicly discuss internal personnel matters," company spokesman Gary Weitman said. "Like most companies, the Tribune makes decisions about staff skills and composition based on customer needs and business conditions.”
The Chicago Tribune last month completed a buyout that led to the departure of fewer than 10 editorial employees. Last July, the paper cut about 20 employees, mainly in the newsroom, including some veteran reporters and editors. The paper has also been hiring some reporters following the expansion of news content pages last year.
Earlier this year, the Chicago Tribune also dismissed most of the security staff that worked at the company's landmark Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue, but many of the employees were hired back by a company to which the paper outsourced the work.Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0312965788, Mass Market Paperback)
Take an unforgettable journey through the English countryside and into the homes of its inhabitants-- four-legged and otherwise-- with the world's best-loved animal doctor.
For over 25 years-- since All Creatures Great and Small was first published-- readers have delighted to the storytelling genius of James Herriot, the Yorkshire veterinarian whose fascinating vignettes brim with the wonder of life, animal and human.
Whether struggling mightily to position a calf for birthing, or comforting a lonely old man whose beloved dog and only companion has died, Herriot's heartwarming and often hilarious stories of his first years as a country vet perfectly depict the wonderful relationship between man and animal-- and they intimately portray a man whose humor, compassion, and love of life are truly inspiring.As this space reported on Monday, a television campaign advertisement for Virginia Democratic Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam released also on Monday attempted to portray supporters of Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie as “Confederacy-supporting, truck-driving racist murderers who attack minority children.”
However, it wasn't long before responses to the make-believe ad indicated that it mirrored an actual murder involving a 17-year-old Muslim girl wearing a hijab who was chased down in Sterling, Virginia, by a suspect in a vehicle. According to police reports, the suspect then abducted and murdered the young girl with a baseball bat, and he is actually an illegal immigrant.
As indicated yesterday: “The minute-long ad -- entitled 'American Nightmare' -- depicts a large pick-up truck with a Gillespie campaign sticker, flying a large Confederate flag and displaying a 'Don’t Tread on Me' front license plate while chasing down a group of minority children, including a Muslim girl wearing a hijab, an African-American boy and two young Latinos.”
In addition, the voiceover at the conclusion of the horrific scene states: “Is this what Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie mean by ‘the American Dream?' as they implore voters to 'Reject Hate' on Election Day next week?”
Along these lines, NewsBusters posted an article in mid-June that stated:
The liberal Washington Post underlined its reputation as a "liberal rag” on Tuesday, June 18, “by burying the immigration status of a man who killed a Muslim teenager in suburban northern Virginia. They wear "Democracy Dies in Darkness" T-shirts and then put anything in the "darkness" that's inconvenient to their liberal agenda.
The front-page headline was “Police in Va. probe road rage in girl's killing.” There was a picture of the victim in her hijab. The alleged assailant appeared in the third paragraph of a story written by Justin Jouvenal and Julie Zauzmer.
“The driver,” the reporters stated, “Darwin Martinez Torres, a 22-year-old construction worker from Sterling, got into an argument with a teen on a bike” as she headed back to her Virginia mosque after breaking her Ramadan fast at a nearby McDonald’s fast-food restaurant and then “drove his car over a curb, scattering the group of as many as 15 teens, police said.”
“He caught up with them a short time later in a parking lot and chased them with a baseball bat, striking 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen and then abducting her in his car,” police told Jouvenal and Zauzmer.
As if that wasn't bad enough, “Torres assaulted Nabra a second time, in Loudoun County, before dumping her body in a pond next to his apartment complex, where it was discovered about 3 p.m. on Sunday,” the police told the reporters. “The medical examiner ruled Monday that the girl died of blunt-force trauma to the head and neck.”
According to a column by Mediaite editor and WMAL host Larry O'Connor, “the murder gained national attention when it first occurred because the assumption was that the Muslim girl was murdered because of the outward sign of her religion.
However, “once it was discovered that the murder was not a hate crime and the perpetrator was in the country illegally, the national media seemed to lose interest,” O'Connor stated.
Coverage of the harsh Virginia advertisement continued into Tuesday morning, when Gillespie appeared on Fox & Friends, and co-host Steve Doocy asked: “Ed, when you saw that commercial that came out yesterday from the Latino Victory Fund, what did you think?” Gillespie responded:
I thought it was a sad day for Virginia, and this attack is not just an attack on my supporters -- who are good, decent, hard-working Virginians who love their neighbors -- it's an attack on all Virginians. And the fact is that whether you disagree with people or not in Virginia, we believe in civil discourse, and this is a new low in politics here.
“I was glad when a couple of the Democratic members of our House of Delegates yesterday condemned the ad,” he continued.
“But outrageously, my opponent has embraced it, and it reveals the disdain not just for my supporters, but for all Virginians, frankly, who want to have a discussion about issues and policies in this election that I've been focused on,” Gillespie stated.
“And you know, all they want to do is smear people, and it's the wrong thing to do, and I have faith in my fellow Virginians that they see that very clearly.”
Doocy then inquired: “What does it say to you about the opposition that they would drop that ad a week before the election?”
“It's clear they understand that this race is slipping away from them,” Gillespie replied.
Will this hostile advertisement continue to blow up in the Democrats' faces across the Old Dominion? Only time … and NewsBusters... will tell.But as the links above show, you have to be good at your game if you don’t want to be caught. Sure, the media will believe you and run far and wide with your story before checking it, and that’s good enough to keep these hoaxes coming for the years to come. But if you want to keep your cake hoax from being revealed by citizens less credulous than the media, here are some tips to get you going.
Let’s look at a story from yesterday that was good enough to fool various journalists but not good enough to fool anyone else.
Jordan Brown, a gay pastor in Austin, filed a lawsuit against Whole Foods claiming he was discriminated against. He says he ordered a cake reading “Love Wins” but that a homophobe cake decorator added “FAG” underneath. You should be able to figure out on your own that this is most likely not true. But let’s just say it’s so false that Whole Foods is taking legal action against Brown.
Some tips that Brown should have followed if he wanted his hoax to have staying power.
#1 Pick A Believable Villain
If you’re a gay black progressive in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods is not a credible villain for your cake hoax passion play. Have some common sense. Whole Foods is known for selling overpriced kombucha, locally sourced quail eggs, and Buddhist magazines. It’s just not believable that their Dallas locations are a hotbed of cartoonish bigotry, much less Austin.
#2 Find A Good Witness
I didn’t go to journalism school, but one thing I’ve picked up over the years as a reporter is that single-sourced tales of perfect victimization really need to be checked out. I call this the Morton Downey, Jr., rule, because his fake-swastika tale was when I learned to be skeptical of such tales. Downey, Jr., was a trash TV talk show host who claimed to have been attacked by neo-Nazis in the bathroom of San Francisco International Airport. These attackers, he said, painted a swastika on his face and attempted to shave his head. His story fell apart because of the lack of supporting evidence and the fact the swastika was backwards, as if it had been painted on by himself while looking in a mirror.
The thing about public acts of violence and bigotry is that they ordinarily involve many witnesses. Because they’re public. I’ve been in the hellhole that is the San Francisco International Airport and the one thing it has in addition to horrible food options and crowded hallways, is tons of people. When is the last time you entered a crowded airport bathroom and encountered no other people? Similarly, Brown was in a crowded Whole Foods and couldn’t find a single person to corroborate his cake story? Nobody in the bakery noticed? Nobody looking in his cart? No cashier? No one?
#3 Pick Better Ironclad Proof Than An Easily-Resealable Adhesive Sticker.
Brown posted a video when he got home from Whole Foods showing his proof that he hadn’t tampered with the cake. Why did he not take care of the problem while at Whole Foods, you ask? Well, even though the cake top is a transparent plastic cover, he didn’t notice the huge anti-gay slur smack dab in the middle until he got to his car. Here’s the video:
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He repeatedly says his story is bulletproof and not at all a cake hoax because the sticker on the cake box is intact. And, to be fair, that was good enough for some commenters on news sites. But I’ll just post a random sampling of comments from sarcastic friends of mine:
“Y’all, he never broke the seal! Cake boxes are impenetrable. I keep all my valuables in an old cake box with some tape over the original price tag.”
“When I leave home, I actually leave a cake seal across the door so I can tell if anybody entered the premises during my absence. It’s foolproof.”
“Fort Knox is actually protected by a 3 tier cake seal system. Impenetrable.”
“But if the seal is slit, you must acquit!”
“FIRE CAN’T MELT SEAL”
But seriously, how many ways could a Whole Foods cake box be penetrated, other than steaming off the seal, gently taking off the seal and reapplying it, cutting the other side of the box opposite the seal, or removing the plastic at the top? Think these things through before other people do.
#4 Make Your Victimization As Anonymous As Possible
A good social justice hoax will just blame “Christians who came into my restaurant” or “someone in my town, don’t know who.” In these examples, you’re claiming to have been victimized by someone in a pool of tens of thousands to millions of people. In the case of Brown, he named the specific Whole Foods, where specific people are on record as having decorated specific cakes. Probably with video evidence.
The specific employee who was accused of bigotry, it turns out, is, in the parlance of 2016 America, a “member of the LGBTQ community.” And the record shows, according to Whole Foods, that the cake was made as requested, with “Love Wins” written on the tip top of it.
It can’t be said enough: Never pin your hoax on an actual, specific person who can be questioned and who can refute your dumb story.
Here’s Whole Foods’ response:
#5 Know What You Don’t Know
Let’s call this the Rather Rule. Dan Rather’s entire journalism career came tumbling down in 2004 when the 60 Minutes anchor claimed a series of memos critical of George W. Bush had been discovered in old Texas Air National Guard files. It was an explosive story in the weeks leading up to the election. Once the documents were put online, however, average bloggers noticed that the margins, line spacing, kerning, font, and letter spacing perfectly matched modern typographic conventions from Microsoft Word that weren’t available on military typewriters of the 1970s. The story blew up in Rather’s face, although liberals have embarked on a campaign of revisionism to redeem the liberal journalist’s reputation.
Here’s where Brown messed up. He might have thought the “fag” scrawl looked similar to the “Love Wins” icing, but it doesn’t.
I’m just going to drop some comments from a BuzzFeed post about Brown’s story that remind me a bit of what happened in the Rather downfall:
So there you go, five easy tips to follow if you want to fool people other than journalists into believing your hoax. And a final word on journalists. When Jenni Lee, a reporter/anchor for KVUE-TV, first spread the story about the cake, prior to checking out the facts, two reporters posted the following in response to her:
They did this within minutes of the original tweet. And yes, USA Today picked up the story from KVUE-TV, mentioning only at the very end, after everyone stopped reading, that Whole Foods denies it. Not that USA Today is unique, as there are thousands of such examples
I would suggest that the Pulitzer Prize Committee should start giving out honors for journalistic restraint, but in many ways those journalism prizes are themselves great examples of how our society has long rewarded erroneous or otherwise flawed social justice activism over accurate and reasoned debates.
Consider that in this country we have actual cake bakers and other artisans who have been forced out of business for declining to cater events that offend their conscience. And rather than have tens of thousands of stories about the shuttering of those businesses or the lawsuits their proprietors are fighting, we ignore their plight. Fake social justice warrior hoaxes get massive press coverage and nationwide sympathy, while actual rights-violations, like bakers being forced to bake gay wedding cakes or get sued, get mocked (a good gaslighting if you’ll ever see one, even) on Saturday Night Live.
UPDATE: After reviewing surveillance footage, Whole Foods announced on Tuesday afternoon that it plans to take legal action against Jordan Brown for fraud. According to Whole Foods, Brown not only made up the story, he also changed the original location of the cake seal. Yes, the very cake seal which he said authenticated his claim:Newly leaked memos related to the 2009 escalation of the war in Afghanistan have put President Obama’s decision in an even worse light, with the revelation that Vice President Joe Biden penned a memo warning him that the plan wasn’t “viable.” Even more shocking is the revelation that President Obama knew of a CIA assessment that warned against the surge, and “purposely did not read it” before approving the massive escalation.
The new information is included in the upcoming book Little America by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The Associated Press got an advanced copy of the book and revealed the new information.
Biden’s memo centered on the idea that, while confident that more troops would be able to chase insurgents from villages, the Afghan government was still not credible, nor able to actual secure any of those “gains.” He recommended a smaller escalation.
In practice even Biden’s assessment was a bit rosy. The surge dramatically increased the death toll in Afghanistan, but here in summer 2012, all of the same problems present in summer 2009 remain, and perhaps have worsened in some ways. Though officials are publicly claiming “progress” the administration has signed a pact with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to keep troops on the ground in Afghanistan through 2024.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzAbout
Hi! We're Mark and Bill from Linked to the Wall. We’ve been playing video games pretty much our whole lives. Over that time, we’ve built up quite a collection of games that we love, for consoles that we don’t play anymore. And we didn’t know what to do with them. They ended up buried away in boxes in our basements, attics—and some hidden away at our parents’ houses!
If you’re anything like us, you’ve got the same problem—buried boxes, full of your old games. Games that you love. Games that you spent every afternoon for months playing. Games that you still think about when you close your eyes. But despite how much you love them they still sit hidden away because you don't know what else to do with them.
We were tired of leaving our favorite games buried away. We want to put them out on display, to see them and be reminded of how much we love them. So we designed a set of custom mounts that let us put our favorite games on the wall. Instead of leaving them hidden, we get to show them off. We put a lot of time into getting mounts just right–and when we shared the results, other people loved our work, too!
Now we want to bring them to you!
Our mounts are...
Secure: Our mounts will hold your games solidly. They’re not going to wobble, fall out, or break.
Removable: Your games will never be permanently locked away in our mounts. When it’s time to replay your favorite game, or if you want to put new games on display, you can easily remove them from our mount.
Simply slide your game up to remove it!
Discreet: You want to show off your games, not our mounts. We’ve designed our mounts to be as invisible as possible, letting your games be the center of attention.
Check out some of our prototypes:
Our mounts each hold a single video game cartridge or disc. We provide several options for attachment—all of our mounts come with both a wood screw for attaching the mount directly to the wall, and a machine screw for attaching the mount to a shadow box, frame, or other board. This gives you a lot of flexibility in where you display your games.
To inspire you with the possibilities, here are some of the displays we’ve created for ourselves and our friends using our mounts:
The Legend of Zelda series - see http://imgur.com/a/kG7ot for image credits
NES Mario games, in display frames
Chrono Trigger
dotstream with its original box
Metal Storm
Megaman 1 - 8, mounted directly on a wall
Our mounts come in two pricing tiers:
Large Mounts: This tier includes mounts for NES, SNES, N64, and GEN cartridges. Buy one for $10, or save 20% on a bundle of 5!
Small Mounts: This tier includes mounts for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo 3DS cartridges, as well as the Disc mount. Buy one for $7, or save 20% on a bundle of 5!
Small and Large Mounts
You can mix and match any mounts in the same tier for the bundles.
We also have a display case which adds UV-resistant acrylic in front of the games, and a sturdy backing behind.
What if I want more?
If you want to purchase extra mounts, bundles, or display kits, then just add the cost of the item (plus $1 extra each for shipping) to your pledge. We'll send out a survey after the campaign concludes to ask what items you want.
We designed our mounts to create a wall with the entire Zelda series on display. When we showed it on Reddit, this is what people had to say about it:
"Seriously make these... Please. I NEED YOUR HELP." – zellthemedic
"I will buy! Shut up and take my money! Give me the means!!! $$$$" — EngineeringEnergy
"Seriously, I need these in my life.” — Susurrations
“I'd love to give my favorite series a wall” — kazoodac
"That is totally awesome. I'd love to have just one." — ChickinSammich
Our Zelda wall was also featured on 3DPrint.com: http://3dprint.com/96420/3d-printed-mounts-for-zelda/
Our Kickstarter has been featured in several articles across the web:
“Is that any way to treat the works of art that defined our childhood? A recent Kickstarter project has instead pitched a better idea: Wall mounting them.” — NicheGamer
“A new startup called "Linked to the Wall" aims to cater to those who wish to show off their collection and plans to do so in an interesting way.” — NintendoLife
“These gamers will turn your old nes cartridges into wall art and these pieces are sick” — BroBible
“Pretty sweet idea for the geek gamers out there, like me :-)” — Inceptional
“Is that any way to treat the great artwork that graced games of the past? I don’t think so. Neither does the team over at Linked to the Wall, LLC who have come up with an interesting display option.” — Retro Gaming Magazine
Our current mount prototypes were printed on our 3D printers. That made it easy for us to design and prototype, but it’s too slow for mass production. We need to be able to produce injection molds for each cartridge form factor we support—and the cost adds up quickly for all of the different molds. And the more consoles we support, the higher this setup cost will be. We need Kickstarter to get the funding to get the molds manufactured, so we can get the mounts to you.As the dusts settles (quite literally) around the landing of the Philae probe, scientists have confirmed that craft didn’t touch down just once – it actually bouncedon the surface of the comet twice.
But what’s happening here? Since when did spacecraft bounce?
Well, it’s all down to the comet's gravity. 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko may be an icy mass the size of a mountain, but gravity is an incredibly weak force (you overcome it every time you get out of bed in the morning) and it only really becomes noticeable with huge, planetary masses.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
The comet's gravity is actually several hundred thousand times weaker than that on Earth and, to make matters worse, the uneven shape of the comet means that even this force varies over its surface.
Its gravity is so weak that scientists working on the Philae lander had to take account of the fact that even the slightest movement on the craft – say, adjusting a camera to look left or right – could be enough to lift it off the surface.
To compensate for this they put thrusters on the top of the craft to push it into the surface (unlike the Curiosity rover which had thrusters on the bottom to stop it from slamming into Mars) as well as pair of harpoons and three ice screws to secure it in place once it was near enough.
Unfortunately, this is where things went wrong: the thrusters and harpoons failed for unknown reasons and consequently Philae rebounded.
Not hard (the craft was only travelling at a leisurely one metre per second) but enough to keep it airborne for several hours -imagine the lander barely moving as it floats hundreds of metres above the surface, attached by only a thin thread of gravity.
Thankfully, however, Philae has now definitely landed, although there’s still some concern about its long term prospects without harpoons to secure it in place.
Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Show all 22 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: European Space Agency's Rosetta mission 1/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Image of Comet 67P/CG taken by the Philae lander from a distance of approximately 3km from the surface 2/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Rosetta's lander Philae took this parting shot of its mothership shortly after separation 3/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Parting shot of the Philae lander after separation, captured by one of Rosetta's cameras 4/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission A technician celebrates after the successful landing of the Philae lander, in the control room at the ESA headquarters in Darmstadt Reuters 5/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Scientists celebrate at a mission observation centre in Toulouse, southern France as they receive information that Philae has landed on the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet AP 6/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Astronomer Klim Ivanovych Churyumov, who discovered the comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 1969, reacts after the successful landing of the Philae lander on the comet Reuters 7/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission A model demonstrates how the landing device Philae, of the space probe Rosetta, stands on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at the press center of the satellite control center of the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany EPA 8/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission An artist impression of Rosetta's lander Philae on the surface of comet Getty Images 9/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Picture taken on October 28 by the navigation camera on Rosetta shows the boulder-strewn neck region of comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It was captured from a distance of 9.7 km from the center of the comet Getty Images 10/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Picture taken on October 24 shows a raised plateau on the larger lobe of the comet Getty Images 11/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission The probe is supposed to fly to a comet and put down a small laboratory on the top of it 12/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission A scientist from the European Space Agency with an airworthy copy of space probe 'Rosetta' in the control center in Darmstadt, Germany 13/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Maneuvers designed for the actual space probe are simulated with the replica. 'Rosetta' will be woken up from an energy saving hibernation after 957 days 14/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission A European Space Agency employee sits in the control room for the Rosetta mission in Darmstadt, Germany 15/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Scientists at the European Space Agency are expecting their comet-chasing probe Rosetta to wake from almost three years of hibernation 16/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Europe's Rosetta probe on a NASA mission 17/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission NASA is participating in the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, whose goal is to observe one such space-bound icy dirt ball from up close for months on end 18/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission An impression of the Philae lander 19/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission ESA probe Rosetta with Mars in the background. The three-tonne probe blasted off aboard an an Ariane V rocket from Kourou, French Guiana in 2004 20/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Rosetta orbiter deploying the Philae lander to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the spacecraft measures 32 m across including the solar arrays, while the comet nucleus is thought to be about 4 km wide 21/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission The spacecraft, festooned with 25 instruments between its lander and orbiter (including three from NASA), is programmed to 'wake up' from hibernation 22/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission An Ariane V carrying the three-tonne probe Rosetta blasting off from Kourou, beginning a decade-long quest to hunt a comet in the depths of the Solar System and shadow it around the Sun in a bid to tease out secrets of how life began on Earth 1/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Image of Comet 67P/CG taken by the Philae lander from a distance of approximately 3km from the surface 2/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Rosetta's lander Philae took this parting shot of its mothership shortly after separation 3/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Parting shot of the Philae lander after separation, captured by one of Rosetta's cameras 4/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission A technician celebrates after the successful landing of the Philae lander, in the control room at the ESA headquarters in Darmstadt Reuters 5/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Scientists celebrate at a mission observation centre in Toulouse, southern France as they receive information that Philae has landed on the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet AP 6/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission Astronomer Klim Ivanovych Churyumov, who discovered the comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 1969, reacts after the successful landing of the Philae lander on the comet Reuters 7/22 European Space Agency's Rosetta mission A model demonstrates how the landing device Philae |
and limited nature: failing to maintain adequate internal controls and procedures, misstating its financial results, and failing to keep the audit committee of its board of directors properly informed about the size of Iksil’s losses.
In effect, JPMorgan, in agreeing to the settlement, was admitting something Dimon has already conceded: we screwed up. As long ago as last May, Dimon said on a conference call that Iksil’s trade were “poorly monitored and poorly constructed and poorly reviewed and all that.” The settlement contains no admission of fraud, reckless risk-taking, or deliberately misleading investors—a point noted by Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and who has been pushing for tougher sanctions on too-big-to-fail banks like JP Morgan. “The size of the penalties is testimony to the great damage risky derivatives bets can do, and that’s important,” Levin said in a statement. “However, the whole issue of misinforming investors and the public is conspicuously absent from the SEC findings and settlement. Our PSI investigation showed that senior bank executives made a series of inaccurate statements that misinformed investors and the public as the London Whale disaster unfolded.”
In a statement announcing that, as part of the overall settlement, JPMorgan had agreed to pay a fine of two hundred million dollars to the British government, the Financial Conduct Authority, the U.K.’s main financial-regulatory agency, did bring up the bank’s misleading statements and stonewalling after Iksil’s losses emerged. “During the first half of 2012, JPMorgan failed to be open and co-operative with the FCA in that it concealed the extent of the losses as well as numerous serious and significant issues regarding the situation in the” huge derivatives portfolio that Iksil and his colleagues had constructed, the agency said. “JP Morgan’s failings were extremely serious and undermined trust and confidence in UK financial markets.”
But if that’s the case, why haven’t the F.C.A. and the other regulators demanded more scalps in JPMorgan’s executive suite, and, perhaps, even the resignation of Dimon? It’s surely not too much that megabanks that enjoy an implicit guarantee from the taxpayers don’t allow their traders to build up huge derivatives positions unchallenged by senior managers. (At one point, the notional exposure of Iksil’s derivatives portfolio was more than a hundred and fifty billion dollars.) And surely such banks can’t be permitted to mislead, or stonewall, their regulators.
If Dimon wasn’t responsible for the glaring failure to supervise Iksil and his colleagues, and for the bank’s misleading statements after the losses emerged, who was? Martin Artajo, Iksil’s immediate supervisor, whom the Justice Department has accused of trying to disguise his losses? Hardly. Artajo, who is currently in Spain fighting extradition to the United States, was a fairly lowly figure in the bank. He had little to do with how it was run, or how it communicated with the outside world. Ina Drew, the former head of the Chief Investment Office, who resigned last year and offered to return two years of compensation? She was a protégé of Dimon and she reported to him personally. But she wasn’t responsible for some of the bank’s key failures, such as introducing a new risk model that greatly understated the risks that Iksil and others were taking.
The truth is that big banks like JPMorgan are hugely complicated organizations, in which no one person can be aware of everything that is going on, or even hope to forestall all possible problems from emerging. When it comes to keeping the bank’s traders on a leash, about the best that can be expected is that the person, or people, in charge set up a proper system of internal checks and controls, including strict limits on leverage, meaningful risk guidelines, and accurate valuation metrics. But, in at least two of these three areas, JPMorgan appears to have fallen short. Again, if that wasn’t Dimon’s responsibility, whose responsibility was it?
Since the regulators have taken a pass on answering this question, it is left to JPMorgan’s board or directors to pursue it. After all, they were among the folks who were misled. In April of last year, according to the cease-and-desist order that the S.E.C. published on Thursday, some of the bank’s senior executives learned that Iksil and his fellow traders were inflating the value of their trades by up to seven hundred and fifty million dollars. But Dimon and his colleagues failed to inform the board, and, in particular, it’s audit committee, which is responsible for making sure that the bank gives out accurate numbers. In a statement, George Canellos, the co-director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, said “JPMorgan’s senior management broke a cardinal rule of corporate governance and deprived its board of critical information.”
In the wake of the legal settlement, maybe the board will haul Dimon before it and ask him to explain how this happened. Perhaps it will even force him to give up one of his titles—he is currently the bank’s chairman and chief executive—an idea that he has strongly resisted but which, earlier this year, gained the backing of about a third of the bank’s shareholders.
What, you don’t think that is very likely to happen? O.K., I’ll let you in on a secret: neither do I.
Photograph by Larry Downing/Reuters/Corbis.For this year's spring Solstice Scents
release, I went all conservative and just bought samples of the three new scents: Whispers in the Night, Chrysalis, and Cameo. I also got my free sample in Courtyard, which I've tried before and really like, but only enough to keep a sample on hand for the times I'm in the mood for it.
My envelope came with a new edition of the Foxcroft Bulletin. I really, really love these! I love that there's a cohesive mythology to their scents that they've carried through multiple collections, and I appreciate the detailed storytelling involved. I see in this newsletter a mention of the Smokewood Apiary's exotic honey tasting event. I'm hoping this is a hint at a potential future scent- some kind of rich, smoky honey scent sounds really nice!
And my thoughts on the new scents:
Whispers in the Night
Jasmine, Tuberose, Vanilla Orchid, Coconut, White Amber, Sandalwood, Amber & Ylang Ylang on a base of Edge of the Night
I'm discovering that I enjoy heady white florals like jasmine, in small doses. This one on cold sniff and first applying is all jasmine with a touch of creamy tuberose, but the jasmine is really strong and indolic to me. I don't care for it on cold sniff. It does calm down after a few minutes and smells almost tropical...the woods and coconut? The coconut and tuberose remind me of Tropical Moon, which is one I actually like a lot. I can almost detect the Edge of the Night base but it feels softened, muted...dialed down. Not the bombastic floriental of the original. This one manages to be soft and a touch sweet and yet still feels heavy and pervasive on me, bordering on mothball-y. This scent just reminds me that I still need to get a full size of the original Edge of the Night- the newer incarnations have been interesting but the original one is brilliant and hands down my favorite.
Cameo
Almond, Rose, Yellow Cake, Tonka Bean, Coconut, Ginger and Green Orange
Whoa. For such a delicate sounding scent this baby has tenacity. Serious staying power and some impressive sillage. I wore this at work and even though I enjoyed the scent, I started feeling self-conscious, like, this is way too much. I washed it off and I still felt it wafting around me. This smells like sharp almond at first, and then I can quickly pick up cakey things, pale pink roses, and billowing tufts of tonka and the tiniest nip of ginger. This scents smells like sweet, pink, puffy clouds filled with mounds of cake and shredded coconut. It also smells quite a bit like Haus of Gloi's Valentine scent, Come Hither, but more gourmand. I like this, but I feel like the tonka amps on my skin and becomes almost cloyingly sweet and much too strong for me to comfortably wear. G once told me that his mother (rest her soul) used to have a saying..."too sweet to be wholesome." That's this one. I will use my sample up but will pass on any other products. I'm going to try layering Rose Mallow Cream, Lemon Ginger Creams, and Haus of Gloi's Twice is Nice and see if I can evoke this scent without the toothache.
Chrysalis
Orange Blossom, Grass, Bitter Green Orange, Vetiver, Patchouli, Amber, Yellow Mandarin, Rose de Mai Absolute, Sandalwood and Indian Attars - 5ml
This one here is a morpher! I get sharp, almost peppery green grassy notes paired with a bright, warm orange blossom note on cold sniff. A tiny bit bitter but pleasant and very fascinating. As it dries down it becomes more earthy and woodsy, actually very exotic smelling. The scent stays warm-toned throughout. I imagine this scent in colors as a bright verdant green and fiery orange with a touch of golden brown. The morphing here is pretty dramatic to me. I wish that initial green phase lasted a little longer, but the dry down is heavenly. I know Angela used mitti attar, which mimics the scent of sun-baked earth before rain, so as much as I like this- it's not quite a "spring in a bottle" scent to me. I imagine one of those to be very cool-toned, dewy, with light grassy notes, delicate florals, soft breezes, that sort of thing. But maybe that's my geographical bias talking. Expect this one to feel more warm and exotic, perhaps a spring-into-summer scent? As the name suggests, almost cathartic. I feel like the dry down smells a little like Cascade of Gold, so if you enjoy that one, you might like Chrysalis. I definitely want a full size of this.
If you would like some more rambling thoughts on scents from previous spring releases, look HERE.
(Sorry, not all the scents in this review are available anymore, but I do comment on Courtyard, Chantilly Cream, Chiffon, Cascade of Gold, among others that are still around!)The Pacers are destroying the league behind a terrifying defense and two max-salary franchise cornerstones, proving, rather emphatically, that the crucial improvements they flashed in last year’s playoffs were real — and indicative of more to come.
The bench is better, which is to say it now features players who can catch and dribble regulation basketballs. Frank Vogel continues to grow as a coach, managing minutes carefully and making subtle X’s-and-O’s adjustments as he learns more about his team and its enemies.
And, oh, hey, Lance Stephenson is suddenly playing like a point guard with killer 3-point range. Stephenson is averaging twice as many assists per game compared with last season, even though he’s only logging about six more minutes on average. Numbers from the SportVU data-tracking cameras provided exclusively to Grantland bear this out. Stephenson is dribbling the ball about 125 times per game this season, up from a paltry 65.5 bounces last season, according to the data. His per-game time of possession has jumped from about 90 seconds to nearly three minutes, and he’s touching the ball about twice as often. He has assisted on nearly 29 percent of Indiana’s baskets while on the floor, roughly equivalent to last season’s marks for a bunch of high-quality starting point guards with strong secondary distributors around them and/or score-first duties — Stephen Curry, Ty Lawson, Damian Lillard, Kyrie Irving, and others. Stephenson is also using up more possessions for his own shots, and yet his turnover rate hasn’t budged at all.
Watch the Pacers’ starting lineup, perhaps the best five-man unit in the league over the last two seasons, and you’ll often catch Stephenson handling the ball up top, while the nominal point guard, George Hill, spots up on the wing. Ditto for the bench-heavy second units Stephenson is captaining; he has a much higher assist rate than C.J. Watson, the team’s new backup point guard, and, like Hill, a solid shooter who is generally better off sharing point guard duties.
This is the on-court fulfillment of a goal Vogel gave Stephenson during the offseason. “During the summer, he told me to get ready to have the ball in my hands more,” Stephenson says.
It also presents Indiana with an enormous dilemma: If Stephenson is a more versatile player than the league anticipated, how much will he be worth this summer? Can the Pacers still afford him?
It seems almost mean to talk about next summer when the Pacers are the feel-good story of the league today, and Stephenson won’t do it. “The future holds itself,” he says. “I’m not worrying about my contract. I’m worrying about winning.” But this is how franchises have to think. This Indiana core has a championship window now, but the league’s beefed-up luxury tax will make it very hard for Indiana to keep its fearsome starting lineup together beyond this season — assuming the Pacers will avoid paying the tax at all costs.
Indiana’s salary situation is unusually fluid, because we won’t know the actual value of Paul George’s max-level contract extension until after this season. George is eligible for a rare pay bump that would kick in if he wins the MVP (unlikely) or makes the All-NBA team, as he did last season. I predicted George would not snag one of the four available All-NBA frontcourt spots (LeBron James and Kevin Durant get the first two), mostly because the competition would be so fierce this year. George is making that prediction look foolish early.
If he misses out, George will earn about $14.5 million next season, assuming the cap for that season falls around $62 million, as the league currently projects. If he makes the All-NBA team, he could earn up to $17.55 million, or any amount in between. (Russell Westbrook, for instance, passed on the raise even though he was eligible for it.) If George takes the full raise, the Pacers would be looking at a minimum of about $65.6 million in salary committed to just eight players, plus $1.5 million or so in charges for empty roster spots — about $67 million total. They’d have to fill those roster spots with actual players who might cost more than those temporary charges, and getting to this number also involves buying out Luis Scola’s partially guaranteed contract. Scola’s a useful player and another guy they’d have to replace.
Keep Scola on the books for his full $4.9 million, and you’re up to just about $70 million with a couple of spots left to fill. (Both scenarios assume the Pacers keep Donald Sloan and Orlando Johnson on minimum-level deals.) In related news, the league expects the luxury tax line for 2014-15 to come in around $75.7 million. That would leave the Pacers only about $6 million under the threshold in this scenario. Stephenson, given his improved play and young age, is going to earn more than that on the open market. You can see how this might be a problem for a franchise that has lost money in recent years.
And Stephenson will hit the open market. Several media reports over the last few months have listed him as a restricted free agent, indicating the Pacers would be able to match any contract a rival team offers. This is wrong. Stephenson is an unrestricted free agent under the quirky rules that govern second-round picks.
There is wiggle room here. Perhaps George will fall short of All-NBA honors, or pass on the full raise. The Pacers could buy out Scola and seek a cheaper replacement. They could use the stretch provision on Ian Mahinmi or Chris Copeland, who has played eight minutes after signing a two-year, $6.1 million deal in the offseason.
But the Stephenson fit is going to be very tight. And Danny Granger, by the way, is a near 100 percent lock to play elsewhere next season. Stephenson’s a higher priority. The Pacers have invested a ton of player development capital in him, and they’d like to continue reaping the benefits of that nurturing. Ditto for the question about which player should start once Granger returns this season. If Stephenson keeps playing like this, Vogel has no choice. You don’t break up a lineup scoring nearly 115 points per 100 possessions and allowing just 80 out of loyalty to a rusty, aging player. And the notion that the bench unit could use Stephenson’s ballhandling more than Granger’s shooting is moot. Bench units already have Stephenson’s ballhandling because of the way Vogel staggers minutes and mixes his starters and bench. As long as Hill, Stephenson, or George is on the floor to run the offense, the Pacers only need to slot Granger the minutes now going to Solomon Hill and Johnson.
Back to Stephenson’s future. There’s another alternative: swallow hard, let Stephenson walk, and use the midlevel exception (either the big one or the small one, depending in part on George’s contract) to find one or even two decent cogs on the cheap. You can get solid wing players in the $3 million range under the new CBA, especially if you’re a good team, though the competition gets fierce as more teams hoard cap room. The Bulls lured Mike Dunleavy Jr. at that price; the Blazers snagged Mo Willams and Dorell Wright for about $5.7 million combined. Could the Pacers go that route, chasing guys like Ray Allen, Rodney Stuckey, Jerryd Bayless, Nick Young, and Vince Carter in the veteran bargain bin? Indy fans might vomit at exchanging Stephenson for those names, but, I mean, why are you paying George, Roy Hibbert, and George Hill nearly $40 million combined if they’re not good enough to compensate for a downgrade at shooting guard? George is versatile enough that the Pacers could sign whatever wings might be available, regardless of their traditional positions.
Remember: Stephenson has never even sniffed a league-average Player Efficiency Rating, and he barely played over the first two years of his career. This is not James Harden coming off his rookie contract.
But if Stephenson keeps playing like this, the bargain bin will indeed represent a steep downgrade. Stephenson has evolved as a playmaker in part because he’s displaying a patience to his game that, frankly, not many people figured he’d ever show at the NBA level. His ferocious, borderline frightening end-to-end rushes have made Stephenson a League Pass favorite — everyone loves a little danger — but watch those bull rushes this season and you’ll find they don’t look quite the same. Stephenson is more calculating, more aware of where his teammates are and will be. He’ll decelerate, veer into the middle of the floor, draw the defense there, and wait for the shooter behind him to fill the now-vacated corner. Hell, he has even slowed down to wait for trailers on a few possessions. That’s right: Lance Stephenson has slowed down, on purpose, on some fast breaks this season.
“I know Scola and D-West can hit that little jump shot,” Stephenson says. “So when I push it, and I don’t see nothing, I just try to pass it back to them and set a pick on their guy at the same time.”
The patience extends to the pick-and-roll. When defenses trap Stephenson a bit further from the hoop than usual, he doesn’t panic or try to wildly split the defenders. He has calmly taken a dribble or two back toward midcourt, drawing the trap with him, and giving his screener a chance to slip into open space:
Both West and Scola are dynamite at making these kinds of cuts, catching the ball in space, and doing something productive with it. Stephenson has developed nice chemistry with each of them, and he looks to set them up for midrange jumpers.
He’s even making some next-level point guard reads, improvising passes one step ahead of the defense. Here’s Stephenson handling the ball on the right wing as Scola sets a cross screen near the rim for George:
The intent is to spring George for a post-up. The Grizzlies know this, and so Zach Randolph, Scola’s man, temporarily leaves Scola to muck up Stephenson’s passing lane to George. And what does Stephenson do? He simply skips the middle man, bypassing the planned entry pass to George and firing a pass to Scola for an easy look:
Vogel is now calling more plays, including a bunch of pick-and-roll variations, for a guy who used to get almost none. This kind of subtlety has seeped into Stephenson’s defense, too. Stephenson used to be something of a jumpy mess on that end, though he could always compensate with elite speed, long arms, and balls-to-the-wall toughness. But he’d gamble in passing lanes, take circuitous routes around picks off the ball, space out and lose track of his guy, and generally do a few things each game that would make purists cringe.
Some of that still shows up. He likes to stand upright, even when a pick is coming, and that’s often because he hasn’t paid enough attention to realize a pick is coming. He’ll get slammed with screens, making it hard for him to recover back into the play:
And that little lapse in attention against the Raptors results in:
Being caught off guard like this on a pick-and-roll taking place on the wing is especially damaging, since it means the ball handler gets a hefty screen and a clean path toward the middle of the floor — where damage generally starts. “I just have to try to be more aware,” Stephenson says. “I mean, I know all the other team’s plays. We go over it all at shootaround. Sometimes, I’m just not aware.”
But Stephenson is excising the bad habits. He has Vogel’s scheme down pat, for one. He’ll stick very close to a corner shooter if that shooter is Joe Johnson or Ray Allen, but he’ll allow himself an extra step or two toward the paint if it’s Tony Allen or Avery Bradley. And even then, Stephenson rarely overhelps from the wing, allowing the other members of Indy’s human torture chamber to do their jobs.
He’s a strong one-on-one defender, both in the post and in space. Attack him from those places, and you’re likely to end up taking a contested jump shot or difficult floater with Stephenson’s arms in your shooting window. He even managed well on LeBron in the conference finals last season after asking Vogel for the assignment during times George rested or dealt with foul trouble. Stephenson said he’d rather guard a bulky wing like LeBron than a waterbug point guard, anyway.
Stephenson just turned 23, and he looks to be making huge strides as a player. But he’s never going to be a superstar. He’s not going to be a no. 1 option on a good team, or a defensive wing stopper on the level of George, LeBron, Andre Iguodala, or Kawhi Leonard. He looks very much like a nice, above-average starting NBA wing. And that’s really good! Not many people thought Stephenson would hit that mark after he logged just 557 minutes combined over his first two seasons, amid rumors of “attitude” issues.
But he’s also starting to look pricey — like $7 million to $10 million pricey, especially since Stephenson will come with the sheen of having played under bright postseason lights. Do the Pacers really need a shooting guard at that price? The evidence is unclear. The George/Hill/West/Hibbert quartet is powerful, and it should be able to thrive with any useful shooting guard plugged in the remaining spot. The same lineup, with Granger in Stephenson’s place, blitzed the league two seasons ago.
But in 326 minutes those four players logged together without Stephenson last season, the Pacers scored a shade under one point per possession while yielding about 1.020, according to NBAWowy.com. In other words: They lost those minutes. But that’s a limited sample size, and with Granger injured and Indy capped-out, those minutes were going to guys like Gerald Green, Sam Young, and Orlando Johnson. The Pacers might be able to find better options on the free-agency market if they plan ahead.
But Stephenson brings an off-the-bounce punch that will be hard to find in the bargain bin — a dose of unpredictable, penetrating creativity Indiana otherwise lacks. George isn’t quite a lead ball handler yet, and Hill is the absolute ideal of the caretaker point guard. Stephenson brings the oomph.
That has Indy in the running for the ring now. How much will it pay to keep it that way?Share
The Jolla smartphone was announced and became available as a pre-order on May 20, and the device has already attracted orders from 118 countries around the world, according to new CEO Tomi Pienimaki. For a phone which originally looked like it would only be released in China and Jolla’s home country of Finland, this is great news, and shows the level of interest in the quirky alternative to Android and iOS.
Initially available with three different pre-order options – the 40 euro and 100 euro option both came with goodies and a priority order number, or there was a simple free option – the 40 euro package was withdrawn due to demand, and Jolla opened up the 100 euro option to the rest of Europe, whereas before it was restricted to certain countries.
Pienimaki didn’t reveal the amount of orders it had received, nor did he indicate which package proved to be most popular, but he has said the phone is on schedule to be manufactured this month, and orders should be fulfilled before the end of the year. While we know the basic specs of the phone some details are still to be confirmed, such as the screen resolution, but these should be made public once it’s on the production line. Jolla has so far found funding through Nokia’s Bridge program, and with China Fortune, but Pienimaki expects to be announcing a second round of funding before July.
Jolla isn’t the only new OS likely to hit stores this year, but it’s certainly the one which seems to have the most momentum. Until now Mozilla’s Firefox OS, which has already found its way onto several phones, looked to have the edge, but Jolla is rapidly catching up. With more funding on the way, and a high level of international interest, Jolla is rapidly becoming the one to watch in 2013.
Updated on 06/13/2013 at 06:00 by Andy: Jolla has announced it has signed a deal with Finnish network DNA, which will be the first to offer the Jolla phone in the country. DNA has been involved with Jolla and the Sailfish OS from the start, so the partnership already existed, however it’s further proof Jolla is gaining considerable industry traction.
Article originally published on 06/12/2013.BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union regulators are considering doubling the bloc’s target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and setting a tougher binding goal for renewable energy use, EU sources said.
A small geothermal power plant is seen near the town of Laugarvatn in southwestern Iceland February 15, 2013. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov
The European Commission, the EU’s executive, outlined new targets earlier this year but has yet to follow up with a firm legislative proposal. That is expected around the end of the year.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one source said the Commission was considering two legal targets to follow the three green energy goals that expire at the end of this decade.
They would be a 40 percent carbon-reduction goal and a 30 percent renewable energy use target. That compares with the 2020 targets of a 20 percent carbon cut from 1990 levels, a 20 percent share of renewable energy and a target to improve energy savings to 20 percent.
“The Commission at the moment is looking at a 40 percent domestic greenhouse gas target and a 30 percent EU-wide renewables target, but no third target,” the source said, adding some commissioners opposed the goals and debate would be difficult.
In addition to cutting domestic emissions by 40 percent, another source said the EU could commit to further cuts through international offsets if a global climate change deal is agreed.
The source added Commission experts were analyzing the economic impact of a 35-45 percent range for carbon cutting.
Traditionally, EU climate policy has been the preserve of the Commission’s climate and energy departments. But Europe’s economic struggles have prompted influential officials, including EU Economic and Monetary Affairs chief Olli Rehn, to insist green policy must not undo fragile recovery.
IMPACT
The European Union’s goals can influence the international debate on climate change and also have a bearing on the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which fell to record lows earlier this year under the burden of surplus permits.
Tougher policy goals could help to limit the oversupply of carbon allowances.
If agreed, the new European goals would be more ambitious than other nations have managed.
The U.S. Senate has refused to legislate cuts favored by U.S. President Barack Obama and Australia’s new conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who won power last month, has promised to scrap taxes on carbon pollution.
Still, environmental campaigners say the 2030 EU carbon-cutting goal should be 60 percent.
“The greenhouse gas numbers that the Commission is currently going for gives us only a 50:50 chance of preventing run-away climate change,” said Brook Riley, climate and energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth (FoE).
He said the range used to model the economic impact was far too low and the Commission was putting short-term political pragmatism before science.
The Commission does not comment on proposals before they are published.
Speaking in Vilnius, where EU energy ministers are meeting on Thursday and Friday, Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said only the debate was open.
“It’s up to member states to bring some input, to bring some constructive priorities,” he told reporters.
Member states appear deeply divided. Denmark has advocated a new set of three targets, but others, including Britain, have said they want just one carbon-cutting goal.
EU member Poland, which will host the next U.N. talks on climate change in Warsaw this year, says the European Union should not make any promises until there is a global deal, which is not expected until a U.N. summit in Paris in 2015.
Even U.N. officials have voiced concern that nations will not promise sufficient carbon cuts.
Echoing disagreement at the government level, the business community is also divided on the need for binding EU targets.
An open letter to EU energy ministers and commissioners, signed by 61 companies and associations, including energy firms Alstom and Acciona, called for a binding 2030 renewable goal, but did not specify a level.SAN FRANCISCO — When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew.
The results, presented April 4 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, serve as a reminder that hypothetical scenarios don’t capture the complexities of real decisions.
Morality studies in the lab almost always rely on asking participants to imagine how they’d behave in a certain situation, study coauthor Oriel FeldmanHall of Cambridge University said in her presentation. But these imagined situations are missing teeth: “Whatever you choose, it’s not going to happen,” she said.
But in FeldmanHall’s study, things actuallyThe provincial government will table an amendment to Ontario’s Family Law Act this fall to give adult children with disabilities access to child support, the Star has learned. The move comes in the wake of a provincial court decision Friday that ruled the law unconstitutional after a Brampton single mother’s fight to win child support for her 22-year-old disabled son.
Robyn Coates and her son Joshua, near their Brampton home in November 2016. Coates launched a constutional challenge claiming Ontario's law discriminates against children with disabilities. A provincial court agreed and the Ontario government plans to change the law. ( Rick Madonik / Toronto Star )
“The Ontario government will be moving forward with an amendment to include adult children with disabilities in the Family Law Act, to essentially mirror the federal Divorce Act,” said the government source, who added the province has been working on the change since last fall. “As soon as the house is sitting again, we will be able to table an amendment to the bill,” the source said. In his precedent-setting decision, Justice William Sullivan agreed with Robyn Coates that Ontario’s Family Law Act discriminates against adult children with disabilities because it denies them access to child support.
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Under provincial law, which governs unmarried parents, adult children are eligible for child support only if they are in school full-time. But under the federal Divorce Act, an adult child who is unable to live independently due to disability, illness or other cause is also eligible for support as long as they need it. Sullivan’s ruling, which adopts the federal Divorce Act wording for the case, means Coates’s son Joshua is eligible for child support from his estranged father Wayne Watson. “I find that Section 31 of the Family Law Act shuts the door to Joshua/Robyn to have a court in Ontario consider... his needs and who is better positioned to meet those needs,” Sullivan said in his 60-page decision. Sullivan ruled that Ontario’s child support law violates section 15 (1) of the Charter that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
A hearing to determine what, if any, child support Watson should pay will be scheduled in Brampton court on Monday. “I am extremely happy,” said Coates, 48, who launched the Charter case in November 2015. “I feel like (Joshua) is being treated like children of married couples. I feel we are equal. I don’t feel like we are being discriminated against, like we have been.”
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“It’s been so exciting to be a part of this. To make it fair for myself and others,” she said. “I’m extremely hopeful that we will be successful in changing the law.” Coates and Watson never lived together or married. But Watson has paid court-ordered child support since Joshua was 4. The father paid $319 a month for almost 13 years until a court-order increased support to more than $1,000 a month. He currently pays about $800 a month. Watson, 46, has said he recognizes his son is disabled, but he noted programs such as the Ontario Disability Support Program are there to help adults with disabilities. He said he was “shocked” by Friday’s decision. “I wasn’t expecting this,” he said in an interview. “This is a total shock. I thought this would have been over with a long time ago. I have put myself in debt because of it and figured once (my child support obligations) were over I’d be able to get myself out of debt.” Watson is married with two other children ages 15 and 21. Joshua was born with Di George Syndrome, a genetic abnormality that causes multiple medical and psychiatric problems that his doctor says are “chronic, severe and debilitating.” He has trouble paying attention, suffers from anxiety and obsessive compulsive behaviour and “will require the care and supervision of others throughout his life,” according to his doctor. Coates, an educational resource worker for students with special needs in the Dufferin-Peel Catholic School Board, says she needs child support to help defray the costs of day programs and medical expenses for Joshua that can run more than $1,400 a month. She says she launched the case so that no other single parent caring for a disabled child could be abandoned by an absent parent when the child becomes an adult. Adult children with disabilities are eligible for child support in every province except Ontario and Alberta regardless of the parents’ previous marital status and whether children are in school or not, argued Coates’s lawyer Robert Shawyer who took on the case pro bono in January. “I’m elated with the decision,” said Shawyer, who has been acting on behalf of unmarried parents trying to access child support in Ontario since 2011. “I’m looking forward to continuing to press forward with this issue until the Ontario government comes to its senses and changes the law and stops discriminating against children of unmarried parents who are primarily women.” Women are the overwhelming number of caregivers for children with disabilities, he added. “The court recognizes that it is discriminatory to limit access to the family law court for adult children with disabilities and their parents,” said lawyer Joanna Radbord, an intervener in the case representing Family Alliance Ontario, an organization that supports individuals with disabilities and their families. “Hopefully we are finally going to get the government to make a change so that children and their parents will be free to access child support on a non-discriminatory basis. It’s going to advance equality in Ontario,” added Radbord, who also acted on behalf of the Sherbourne Health Centre, which supports LGBTQ parents and children. In light of Coates’s constitutional challenge, provincial NDP Women’s Critic Peggy Sattler introduced a private member’s bill in March to amend the provincial law. Sattler first became aware of the issue about a year ago through Marnie Carson, a parent with a disabled son in her London West constituency. Carson urged Sattler to introduce the bill on behalf of her son Brayden, 18, who has autism. Because Carson and the boy’s biological father were never married, his child support is set to end shortly. “I am so excited to see justice for the disabled children of unmarried parents,” Carson said. “I have been promoting this new bill for months, contacting all provincial MPPs myself. We are determined to see this through for my son’s sake.”The 3 most popular tech stacks are currently: LAMP, MEAN and Ruby on Rails.
LAMP
LAMP gained popularity as: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. While linux remains strong as the Server OS, Apache his being challenged by Nginx as the webserver component and Postgres SQL has become very popular for the database layer.
The LAMP stack is used by some of the biggest companies on the Internet, |
’clock in the morning most of the time, and they went straight to FloraHolland,” said the police commander in charge of the Dutch side of the investigation. “They didn’t have Ferraris or big watches. If you looked at them you wouldn’t see anything strange. They seemed to be ordinary people, but they were not.”
What the employees at the flower market did not know was that Crupi and Macri were – prosecutors allege – part of the Commisso clan, which prosecutors say is based in the small coastal town of Siderno and is one of the ‘Ndrangheta’s most powerful arms.
“The ‘Ndrangheta is a trademark, or guarantee, of criminal seriousness.” David Ellero, head of Europol’s organised crime squad in The Hague
Both Crupi and Macri are related to one of the three bosses who together regulated affairs for the entire ‘Ndrangheta network until the mid-70s. That man, Antonio “Uncle 'Ntoni” Macri, was the “living symbol of organised crime's omnipotence,” Italian magistrate Guido Marino wrote in a 1970 court ruling. ‘Ntoni’s daughter, Concetta, is married to Crupi. And ’Ntoni’s son is Vincenzo Macri, the business partner and brother-in-law of Crupi.
In 1975, a hit squad shot the 72-year-old 'Ntoni dead after his daily game of bocce, an Italian game similar to bowls. The murder set off a bloody mafia war that cost some 233 lives in three years, according to mafia historian John Dickie. In Siderno, a town of fewer than 20,000, an estimated 5,000 people attended the funeral of Uncle 'Ntoni.
Vincenzo, the younger Macri, is currently a fugitive and could not be contacted for comment. Maria Candida Tripodi, a lawyer who says she was hired by a family member to defend Macri, said that he is innocent.
“I’ve never spoken directly with him, but I do know he intends to defend himself or I would not have been hired,” she said. “I believe he will deny the accusations.”
Belcastro, the lawyer for Crupi, said of Siderno and his client: “It’s a very small town so it’s normal that he would know people who may have a criminal background, but that doesn’t make him a criminal.”
Crupi’s wife, Concetta, did not respond to attempts to contact her through her husband’s lawyer.
SMUGGLING NETWORK
At the FloraHolland market, Crupi and Macri ran a business called Fresh BV, which boasted on its website that it was “a major player of the Italian wholesale market” with a trucking business providing “distribution that allows us to be proud of our speed and methods.” In the mid-2000s, Fresh BV was sending about a truckload of flowers a day to Italy, former employees said. In recent years the volume had decreased, police said, but the company was still sending several trucks each week.
The FloraHolland market in Aalsmeer is enormous, equivalent in size to 400 soccer pitches. Since speed is of the essence in delivering fresh flowers, 18-wheeler trucks rumble in and out at all hours.
With the port of Rotterdam and Schiphol airport nearby, Crupi’s flower business was perfectly positioned to receive drug shipments from South America and distribute them onwards, say police and prosecutors.
As Italian police investigated Crupi, they asked their Dutch counterparts to bug the offices of Fresh BV. The eavesdroppers allege they heard Crupi and Macri speaking at length about mafia affairs, according to transcripts. Court documents allege the two men discussed selling and shipping cocaine to a Neapolitan crime family; Macri’s desire to set up a drug trafficking operation in Venezuela; the first birthday of an alleged clan member’s son; how to fence millions of euros in stolen Lindt chocolate (see sidebar); and the deadly ‘Ndrangheta power struggle in Canada.
“The crime of mafia membership doesn’t exist anywhere in the world except Italy, but the mafia is everywhere.” Antonio De Bernardo, prosecutor in Reggio Calabria, southern Italy
Prosecutors allege Crupi and Macri were wary of surveillance and behind closed doors spoke in Calabrian dialect. They usually referred to other suspected mobsters only by nicknames, such as “Chubby the son of Grace,” “the brigand” and “the chosen one.” Crupi often called Macri by his nickname, “pumadoru” – dialect for “tomato.”
The court documents allege that Crupi, Macri and others ran an organisation “systematically and regularly dedicated to importing from Holland large quantities of cocaine to be sold on the Italian market.” They represented the international business side of the ‘Ndrangheta, say prosecutors, rather than being feared bosses ruling home turf through clan loyalty and intimidation.
Police carried out the first arrests in the investigation in August 2014, when they witnessed an Albanian man allegedly picking up drugs in Rome from a flower-truck driver working for the Crupi family. In another operation, one of Crupi’s truck drivers allegedly picked up more than 11 kilos of cocaine from a man in Rotterdam and shuttled it to Italy in a hidden compartment, according to police eyewitness accounts and a recording from a listening device in the cabin. The driver was recorded saying he had picked up the “black tulip bulbs,” which police took to be code for the drugs.
The driver was arrested in December 2014 at an isolated warehouse district in northern Italy where he met the alleged buyer of the drugs, who was also arrested. These shipments, prosecutors allege in Crupi’s arrest warrant, were “just the tip of the iceberg.”
SPECIAL LAW
To tackle the likes of the Cosa Nostra and ‘Ndrangheta, Italy has made it a criminal offence to be a member of a mafia organisation. The offence carries a sentence of up to 24 years in prison if mafia activities have an international dimension. No other country has such a law. Italian prosecutors say the lack of such a law outside Italy is a serious impediment in tackling mafiosi operating internationally.
“Italy, because the authorities have had to struggle against the mafia for decades, has the best anti-mafia legislation and the best investigators,” said Ellero, the head of Europol’s organised crime squad in The Hague. “But when you leave Italy, it’s back to square one.”
That is why many mafia operators have increasingly shifted activities and assets abroad, say prosecutors. “The crime of mafia membership doesn’t exist anywhere in the world except Italy, but the mafia is everywhere,” said Reggio Calabria prosecutor Antonio De Bernardo, who is leading the southern court’s investigation against Crupi.
In February 2015, Italy’s elite SCO police – knowing that rituals like birthday parties, baptisms, weddings and funerals remain important occasions for the 'Ndrangheta – bugged a car Crupi rented in Siderno. He and his wife drove the car to their nephew’s first birthday party at Siderno’s Hotel President.
During the trip home, he was recorded speaking to a known 'Ndrangheta member, according to court documents.
In September, Crupi was back in Italy again. This time police raided the place where Crupi was staying and took him to jail. He has remained in prison ever since.
The police investigation is ongoing. In both Rome and Reggio Calabria, prosecutors plan to seek a trial against Crupi, Macri and others for drug trafficking and mafia membership later this year, judicial sources said.
Meanwhile, some of Crupi’s former colleagues in Holland are still shocked at the accusation that he’s part of the mafia. “If it’s true,” said a former employee of Crupi’s flower company, “then he’s a better actor than Robert de Niro and Al Pacino rolled into one.”UPDATED: Brandon Scott (Guerrilla) and Teen Wolf‘s Holland Roden are set as series leads for the third installment of Syfy anthology series Channel Zero. Also joining as a lead is Olivia Luccardi (Person to Person). There’s no official title or logline yet for the third season, which is scheduled to premiere in 2018.
Each installment of the Channel Zero anthology is based on a “creepypasta” (user-generated horror stories published online). The first installment, the six-part Candle Cove, centered on Kris Straub’s unnerving story of one man’s obsessive recollection of a mysterious children’s television program from the 1980s. No-End House, the second six-hour installment, is set to premiere on Syfy in October. It follows Brian Russell’s story of Margot (Amy Forsyth), a young woman who, along with her friends, visits the No-End House – a bizarre house of horrors consisting of a series of increasingly disturbing rooms.
In the third installment, Scott will play Officer Luke Vanczyk, a young but already jaded cop, living in the shadow of his father, the Chief of Police. Luke’s world-weary exterior hides a fierce commitment to justice, and a deep love for his troubled community.
One Entertainment
Roden will play Zoe Woods, Alice’s (Luccardi) older sister, a sharp, tough young woman whose struggles with mental illness have worn her down over the years. She hates that her younger sister has to take care of her and she’d give anything to go back to the way things used to be. Luccardi’s Alice is an idealistic, smart, strong-willed young woman who is eager to be liked and always tries to make a good impression, although she’s always struggling financially.
Scott most recently was seen in Showtime-Sky miniseries Guerrilla and has recurred in Loosely Exactly Nicole and Grey’s Anatomy, among others. He’s repped by Sweeney Entertainment, Innovative Artists and Felker Toczek Suddleson Abramson.
Holland is known for her role as Lydia Martin on MTV’s Teen Wolf, and she previously guest-starred on series including Grey’s Anatomy, Criminal Minds and Community. She’s repped by Management 360, Paradigm and Ziffren Brittenham.
Luccardi was most recently seen in indie Person to Person, and this fall will recur on HBO’s The Deuce opposite James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal. She’s repped by One Entertainment.Two criminals with alleged links to the Dawood Ibrahim gang — including a notorious underworld operative, who was extradited from Saudi Arabia five years ago — were killed in a prison clash at a sub-jail at Mangaluru in coastal Karnataka on Monday.
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Madoor Yusuf (42), who was under trial for multiple cases including the killing of Sukhananda Shetty, a BJP leader in Mangaluru, and Ganesh Shetty, a sharp shooter linked to Chhota Shakeel and convicted in an attempt to murder case in Mumbai, were killed in the prison clash.
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Madoor Yusuf alias Isubu, who hailed from Kasargod in Kerala, was an accused in more than 20 criminal cases including the murder of former deputy prime minister LK Advani’s gunman, Shekar Rathod. While he was arrested in July 2010 in Riyadh with the help of Interpol, Ganesh Shetty was nabbed in Mangaluru in March, 2010.
Police sources said the murders occurred during a clash between the Yusuf gang and the gang of Akash Bhavan Sharan, a close associate of another underworld don Vicky Shetty, during the breakfast hour.Wind Games Day 2 Updates
The Wind Games 2014 was the first wind tunnel competition in Spain and the first time of running a 2-way dynamic competition, which proved to be incredibly exciting.
Windoor have just celebrated one year in business and decided to run a world class competition, with only the best teams here. The pool of talent here was amazing, so it was totally gripping – there was no time it was ‘safe’ to go to the loo as there was always unmissable action in the tunnel. Everyone had a superb time – me included! It was a very popular meet with the competitors, who enjoyed the attention to detail like the open house breakfast, The central transparent tunnel makes the perfect centre point to the competition. Today the many spectators here were obviously enjoying the show.
The organisation hopes to run another Wind Games next year, with 4-way Dynamic to be added. Meantime Windoor will run a few 2-way Dynamic competitions, to keep the spark alive in this brand-new event. There is a lovely spirit of cooperation developing between the wind tunnels in Europe, to develop Dynamic Flying, the first tunnel competition that can’t be run in the sky. It’s exciting to see judging by competitors, in a way that probably couldn’t happen quickly under the FAI.
2-way Dynamic
Bronze and €1,000 prize money for Basically Straight, the last minute entry (night before) by 2 awesome flyers who ‘just happened’ to be in here. In second winning € 2,000 were 4SpeedBabylon, who were a big hit with the crowd with their artistic performance. Windoor team won the event, congratulations to Rafael Sweiger and Radek Meduna for winning the most exciting battle, the gold medal, € 3,000, and two Sonic jumpsuits. This team was clearly the most in need of new suits so this is a perfect prize!
The 2-way Dynamic podium at the Wind Games — by Stikkos
VFS
In third place, Team Element with a 16.1 average (129 points over 8 rounds) in their first competition. The Belgians fought off stiff competition to win the bronze medal and €1,000, beating Avalon who scored 125 and QFX with 124. Transfert won silver and € 3,000 to cover the cost of their trip, finishing with 151 points over 8 rounds, making a 19.1 average by the French team. Team4Speed (France) won with a 29.6 average, this brought them €5,000, the total adulation of the crowd, and a surprise sponsorship deal with Windoor so they will in future be known as Team4Speed Windoor.
The 4-way VFS podium at the Wind Games — by Stikkos
FS 4-way Female
In third with a 17.3 average were the local team EmpuriaGatos BBD, who win €1,000. Second were the British ladies team Kaizen with a 20+ average, who take home € 2,000. Winners Aerodyne French ladies scored a 23.7 average and win € 3,000 with an impressive performance. Kaizen and the Aerodyne French ladies will meet a few times on the competition circuit before their final showdown at the World Championships in Prostejov
The 4-way Female podium at the Wind Games — by Stikkos
FS 4-way Open
In third are Thunder with a 25.4 average, winning €3,000. In second place with a 30.5 average are Arizona Airspeed who win €5,000, helping to fund their trip all the way from the US. Huge thanks to Airspeed for traveling all this way, it made a very exciting competition. The 4-way FS Wind Games Champions are NMP PCH Hayabusa who take home a gold medal, €8,000 for team funds, and a very good feeling to have won this mega battle with Airspeed. Many more will ensue in the coming year; the two teams meet next at Paraclete indoor meet in February and then at the Shamrock Showdown at Skydive Deland during March. Bring it on… The world wants to watch!
The 4-way Open podium at the Wind Games — by Stikkos
For a full update of yesterday’s action, including scores, videos, photos, click here. Or to watch a superb edit by Martial Ferré of Veloce showcasing the true spirit of competition, the battle between Hayabusa and Airspeed during rounds 1 to 6, click here!
The Belgian delegation at the Wind Games — by Stikkos
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 15.30 pm
4-way FS Final Scores of round 9 are coming in … for Thunder 25.. Hayabusa, 32! … Airspeed.. also 32! These teams could hardly be closely matched….
The atmosphere in the tunnel changes a little for the final, with the light at the end of the (wind) tunnel in sight… Once the teams are finished their round, they are bootee flying, back flying and generally skylarking (tunnel-larking?)
Airspeed make the 12 look so easy – with most teams the front piece that does a 540° seems to lag behind the back but Airspeed’s look nicely timed. They have a dodgy moment when Mark’s hand is on the net and a couple of hitches… Hayabusa look mean, determined and hungry for gold… fast, fast, faster: one glitch but powered through. We’ll still have to wait for the judges to score, it’s still anyone’s game…. now it’s a waiting game…
Thunder score 19…taking the bronze medal for Belgium.. next up are Airspeed…. they score a 21 with lots of red (busts) on the judges’ scores… Up next are Hayabusa, they immediately look faster but the mood is tense and quiet as they power through the dive.. they pass 21 with a few seconds still to go, and the crowd already start cheering.. 23, 24, 25.. 26 points, finishing in style with 314 points to Airspeed’s 305. Super nice and 31.4 is the highest average ever scored in a 4-way tunnel meet (with these entry rules)! Thunder put in a stonking performance to finish in third with 25.4 average.
It's always super exciting to see Airspeed and Hayabusa go head to head and this time was no different! We’ll have to see what the rest of the year brings, the two teams will meet again several times in the competition playground. But first blood has gone to the Belgians, congratulations Hayabusa!
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 15.15 pm
VFS Final Results The screens in the bar showed the live judging, in reverse order to keep the excitement going. Need4Speed score a 30 to take the gold medal and first ever Wind Games VFS champion title for France. Second, also for France, are Transfert. In a nail-biting finish where one of 3 teams could have taken the bronze, the Belgians came through and took third in their fest ever competition! Avalon next, then QFX, then Fly Definition. The atmosphere in here is electric, with a crowd of enthusiastic spectators really getting into the mood.. 4-way FS scored next….
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 14.50 pm
2-way Dynamic Finals Babylon 1 and Basically Straight fly head to head to decide bronze medal.. the final is one speed round and one free (artistic) round. Need4Speed Babylon and Windoor fly head to head. Cathy and Raph’s speed round looks amazingly fast.. in come Windoor.. they look good but one flyer is lagging behind the other. He suddenly leaves the tunnel!! Apparently he couldn’t follow the fast pace of the first flyer, who was going full-throttle (wanting to win).
On to the artistic rounds … they are both so impressive I cannot imagine how the judges could separate them. They call in the two teams.. and it’s another DRAW! Apparently Windoor lost the speed round (obviously as they gave up) but won the free round with a more synchronised and difficult performance. So, now a Sudden Death final to separate the two.. same procedure … teams are given their draw 1 minute before entering the tunnel….
In comes Windoor.. much better speed round. I am glued to the performance, can’t look away, feeling breathless. They look good, the follower again struggling slightly to keep up, and a touch wobbly. Still, it’s a good round, and the guys punch the air when they leave, happy with their performance. In come Need4Speed.. the same situation happens, the second flyer doing his utmost to keep up with the lithe Cathy.
In comes the Wind Girl with the decision,.,.it’s Windoor who win the first ever Wind Games! Nice one!
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 14.15 pm
VFS Final Flying in reverse order. Fly Definition for Poland show how technical this round is. There is one point between QFX (111), Avalon (112) and Element, who had a really good last round for Belgium and are on 113. It’s anyone’s bronze… QFX for the UK do a controlled flight followed by Avalon, who seemed consistent, and then a very nice round by Element. Transfert does a good flight to take the silver. Need4Speed don’t even need to fly again to win gold but they do anyway, and show us their speed one last time, to great applause from the crowd. I still have no idea who will come through with the bronze, we’ll have to wait for the judges!
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 13.45 pm
2-way Dynamic - Semi Finals Windoor are through to the final, beating Babylon 1 with a wonderful acrobatic free routine and a fast speed round on a very technical draw that had the potential to tangle up the flyers. This new discipline this is judged by competitors, not IPC judges. Josh and Adam say they take into account, including difficulty, imagination, using a lot of the tunnel, variety Results are announced by the Wind Girl, an ethereal fairylike creature who is now circulating through the crowd, sweeping her white frondy things over the children.
Need4Speed Babylon have a head-to-head battle with Basically Straight. The crowd are loving this acrobatic display, the atmosphere in here is buzzing! Basically Straight do a fabulous free routine, then followed by Need4Speed Babylon, who were amazing, with many twisting spinning gymnastic tricks and imaginative choreography. They also had a head-to-head battle with a speed round. Who could split these teams, who both fly so superbly? Apparently not the judges because they announced it was a DRAW! So the two teams now need to be separated by a Sudden Death elimination.
One team will be brought to the flying chamber, shown their speed round and have 1 minute to visualize and practice before entering the chamber to perform the moves as fast as possible. The second team is not allowed to observe. The second team is then brought to the chamber and they go through the same procedure. How thrilling. I’ve never seen this before, when performers do not have their normal preparation time to visualise but have to fly by the seat of their pants.
Sudden Death Round
Basically Straight are off first, just 60 seconds to prepare and in they go … initially you could see the lack of prep as the second flyer was lagging a bit behind, but after the first page they really got their act together and looked very strong, putting up a great performance. In come Need4Speed for their speed round, lots of concentration. They look fast and tight. The crowd love the round – Cathy and Raph exit and hug each other, seeming happy. What will be the result?.. in comes the Wind Girl and announces Need4Speed to go through. The audience go crazy, it is the people’s choice as well as the judges. Finals to come. everything resets to zero. I didn't realise I would get so enthralled with this meet!
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 13.30 pm
4-way VFS It looks like a very precise round (7), with combinations of head-up and head-down 2ways. The Belgians were more efficient than Fly Definition, then QFX (UK), who put in a good round, looking very controlled. Avalon, who risked losing the bronze were so happy with their performance one flyer went for a celebratory fly-round, like a lap of honour! The scores are just in with the Belgians scoring an impressive 23, compared to 20 for Avalon and 19 for both QFX and Fly Definition. This puts the Belgians in a third position, but it's all so close, anything can happen in the last round.
4-way FS
Round 9, the semi final.. it’s 5,18, 9 so a technical jump with a slot switcher, never going to be super fast, a hard one to make up ground but I’m sure Airspeed will give it a go! The gold medal in the open comes with a cheque for 8000 € – but the money is less important than the victory. They are running in reverse order to keep it exciting. Big crowd here now really loving it. Airspeed super fast as ever but when Hayabusa got in the tunnel it was a different speed straight away, they’d scored 3 points before I could blink! It was so fast I was getting breathless just watching. We haven’t had the scores yet but I can almost guarantee it will outscore Airspeed.
4-way Female
Kaizen (UK) are clearly enjoying their meet, I’ve seen Laura smiling a lot even during the competition round. Their last one was a beautiful 27 and they are running at a 20+ average, nice one ladies! This round showed off lovely neat 18s, making this difficult block look easy. The French ladies showed their class, with highly athletic flying using lots of vertical space, a very fast pace and super neat flying.
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 12.45 pm
2-way Dynamic The scores of the Free round are in. This is not a head-to-head elimination battle, the judges (Adam and Josh) scored all the rounds and then the top four teams go into the semi-final. They awarded points as follows: Babylon 1 win the round and gain 4 points, then 4Speed Babylon with 3 points, then Basically straight with 2 points. The windoor team scored 1 point. So the teams that go through to the semis are: Windoor (15 points), Basically straight (10), 4Speed Babylon (8) and Babylon 1 (6 points).
The exciting element of this competition is that now the scores are effectively re-set to zero. There are 4 teams that go through and they now battle head-to-head with each other, doing one speed round and one free round. The lowest scoring team is eliminated. The two finalist teams then do a free round to decide the overall champion and winner of 3,000€.
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 12.10 pm
Fast round in VFS Need4Speed had a brain lock, losing valuable time in an otherwise flawless performance.
Avalon had a bad round, with 1 flyer shooting up the tunnel at one point. They scored only 14, which means the bronze medal is for grabs! The difference between the 4 teams battling for third place is only 4 points and tension is rising! Round 8 will be a difficult one with a slot-switcher so it might come down to that! How exciting!
Round 8 – FS Open
B, G, H, O, 10 The French normally have the most aggressive 10, with Tail spinning like a top for a very fast block. I was very excited to watch this round! The French girls started too strongly with this move and all but funnelled.. they still had a very fast round, looking like the champions they hope to be.
Inrcredible flying by Hayabusa - crazy fast. The expressions on their faces - I have no words. Random work as fast as a woodpecker! The crowd was going crazy! Airspeed also looked on fire but I don’t think so quick. Their 10 looked. the scores not yet in.. oh, just in 38 points for Airspeed with 1 bust. No news yet on Hayabusa… oh.. just on screen now… 41!! pulled back the 3 points, 2 rounds to go…
Dynamic 2-way: free round
Full Patate did lots of links and tricks rolls through each other’s arms and legs – big crowd pleaser. Lots of spectators here and they definitely have different taste to skydivers, they loved simple things like a rodeo. Very nice synchronisation by Full Patate, at times they looked like a 2-way diving team, looping and somersaulting together. Windoor had a twisting gymnastic routine, flying on every surface of their bodies.
‘Basically straight’ didn’t have time to put a free routine together as they literally just entered because the 2 of them happened to be here. Till now they have looked like one of the strongest teams here but their free routine wasn’t as exciting as it could have been with more time.
Need4Speed Babylon probably got the biggest cheer from the crowd with a very showy routine full of flair. This free round was the most fun to watch of the 2-way so far.
Airspeed's average has really increased since Hayabusa put the pressure on!
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 11 am
4-way Open Round 7 of the 4-way was not going to be kind to the larger built teams in this 14 ft diameter tunnel: F 4 1. Monaco struggled and sometimes had to use the walls of the tunnel to push themselves round. Thunder coped admirably by cheating their cats, it didn’t even look tight.
Jaw-dropping rounds followed by Hayabusa and Airspeed. Hayabusa fast and furious from the beginning. Airspeed starting slower but really ramping up the pace through the dive. This is body flying at its ultimate. What a privilege to watch this epic battle right in front of our noses. You have such a close-up view of your idols, seeing the concentration on everyone’s face how full-on throttle they are flying. The French girls demonstrated their flexibility and speed and the full-on style of the French.
Scores
The scores came in quickly: Thunder 27.. EXL3 Maubeuge scored 23 Hayabusa had a blistering round and scored 29 … all quiet as the Airspeed round started being judged 26, 27… 28, 29 … 30, 31…32!! So Airspeed has pulled back 3 points, Hayabusa now just 1 point in the lead. The next round is four randoms and a slot switcher! a very big jump: B, G, H, O, 10.. Stay tuned for the LIVE video.
Update Sat 18 Jan 2014 - 10 am
In 4-way, the final showdown between Airspeed and Hayabusa is about to begin; yesterday they were neck and neck all through the day. The lead is currently with Hayabusa, who are 4 points ahead. There are four rounds to go, some fast ones, anything could happen, it promises to be an exciting day. You can see everyone is flying full-on, right on the edge!
In VFS, there is no doubt that Need4Speed will win, followed by Transfert, but bronze could be taken by any of the other 4 teams, it’s that close. There are 2 very fast rounds to go, and one relatively slow one. The teams that fly the hardest will take the bronze, but this discipline is so unforgiving that fast could lead to disaster! In 2-way dynamic, today will cut down the field of 7 teams by half for for the semi-final and again for the final. The draw for the semis and finals will be done just 45 minutes before flying, to add to the excitement.
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articlesUnusually frank discussions of pollution come as Beijing implements new emergency response plan in response to smog
China's state media have called for environmental improvements in unusually frank discussions of the country's pollution problem, as thick smog continues to shroud Beijing and other cities.
Stores sold out of masks and the capital implemented its new pollution emergency response plan for the first time after visibility plummeted at the weekend. Several construction sites were ordered to halt work, factories slowed production and authorities ordered a curb on the use of government cars. Schools cancelled outside activities and authorities advised residents to stay inside.
Hospitals reported increases of up to 30% in the number of patients reporting breathing problems as officials warned that the conditions were likely to last until Wednesday – a day longer than previously predicted – when winds should help to disperse the pollution.
Outside the capital there were mass flight delays and highway closures on Sunday. Visibility in Changsha, the capital of Hunan, reportedly dropped to 50m.
Beijing's levels are by far the worst recorded since the government began early last year releasing figures on PM2.5 particles – tiny particulate matter thought particularly damaging to health because it can penetrate deep into the lungs – and the US embassy began issuing its own measurements four years ago.
According to an official monitoring centre in Beijing, levels of PM2.5 were well above 600 micrograms per cubic metre in several places on Saturday, and may even have hit 900. Though Monday's level dropped to around 350, that is still far above the safe level of 25 designated by the World Health Organisation.
Pan Xiaochuan, the deputy director of the department of occupational and environmental health at Peking university, said the problem was caused by weather conditions rather than increased emissions, although some have suggested more people are burning coal due to a particularly cold winter.
He said stricter regulations on emissions were needed in areas around Beijing, but added: "The government responded quickly this time. CCTV [the state broadcaster] news has reported the pollution. It shows the transparency of the government's work has been enhanced. It is a new phenomenon."
State newspapers have run highly critical articles saying more needed to be done to tackle the problem at its source.
"How can we get out of this suffocating siege of pollution?" the People's Daily, the official Communist party newspaper, asked in a front-page editorial.
"Let us clearly view managing environmental pollution with a sense of urgency."
It said around half of more than 70 Chinese cities monitored for air quality showed severe pollution over the weekend.
The populist state-run Global Times newspaper said the problem had triggered public calls to shift development "away from the previous fixation on economic growth", while the China Youth Daily titled a front-page commentary: "More suffocating than the haze is the weakness in response."
Well-known environmentalist Ma Jun said: "Given the public's ability to spread this information, especially on social media, the government itself has to make adjustments."
While Chinese environmental regulations have become far more stringent, environmentalists have complained that officials are often reluctant to enforce standards for fear of holding back economic growth.
But John Cai, the director of the centre for healthcare management and policy at Beijing's China Europe International Business School, warned: "The increased disease burden [due to poor air quality] has caused a serious financial burden on government and individuals.
"The recent serious pollution will send a serious warning to the government and will have an important impact in making the government speed up its regulation and enforcement."
Shops have been unable to keep up with the surge in demand for masks and air purifiers, with many running out.
"[Our] masks were not specially designed to prevent PM 2.5, but they all sold out anyway. We are trying to purchase more," said an assistant at the Fujitang drug store in Beijing.
An employee at the White Pagoda drugstore added: "People didn't come here to buy one or two, but ordered a lot for their friends and family, and companies came here to buy for their staff, too. "
At a Sundan appliances store in central Beijing, sales assistant Ms Jiang said sales of air purifiers had increased roughly tenfold. The Yuanda Group said it had upped production of the machines because sales had risen recently due to poor air quality throughout China.The USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier is currently conducting security operations in the Gulf (AFP Photo/Anthony N. Hilkowski)
Sanaa (AFP) - An Iranian naval convoy suspected of carrying weapons for Shiite rebels in Yemen has turned back, US officials said, as Saudi-led warplanes kept up air strikes on anti-government forces.
The conflict has sent tensions soaring between Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, which backs the Huthi rebels, raising fears Yemen could become a new front in a proxy war between Middle East powers.
Yemeni Foreign Minister Riyadh Yassin accused Tehran Thursday of trying to break a naval blockade on his country, describing the war as an "Iranian plot implemented by the Huthi militia".
A US official said Thursday the nine-ship Iranian convoy that had been heading for Yemen is "no longer on the same course".
The USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and other American warships have deployed off Yemen's coast to track the Iranian flotilla and possibly prevent any arms deliveries to the rebels.
The flotilla included two "armed vessels," said the US official.
It was possible the Iranians "could make a turn to Yemen at any time," the official added.
Iran vehemently denies arming the rebels and has presented a peace plan to the UN calling for a ceasefire and the formation of a unity government.
On Friday, Tehran summoned the Saudi envoy to protest after warplanes allegedly turned back humanitarian aid flights headed for Yemen, whose airspace is controlled by a Saudi-led coalition.
With international pressure mounting for a political solution, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced plans to appoint Mauritanian diplomat Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed as his new envoy to Yemen.
The Huthis swept into the capital in September from their northern stronghold, and later advanced south on the major port of Aden, forcing President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi to flee to Riyadh last month.
- Children living in fear -
More than 1,000 people have been killed in the fighting since late March, according to the UN, which said Friday at least 115 children were among the dead.
"We believe that these are conservative figures," UN children's agency spokesman Christophe Boulierac told reporters in Geneva, saying at least 64 of the dead children were victims of air strikes.
The UN agency said 26 children had been killed by unexploded ordnance and mines, 19 by gunshots and three by shelling.
Another 172 children had been maimed.
"There are hundreds of thousands of children in Yemen who continue to live in the most dangerous circumstances, many waking up scared in the middle of the night to the sounds of bombing and gunfire," UNICEF representative in Yemen Julien Harneis said in a statement.
The Saudi-led coalition declared Tuesday that the first phase of its operations against the Huthis |
he bought Holdsworth's shares - then Bolton would go into administration, losing 12 points and going into a two-year transfer embargo as a result.[53] Bolton paid off the debt by the deadline and avoided such punishment.[54] It was later revealed former owner and club president Edwin Davies loaned Anderson £5 million to pay the debt, four days before his death.[55]
In February 2019, Bolton were again issued a winding-up petition by HMRC.[56]Yes, fellow short woman, today on Dress Code we're taking on the world of too-long pants and ill-proportioned dresses and Misses' departments and limited options and, yes, talking solutions:
When people hear "petites," they think an elfin gamine. Sure, that's one group, but the term takes in all shapes and sizes under 5'4", from Misses to "boyish" to, well, any of the multitude for whom clothes simply are not cut and proportioned. Because as anyone who's dealt with this issue knows, there's a lot more to it than just chopping 9" off the bottom of your jeans:
Most pieces on advice for petites deals in tips for "looking taller." While most of us are in no danger of fooling anyone into thinking we're not short (although heels do exercise a strange amount of power in this regard), these generally include:
Dressing in a single color palette to create a continuous line
Emphasizing vertical lines, be they knits, zippers, plackets or stripes
Avoiding breaking up the body with blocks of color
V-necks and, in the case of higher closed necks, long necklaces or scarves
Fitted shapes that don't "overwhelm" the figure, in lighter, less-bulky fabrics
Small prints that don't "wear" you
Keep bags and accessories small for scale
While I see people break these rules with success all the time (a confident woman can tame even the biggest, boldest Lily Pulitzer monkey), with these you have the basics. And I thought Lucky's recent feature on "unexpected pieces that look great on petites" was a great source of inspiration!
A few things more specific thoughts I'd add:
A jacket that hits at the hip always looks good
If you don't like heels, a pointy flat is also flattering
Cropped pants are kinda unflattering, despite the fact that every petite line carries them. I still wear them, but no one can deny that they make one look shorter. That said, sometimes they just save us the trouble of hemming and can work as regular pants!
Wrap dresses are a good petite option in any size: they conform to your body and they're easy to hem.
Unless they match your skin-tone, an ankle-strap will knock off inches faster than almost any other single piece of clothing.
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The real issue, of course, is finding clothes that fit properly in the first place. As we all know from bitter experience, just chopping off that foot of denim isn't going to do much if it ruins the whole line of the pants. There's always alteration, yes, and if you do go that route, these tips can be helpful:
Shoulders are dealmakers and dealbreakers. If something doesn't fit in the shoulder, it can't be altered.
Things that can: long sleeved and legs; waists can be taken in.
Where to shop for basics
Lots of places carry petites, but here's the rub: half the time, they're not available in stores (yes, we're looking at you Bebe and most J. Crews) and when you do check them out, there's a seriously limited selection (Again: Bebe.) They're not always truly petite! Sadly, sometimes this just means trial and error. But here are a few tried-and-tested sources that have proven reliable for the petite amongst us:
Department stores. Most larger department stores, both higher and lower end, have entire petites and Misses' sections. A few that we know to have comprehensive selections: J.C. Penney, Macy's, Saks, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, Lord & Taylor.
J. Crew. Although like all their clothes, J. Crew's petites suffer from confusing vanity-sizing that requires much trying and may involve sending things back repeatedly, J. Crew makes a lot of basics in petite sizes. Especially good for suiting, jeans, dresses.
Banana Republic. See: everything about J. Crew sizing, except even more so. But Banana tends to have a good in-store petites selection. Especially good for work basics.
Ann Taylor. Another one that carries their petites in-store. Good for work basics, especially jackets.
Lauren by Ralph Lauren. Your go-to for preppy basics. Especially good for coats.
Nicole Miller. Yes, they can be more pricey — but these perfect, basic dresses come in petite sizes, too.
Old Navy. Many things in petites at good prices. Again, try try try as sizing varies.
They're not technically "petites," but for fancier dresses, I have had very good luck with the brands Madison Marcus, Shoshanna and Migeulina, all of which seems to cut for a petite fit models.
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Where to buy jeans
Jeans are a hassle for anyone, but when it feels like every inseam is made for a heel-wearing giantess, it becomes doubly challenging. As a general rule, straight-leg jeans are the easiest to hem (skinnies can work too) but there are plenty of brands that cater to petites and array a range of scaled-down sizes:
J.Crew, Banana Republic, Levi's, the Gap and Lee all carry petite versions of their jeans.
One of my personal favorite jean is the J.Brand pencil-leg in petite (although it would be nice if they scaled down more styles!) I've also found Deener, although not "petite," to be particularly well-scaled to smaller women — clothes as well as jeans.
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Foreign Sizes:
Both Euro and Japanese clothes tend to scale smaller — they don't tend to have petites. That said, US versions of these same companies' clothes are scaled differently for the American market.
Vintage
People used to be shorter. They also often wore serious foundation garments, so a lot of them are small. But whatever your size, vintage is a great option for those of us under 5'4," especially things from the 60s or before. (People seem to have abruptly gotten taller in the 1970s.) If you buy online, most vintage vendors will give the height of the model, too, always helpful. As with anything vintage, check out the measurements rather than the numerical size.
Kids Stores
If you're really small, children's stores can be a fun option. Brooks Brothers boys' department is great for button-downs, actual schoolboy blazers, plain tees and PJ's. The Children's Place is a good resource for tee-shirts and blouses. And don't forget the teens' departments of department stores. And kids' clothes are generally cheaper, too.
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Petite Plus Sizes
A number of the lines that are good for petites generally — Talbots, Lands' End, Macy's — have good plus options. A few that cater specifically:Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri[3] (Arabic: أيمن محمد ربيع الظواهري ʾAyman Muḥammad Rabīʿ aẓ-Ẓawāhirī; born June 19, 1951)[4] is the current leader of al-Qaeda and a current[5] or former member and senior official of Islamist organizations which have orchestrated and carried out attacks in North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In 2012, he called on Muslims to kidnap Western tourists in Muslim countries.[6]
Since the September 11 attacks, the U.S. State Department has offered a US$25 million reward for information or intelligence leading to al-Zawahiri's capture.[7] He is under worldwide sanctions by the Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee as a member of al-Qaeda.[8]
Alternate names and sobriquets
Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri is pronounced [ˈʔæjmæn mʊˈħæmːæd rɑˈbiːʕ azˤːɑˈwæːhɪriː] or [aðˤːɑˈwæːhɪriː] in Arabic. Zawahiri is usually spelled Zawahri (from the pronunciation in his native Egyptian Arabic), but is sometimes spelled "Dhawahri" if transliterated directly from Modern Standard Arabic, also called Literary Arabic, in certain academic circles. Using the Intelligence Community Standard for the Transliteration of Arabic Names, it is spelled Zawahri.
Al-Zawahiri has also gone under following names:[9] Abu Muhammad / Abu Mohammed (أبو محمّد), Abu Fatima (أبو فاطمة), Muhammad Ibrahim (محمّد إبراهيم), Abu Abdallah (أبو عبدالله), Abu al-Mu'iz (أبو المعز), The Doctor, The Teacher, Nur (نور), Ustaz (أستاذ), Abu Mohammed Nur al-Deen (أبو محمّد نورالدين), Abdel Muaz / Abdel Moez / Abdel Muez (عبدالمعز).
Personal life
Early life
Ayman al-Zawahiri was born in 1951 in the neighborhood of Maadi, Cairo, in the then Kingdom of Egypt, to Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri and Umayma Azzam.
Close family
The al-Zawahiri family was considered "distinguished" [10] while they lived in Maadi. Al-Zawahiri's parents both came from prosperous families. Al-Zawahiri's father, Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, came from a large family of doctors and scholars. Mohammed Rabie became a surgeon and a professor of pharmacy[10] at Cairo University. Ayman's mother, Umayma Azzam, came from a wealthy, politically active clan, being the daughter of Abdel-Wahhab Azzam, a literary scholar who served as the president of Cairo University, the founder and inaugural rector of the King Saud University (the first university in Saudi Arabia) as well as ambassador to Pakistan, while his own brother was Azzam Pasha, the founding secretary-general of the Arab League (1945-1952).[11] From his maternal side yet another relative was Salem Azzam, an Islamist intellectual and activist, for a time secretary-general of the Islamic Council of Europe based in London.[12] Always maternally, he also has a link to the house of Saud : Muna, the daughter of Azzam Pasha (his maternal great-uncle), is married to Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud, the son of the late king Faisal.[13]
Ayman has said that he has a deep affection for his mother. Her brother, Mahfouz Azzam, became a role model for Ayman as a teenager.[14] Ayman has a younger brother, Muhammad al-Zawahiri, and a twin sister, Heba Mohamed al-Zawahiri.[citation needed] Al-Zawahiri's sister, Heba Mohamed al-Zawahiri, became a professor of medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute, Cairo University. She described her brother as "silent and shy".[15] Al-Zawahiri's brother, Muhammad al-Zawahiri, was sent to the Balkans by his older brother in 1993. Ayman al-Zawahiri sent Muhammad to meet with Alija Izetbegović, commander of the 3rd Corps of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with senior staff officers attached and religious leaders, to check the Islamisation of the Bosnian Army and the funds received for the mujahedeen fighters in Bosnia.[16][unreliable source?] Muhammad was known as a logistics expert and is said to be the military commander of Islamic Jihad. Muhammad worked in Bosnia, Croatia, and Albania under the cover of being an International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) official.[citation needed] While hiding in the United Arab Emirates, he was arrested in 2000, then extradited to Egypt, where he was sentenced to death.[citation needed] He was held in Tora Prison in Cairo as a political detainee. Security officials said he was the head of the Special Action Committee of Islamic Jihad, which organized terrorist operations. However, after the Egyptian popular uprising in the spring of 2011, on March 17, 2011, he was released from prison by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the interim government of Egypt. His lawyer said he had been held to extract information about his brother Ayman.[17] However, on March 20, 2011, he was re-arrested.[18] On August 17, 2013, Egyptian authorities arrested Muhammad al-Zawahiri at his home in Giza.[19]
Youth
Ayman al-Zawahiri was reportedly a studious youth. Ayman excelled in school, loved poetry, and "hated violent sports" — which he thought were "inhumane." Al-Zawahiri studied medicine at Cairo University and graduated in 1974 with gayyid giddan. Following that, he served three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army after which he established a clinic near his parents in Maadi.[20] In 1978, he also earned a master's degree in surgery.[21] Ayman al-Zawahiri has also shown a radical understanding of Islamic theology and Islamic history.[citation needed] He speaks Arabic, English,[22][23] and French.
Al-Zawahiri participated in Youth activism as a student. He became both quite pious and political, under the influence of his uncle Mahfouz Azzam, and lecturer Mostafa Kamel Wasfi.[24] Sayyid Qutb preached that to restore Islam and free Muslims, a vanguard of true Muslims modeling itself after the original Companions of the Prophet had to be developed.[25]
Joins the Muslim Brotherhood
By the age of 14, al-Zawahiri had joined the Muslim Brotherhood. The following year the Egyptian government executed Qutb for conspiracy, and al-Zawahiri, along with four other secondary school students, helped form an "underground cell devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state." It was at this early age that al-Zawahiri developed a mission in life, "to put Qutb's vision into action."[26] His cell eventually merged with others to form al-Jihad or Egyptian Islamic Jihad.[20]
Marriage and children
Ayman al-Zawahiri has been married at least four times. His wives include Azza Ahmed Nowari and Umaima Hassan.[citation needed]
In 1978, al-Zawahiri married his first wife, Azza Ahmed Nowari, a student at Cairo University who was studying philosophy.[24] Their wedding, which was held at the Continental Hotel in Opera Square,[24] was very conservative, with separate areas for both men and women, and no music, photographs, or light-hearted humour.[27] Many years later, when the United States attacked Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks in October 2001, Azza apparently had no idea that al-Zawahiri had supposedly been a jihadi emir (commander) for the last decade.[28] In June 2012, one of Zawahiri's four wives, Umaima Hassan, released a statement on the internet congratulating the role played by Muslim women in the Arab Spring.[29]
Al-Zawahiri and his wife, Azza, had four daughters, Fatima (born 1981), Umayma (born 1983), Nabila (born 1986), and Khadiga (born 1987), and a son, Mohammed (also born in 1987; the twin brother of Khadiga), who was a "delicate, well-mannered boy" and "the pet of his older sisters," subject to teasing and bullying in a traditional all-male environment, who preferred to "stay at home and help his mother."[30] In 1997, ten years after the birth of Mohammed, Azza gave birth to their fifth daughter, Aisha, who had Down syndrome. In February 2004, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded and subsequently stated that Abu Turab Al-Urduni had married one of al-Zawahiri's daughters.[31]
In the first half of 2005, one of Al-Zawahiri's three surviving wives gave birth to a daughter, named Nawwar.[32]
Ayman al-Zawahiri's first wife Azza and two of their six children, Mohammad and Aisha, were killed in an air strike on Afghanistan by US forces in late December 2001, following the September 11 attacks on the U.S.[33][34] After an American aerial bombardment of a Taliban-controlled building at Gardez, Azza was pinned under debris of a guesthouse roof. Concerned for her modesty, she "refused to be excavated" because "men would see her face" and she died from her injuries the following day. Her son, Mohammad, was also killed outright in the same house. Her four-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, Aisha, had not been hurt by the bombing, but died from exposure in the cold night while Afghan rescuers tried to save Azza.[35]
Career
Ayman al-Zawahiri worked in the medical field as a surgeon. In 1985, al-Zawahiri went to Saudi Arabia on Hajj and stayed to practice medicine in Jeddah for a year.[36] As a reportedly qualified surgeon, when his organization merged with bin Laden's al-Qaeda, he became bin Laden's personal advisor and physician. He had first met bin Laden in Jeddah in 1986.[37]
In 1981, Ayman al-Zawahiri also traveled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he worked in a Red Crescent hospital treating wounded refugees. There he became friends with Ahmed Khadr, and the two shared a number of conversations about the need for Islamic government and the needs of the Afghan people.[38][39]
In 1993, al-Zawahiri traveled to the United States, where he addressed several California mosques under his Abdul Mu'iz pseudonym, relying on his credentials from the Kuwaiti Red Crescent to raise money for Afghan children who had been injured by Soviet land mines—he only raised $2000.[40]
Militant activity
Assassination plots
Egypt
In 1981, Al-Zawahiri was one of hundreds arrested following the assassination of President Anwar Sadat.[41] Initially, the plan was derailed when authorities were alerted to Al-Jihad's plan by the arrest of an operative carrying crucial information, in February 1981. President Sadat ordered the roundup of more than 1500 people, including many Al-Jihad members, but missed a cell in the military led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, who succeeded in assassinating Sadat during a military parade that October.[42] His lawyer, Montasser el-Zayat, said that Zawahiri was tortured in prison.[43]
In his book, Al-Zawahiri as I Knew Him, Al-Zayat maintains that under torture by the Egyptian police, following his arrest in connection with the murder of Sadat in 1981, Al-Zawahiri revealed the hiding place of Essam al-Qamari, a key member of the Maadi cell of al-Jihad, which led to Al-Qamari's "arrest and eventual execution."[44]
In 1993, al-Zawahiri's and Egyptian Islamic Jihad's (EIJ) connection with Iran may have led to a suicide bombing in an attempt on the life of Egyptian Interior Minister Hasan al-Alfi, the man heading the effort to quash the campaign of Islamist killings in Egypt. It failed, as did an attempt to assassinate Egyptian prime minister Atef Sidqi three months later. The bombing of Sidqi's car injured 21 Egyptians and killed a schoolgirl, Shayma Abdel-Halim. It followed two years of killings by another Islamist group, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, that had killed over 200 people. Her funeral became a public spectacle, with her coffin carried through the streets of Cairo and crowds shouting, "Terrorism is the enemy of God!"[45] The police arrested 280 more of al-Jihad's members and executed six.
For their leading role in anti-Egyptian Government attacks in the 1990s, al-Zawahiri and his brother Muhammad al-Zawahiri were sentenced to death in the 1999 Egyptian case of the Returnees from Albania.
Pakistan
The 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, was the Egyptian Islamic Jihad's first success under Zawahiri's leadership, but Bin Laden had disapproved of the operation. The bombing alienated Pakistan, which was "the best route into Afghanistan".[46][clarification needed]
In July 2007, Al-Zawahiri supplied direction for the Lal Masjid siege, codename Operation Silence. This was the first confirmed time that Al-Zawahiri was taking militant steps against the Pakistan Government and guiding Islamic militants against the State of Pakistan. The Pakistan Army troops and Special Service Group taking control of the Lal Masjid ("Red Mosque") in Islamabad found letters from al-Zawahiri directing Islamic militants Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Abdul Aziz Ghazi, who ran the mosque and adjacent madrasah. This conflict resulted in 100 deaths.[47]
On December 27, 2007, al-Zawahiri was also implicated in the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.[48]
Sudan
In 1994, the sons of Ahmad Salama Mabruk and Mohammed Sharaf were executed under al-Zawahiri's leadership for betraying Egyptian Islamic Jihad; the militants were ordered to leave the Sudan.[49][50]
United States
In 1998, Ayman al-Zawahiri was listed as under indictment[51] in the United States for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, a series of attacks that occurred on August 7, 1998, in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the major East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya.[4] The attacks brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to international attention.
In 2000, the USS Cole bombing encouraged several members to depart. Mohammed Atef went to escape Kandahar, Zawahiri to Kabul, and Bin Laden fled to Kabul, later joining Atef when he realised no American reprisal attacks were forthcoming.[52]
On October 10, 2001, al-Zawahiri appeared on the initial list of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's top 22 Most Wanted Terrorists, which was released to the public by U.S. President George W. Bush. In early November 2001, the Taliban government announced they were bestowing official Afghan citizenship on him, as well as Bin Laden, Mohammed Atef, Saif al-Adl, and Shaykh Asim Abdulrahman.[53]
Organizations
Egyptian Islamic Jihad
Ayman al-Zawahiri was previously the second and last "emir" of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, having succeeded Abbud al-Zumar in the latter role when Egyptian authorities sentenced al-Zumar to life imprisonment. Ayman al-Zawahiri eventually became one of Egyptian Islamic Jihad's leading organizers and recruiters. Zawahiri's hope was to recruit military officers and accumulate weapons, waiting for the right moment to launch "a complete overthrow of the existing order."[54] Chief strategist of Al-Jihad was Aboud al-Zumar, a colonel in the military intelligence whose plan was to kill the main leaders of the country, capture the headquarters of the army and State Security, the telephone exchange building, and of course the radio and television building, where news of the Islamic revolution would then be broadcast, unleashing – he expected – "a popular uprising against secular authority all over the country."[54]
Maktab al-Khadamat
In Peshawar, he met up with Osama bin Laden, who was running a base for mujahideen called Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK); founded by the Palestinian Sheikh Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. The radical position of al-Zawahiri and the other militants of Al-Jihad put them at odds with Sheikh Azzam, with whom they competed for bin Laden's financial resources.[55] Zawahiri carried two false passports, a Swiss one in the name of Amin Uthman and a Dutch one in the name of Mohmud Hifnawi.[56]
British journalist Jason Burke wrote: "Al-Zawahiri ran his own operation during the Afghan war, bringing in and training volunteers from the Middle East. Some of the $500 million the CIA poured into Afghanistan reached his group."[57]
Former FBI agent Ali Soufan mentioned in his book The Black Banners that Ayman al-Zawahiri is suspected of being behind Azzam's assassination in 1989.[58][59]
al-Qaeda
[60] This image used by the FBI shows Ayman al-Zawahiri in Khost, Afghanistan.
In 1998, al-Zawahiri formally merged the Egyptian Islamic Jihad into al-Qaeda. According to reports by a former al-Qaeda member, he has worked in the al-Qaeda organization since its inception and was a senior member of the group's shura council. He was often described as a "lieutenant" to Osama bin Laden, though bin Laden's chosen biographer has referred to him as the "real brains" of al-Qaeda.[61]
On February 23, 1998, al-Zawahiri issued a joint fatwa with Osama bin Laden under the title "World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders". Zawahiri, not bin Laden, is thought to have been the actual author of the fatwa.[62]
Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri organized an al-Qaeda congress on June 24, 1998. A week prior to the beginning of the conference, a group of well-armed assistants to al-Zawahiri had left by jeeps in the direction of Herat. Following the instructions of their patron, in the town of Koh-i-Doshakh, they met three unknown Slavic-looking men who had arrived from Russia via Iran. After their arrival in Kandahar, they split up. One of the Russians was directly escorted to al-Zawahiri and he did not participate in the conference. Western military intelligence succeeded in acquiring photographs of him, but he disappeared for six years. According to Axis Globe, in 2004, when Qatar and the U.S. investigated Russian embassy officials whom the United Arab Emirates had arrested in connection to the murder of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar, computer software precisely established that a man who had walked to the Russian embassy in Doha was the same one who visited al-Zawahiri prior to the Al-Qaida conference.[63]
Emergence as al-Qaeda's chief commander
On April 30, 2009, the U.S. State Department reported that al-Zawahiri had emerged as al-Qaeda's operational and strategic commander[64] and that Osama bin Laden was now only the ideological figurehead of the organization.[64] However, after the 2011 death of bin Laden, a senior U.S. intelligence official was quoted as saying intelligence gathered in the raid showed that bin Laden remained deeply involved in planning: "This compound (where bin Laden was killed) in Abbottabad was an active command-and-control center for al-Qaeda's leader. He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions within al-Qaeda."[65]
Following the death of bin Laden, former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism Juan Zarate said that al-Zawahiri would "clearly assume the mantle of leadership" of al-Qaeda.[66] However, a senior U.S. administration official said that although al-Zawahiri was likely to be al-Qaeda's next leader, his authority was not "universally accepted" among al-Qaeda's followers, particularly in the Gulf region. Zarate said that al-Zawahiri was more controversial and less charismatic than bin Laden.[67] Rashad Mohammad Ismail (AKA "Abu Al-Fida"), a leading member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, stated that al-Zawahiri was the best candidate.[68]
Hamid Mir is reported to have said that he believed that Ayman al-Zawahiri was the operational head of al-Qaeda, and that "[h]e is the person who can do the things that happened on September 11."[61] Within days of the attacks, Zawahiri's name was put forward as bin Laden's second-in-command, with reports suggesting he represented "a more formidable US foe than bin Laden."[69]
Formal appointment
As of 2 May 2011, he became the leader of al-Qaeda following the death of Osama bin Laden.[66] This was confirmed by a press release from al-Qaeda's general command on June 16.[5] Al-Zawahiri's succession to command of al-Qaeda was announced on several of their websites on June 16, 2011.[34] On the same day, al-Qaeda renewed its position that Israel was an illegitimate state and that it wouldn't accept any compromise on Palestine.[70]
The delayed announcement led some analysts to speculate that there was quarreling within al-Qaeda: "It doesn't suggest a vast reservoir of accumulated goodwill for him," said one celebrity journalist on CNN.[71] Both U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen maintain that the delay didn't signal any kind of dispute within al-Qaeda,[72] and Mullen reiterated U.S. death threats toward al-Zawahiri.[73] According to U.S. officials within the Obama administration and Robert Gates, al-Zawahiri would find the leadership difficult as, while intelligent, he lacks combat experience and the charisma of Osama bin Laden.[72][74][75]
Imprisonment
Egypt
Al-Zawahiri was convicted of dealing in weapons and received a three-year sentence, which he completed in 1984, shortly after his conviction.[76]
Russia
At some point in 1994, al-Zawahiri was said to have "become a phantom"[77] but is thought to have traveled widely to "Switzerland and Sarajevo". A fake passport he was using shows that he traveled to Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong.[78]
On December 1, 1996, Ahmad Salama Mabruk and Mahmud Hisham al-Hennawi – both carrying false passports – accompanied al-Zawahiri on a trip to Chechnya, where they hoped to re-establish the faltering Jihad. Their leader was traveling under the pseudonym Abdullah Imam Mohammed Amin, and trading on his medical credentials for legitimacy. The group switched vehicles three times, but were arrested within hours of entering Russian territory and spent five months in a Makhachkala prison awaiting trial. The trio pleaded innocence, maintaining their disguise and having other al-Jihad members from Bavari-C send the Russian authorities pleas for leniency for their "merchant" colleagues who had been wrongly arrested; and Russian Member of Parliament Nadyr Khachiliev echoed the pleas for their speedy release as al-Jihad members Ibrahim Eidarous and Tharwat Salah Shehata traveled to Dagestan to plead for their release. Shehata received permission to visit the prisoners, and is believed to have smuggled them $3000 which was later confiscated from their cell, and to have given them a letter which the Russians didn't bother to translate.[79] In April 1997, the trio were sentenced to six months, and were subsequently released a month later and ran off without paying their court-appointed attorney Abulkhalik Abdusalamov his $1,800 legal fee citing their "poverty".[79] Shehata was sent on to Chechnya, where he met with Ibn Khattab.[77][79][80][81]
Leaving Egypt
During this time, al-Zawahiri also began reconstituting the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) along with other exiled militants.[82] The group had "very loose ties to their nominal imprisoned leader, Abud al-Zumur."[citation needed]
In Peshwar, al-Zawahiri is thought to have become radicalized by other Al-Jihad members, abandoning his old strategy of a swift coup d'état to change society from above, and embracing the idea of takfir.[83] In 1991, EIJ broke with al-Zumur, and al-Zawahiri grabbed "the reins of power" to become EIJ leader.[84]
Activities in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Zawahiri has allegedly worked with the Islamic Republic of Iran on behalf of al-Qaeda. Lawrence Wright reports that EIJ operative Ali Mohammed "told the FBI that al-Jihad had planned a coup in Egypt in 1990." Zawahiri had studied the 1979 Islamist Islamic Revolution and "sought training from the Iranians" as to how to duplicate their feat against the Egyptian government.
He offered Iran information about an Egyptian government plan to storm several islands in the Persian Gulf that both Iran and the United Arab Emirates lay claim to. According to Mohammed, in return for this information, the Iranian government paid Zawahiri $2 million and helped train members of al-Jihad in a coup attempt that never actually took place.[85]
However, in public Zawahiri has harshly denounced the Iranian government. In December 2007 he said, "We discovered Iran collaborating with America in its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq."[86] In the same video messages, he moreover chides Iran for "repeating the ridiculous joke that says that al-Qaida and the Taliban are agents of America," before playing a video clip in which Ayatollah Rafsanjani says, "In Afghanistan, they were present in Afghanistan, because of Al-Qa'ida; and the Taliban, who created the Taliban? America is the one who created the Taliban, and America's friends in the region are the ones who financed and armed the Taliban."[86]
Zawahiri's criticism of Iran's government continues when he states,
Despite Iran's repetition of the slogan 'Death to America, death to Israel,' we haven't heard even one Fatwa from one Shiite authority, whether in Iran or elsewhere, calling for Jihad against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.[86]
Zawahiri has dismissed that there is any cooperation between Iran and Al Qaeda against their common enemy, viz, the United States.[87] He also said that "Iran Stabbed a Knife into the Back of the Islamic Nation."[88]
In April 2008, Zawahiri blamed Iranian state media and Al-Manar for perpetuating the "lie" that "there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no-one else did in history" in order to discredit the Al Qaeda network.[89] Zawahiri was referring to some 9/11 conspiracy theories according to which Al Qaeda was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
On the seventh anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Zawahiri released a 90-minute tape[90] in which he blasted "the guardian of Muslims in Tehran" for recognizing "the two hireling governments"[91] in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Alleged activities in Russia
There have been doubts as to the true nature of al-Zawahiri's encounter with the Russians in 1996. Washington, D.C.-based Jamestown Foundation scholar Evgenii Novikov has argued that it seems unlikely that the Russians would not have been able to determine who he was, given their well-trained Arabists and the obviously suspicious act of Muslims crossing illegally a border with multiple false identities and encrypted documents in Arabic.[92][93] Assassinated former FSB secret service officer Alexander Litvinenko alleged, among other things, that during this time, al-Zawahiri was indeed being trained by the FSB,[94] and that he was not the only link between al-Qaeda and the FSB.[95] Former KGB officer, speaker on the Voice of America and writer Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy supported Litvinenko's claim and said that Litvinenko "was responsible for securing the secrecy of Al-Zawahiri's arrival in Russia, who was trained by FSB instructors in Dagestan, Northern Caucasus, during 1996–1997."[96]
Activities in Egypt
While there Zawahiri learned of a "Nonviolence Initiative" being organized in Egypt to end the terror campaign that had killed hundreds and resulting government crackdown that had imprisoned thousands. Zawahiri angrily opposed this "surrender" in letters to the London newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat.[97] Together with members of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, he helped organize a massive attack on tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut to sabotage the initiative by provoking the government into repression.[98]
The attack by six men dressed in police uniforms succeeded in machine-gunning and hacking to death 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians, including "a five-year-old British child and four Japanese couples on their honeymoons," and devastated the Egyptian tourist industry for a number of years. Nonetheless the Egyptian reaction was not what Zawahiri had hoped for. The attack so stunned and angered Egyptian society that Islamists denied responsibility. Zawahiri blamed the police for the killing, but also held the tourists responsible for their own deaths for coming to Egypt,
The people of Egypt consider the presence of these foreign tourists to be aggression against Muslims and Egypt... The young men are saying that this is our country and not a place for frolicking and enjoyment, especially for you.[99]
The massacre was so unpopular that no terror attacks occurred in Egypt for several years thereafter.[clarification needed] Zawahiri was sentenced to death in absentia in 1999 by an Egyptian military tribunal.[100]
Activities and whereabouts after the September 11 attacks
In December 2001, al-Zawahiri published a book entitled Fursan That Rayal al Nabi[101] (Knights Under the Prophet's Banner) which outlined ideologies of al-Qaeda.[102] English translations of this book were published; excerpts are available online.[103]
...The second power depends on God alone, then on its wide popularity and alliance with other jihad movements throughout the Islamic nation, from Chechnya in the north to Somalia in the south and from "Eastern Turkestan in the east to Morocco in the west.[104][105][106]
...It seeks revenge against the gang-leaders of global unbelief, the United States, Russia, and Israel. It demands the blood price for the martyrs, the mothers' grief, the deprived orphans, the suffering prisoners, and the torments of those who are tortured everywhere in the Islamic |
after the funeral of Wissam al-Hassan."
When in doubt blame Syria: after all the horribly split US congress needs some flag to rally behind two months ahead of a decision that will force it to come up with a grand compromise which in the absence of a foreign conflict (and a third presidential debate precisely forcusing on US foreing policy), just isn't happening: "They accused Syria of being behind Hassan's killing and called for Mikati to resign."
Supposedly this means Syria took some time off from its busy daily schedule of provoking Turkey and NATO, and lobbing artillery shells into Turkish territory fully aware it (any by it we mean 'flip-flops on the ground' sponsored branches Al Qaeda operating in its territory of course) is playing with a fully blown Western world retaliation.
Finally, as a reminder - this is the regional sectarian powder keg just waiting for a "someone" to drop a lit match...Cannondale is dabbling with a cyclocross suspension fork, and former national champion Tim Johnson was testing it in Gloucester
Cannondale rider spotted on Lefty fork
Suspension engineers at Cannondale have been hard at work on a new cyclocross standard — a cyclocross version of Cannondale’s popular Lefty suspension fork. A 26”-wheel Lefty, slimmed down to shorter travel for cyclocross, was spotted at the Cannondale-Cyclocrossworld.com team trailer on Sunday at the Rapha Super Cross race in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
The bike belonged to former cyclocross national champion Tim Johnson. Johnson’s fork started its life as a 26” Lefty XLR cross-country fork, but had its travel tweaked to be much shorter than the Lefty’s XLR’s 100mm of travel. Sources estimated that it was reduced to 35mm of travel.
Johnson’s bike also had a RockShox PopLoc remote lockout, just like those found on Cannondale mountain bikes. The remote was mounted to the right of the proprietary Cannondale stem. Meaning Johnson would only be able to lock out and open the fork while his hands were on the top, an ideal spot for setting up before an overly bumpy section of course, or for bunny-hopping barriers.
Cannondale marketing manager, Bill Ruddell said, “The team must be doing some special product testing,” seemingly unaware that Johnson was testing a Lefty fork.
Johnson would not confirm any of the particulars on the new fork, only saying, “I’ll tell you one thing, you have to ride this thing.”Sonja Puzic, CTVNews.ca
Prime Minister Stephen Harper hailed the end of Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan Wednesday as a “significant milestone in the fight against global terror.”
After 12 years, the loss of 162 lives and endless debate at home, the military mission formally ended with a ceremony in Kabul.
Canadian and international dignitaries looked on as the army took down the Canadian flag at NATO headquarters, still under heavy guard in the war-ravaged country.
In a statement, Harper praised the work of the more than 40,000 Canadian Forces members who “have fought to defeat the threat of terrorism, and to ensure the freedom of others to build a stronger, safer world. In the course of this fight, many have paid the ultimate price.
“Their courage and dedication has brought much pride to our country. I look forward to personally welcoming home the last contingent of Canada’s brave men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces when they return home on the final flight.”
The withdrawal of the last 100 Canadian soldiers, who stayed behind to train Afghan National Security Forces, will be completed over the next few days. The last troops will arrive home on March 18.
“Your strength has protected the weak; your bravery has brought hope to hopeless; and the helping hand you have extended to the Afghan people has given them faith that a better future is within their grasp," Deborah Lyons, the Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan, told the soldiers in Kabul Wednesday.
In a statement, Liberal defence critic Joyce Murray said “all Canadians join in extending our appreciation and thanks” to those who served in Afghanistan.
“All those who served have made enormous sacrifices during Canada's largest military deployment since the Second World War,” Murray said.
“Canadian women and men carried out their duties with the utmost professionalism and distinction. We are immensely proud and grateful of their service to enhance peace, stability, and hope in a troubled region of the world.”
Canada must be sure to “take the best possible care” of the veterans who are returning or who have already returned from Afghanistan, Murray said.
Today, Canadians remain divided on the success of the Afghan mission. Heavy combat, roadside bombings and other incidents took the lives of 158 Canadian soldiers, one diplomat, one journalist and two civilian contractors. Many soldiers who returned home injured or profoundly changed by the experience are now struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, inadequate mental health care services, unemployment and other issues.
“This country was put to the test,” retired Col. Pat Stogran, who served as commander in Afghanistan, told CTV’s Canada AM Wednesday. “The jury is still out right now.”
Since Canadian troops first arrived in October 2002, there have been notable improvements in Afghanistan: access to education, especially for girls, a drop in infant and maternal mortality rates, and infrastructure projects, among others.
From 2001 to 2013, Canada spent $1.65 billion on reconstruction and development in Afghanistan and made efforts to improve women’s rights and the living conditions of rural Afghans.
But security is deteriorating in many parts of the country, raising serious questions about Afghanistan’s future. Just this week, a British-Swedish journalist was gunned down in a heavily policed part of Kabul. Feday-e-Mahaz, a Taliban splinter group, claimed responsibility for the killing.
Access to health care is another big problem. Diseases such as polio, malaria, measles and tuberculosis are a huge burden on the underfunded health care system.
Stogran, an outspoken former veterans’ affairs ombudsman, said he left the army “discouraged” by what he called a “falling apart” of the Canadian government’s approach to the Afghan mission. But he remains “very proud” of the soldiers’ accomplishments and sacrifices.
“I’m amazed at how our young people rallied to the call and the job our folks did overseas,” he said. Not only did Canadian soldiers risk their lives every day, they also collected money for aid projects and helped build schools and wells, Stogran said.
The removal of the Canadian flag in Kabul was “a very solemn occasion for me,” he said. But ongoing conflicts in the Middle East mean that “we’re not finished this yet,” he added.
“We are at a point now where our nation has to heal and we have to celebrate the accomplishments of our young people. They’ve planted a seed in Afghanistan that we should all hope and pray will serve the long-term benefit of a very troubled nation,” Stogran said.
“But we can’t dust ourselves off and say: ‘Well, I’m glad that Afghanistan is over with.’”
NATO’s combat forces are also scheduled to leave Afghanistan at the end of the year, but member nations have promised $4.1 billion a year in funding for the country’s security forces.
Lyons, the Canadian ambassador, said Wednesday that Canada will remain involved in building Afghanistan’s economy, particularly the resource sector.
In his statement, the prime minister reiterated that Canada “will continue to play an important role in supporting efforts that contribute to building a better future for all Afghans.”
Harper also said that when he greets the last soldiers as they return home, he will announce plans to “formally commemorate the mission in Afghanistan.”
With files from The Canadian PressDr Libby Weaver shares nutritious breakfast recipes from her new book 'The Energy Guide'
Clockwise from left: Pumpkin quinoa porridge, breakfast bowl and strawberry chia pots. Picture / Jeremy Simons
Feeling a little flat? The new book from Dr Libby Weaver has tips and more than 100 recipes to help your energy stores. The Energy Guide looks at how the “three pillars of health”, nutrition, biochemisty and emotions, influence your vitality. Dr Libby breaks down our day-to-day habits with chapters titled “Are you sleeping well?” and “Are you stressed and emotional?”, offering achievable steps we can take to get our bodies working as they should. Her wholefood recipes look tasty and simple to make too — think salmon and quinoa fish cakes and broccoli and spinach flatbread. See six of her fast, healthy and nutritious breakfast recipes below.
PUMPKIN QUINOA PORRIDGE
Serves 4
1 cup (250g) mashed roasted pumpkin
½ tsp ground cinnamon
2 Tbsp extra virgin coconut oil, melted, or ghee
2 cups (370g) rinsed, cooked quinoa
2 Tbsp almond butter
100g blueberries
1 pomegranate, seeds removed
1 Tbsp pure maple syrup (optional)
METHOD
1. Place the pumpkin, cinnamon and half the coconut oil or ghee in a saucepan and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes or until warmed through.
2. Place the quinoa and remaining coconut oil or ghee in a separate saucepan and warm gently over medium heat.
3. Spoon the quinoa into a bowl and top with the pumpkin. Add the almond butter, blueberries, pomegranate seeds and a drizzle of maple syrup if you like.
READ: Dr Libby Wants You to Say No
BREAKFAST BOWL
Serves 4
4 eggs, at room temperature
1 avocado, cut into quarters
200g cherry tomatoes, halved
2 handfuls of watercress or baby spinach leaves
2 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1/3 cup (55g) mixed seeds, such as linseeds, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds
METHOD
1. Bring a saucepan of water to the boil and gently lower the eggs into the water. Cook for 6 minutes, then remove from the pan and rinse under cold water. Peel straight away.
2. Divide the avocado, tomato and watercress or spinach among four bowls. Top with a soft-boiled egg, drizzle with lemon juice and olive oil, and sprinkle with seeds.
STRAWBERRY CHIA POTS
Serves 4
250g strawberries, hulled and halved
1 banana, chopped
½ tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground ginger
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tbsp melted extra virgin coconut oil, at room temperature
1 × 400ml tin coconut cream
½ cup (70g) black chia seeds, plus extra for sprinkling
METHOD
1. Place 200 g of the strawberries and the banana, spices, vanilla, coconut oil and coconut cream in a blender and blend until smooth. Transfer to a bowl and fold through the chia seeds.
2. Divide among four serving pots or bowls, then cover and refrigerate overnight. Serve with the remaining strawberry halves and a sprinkle of extra chia seeds.
Clockwise from left: Sesame eggs with asparagus soldiers; avocado and egg bowls; omelettes with avocado and leafy greens. Picture / Jeremy Simons
SESAME EGGS WITH ASPARAGUS SOLDIERS
Serves 4
1 bunch asparagus (180g), trimmed
1 Tbsp Dukkah or toasted sesame seeds
Sea salt
4 eggs, at room temperature
METHOD
1. Steam the asparagus for 3 minutes or until bright green and tender.
2. Place the dukkah or sesame seeds in a bowl, add salt and mix to combine.
3. Bring a saucepan of water to the boil. Gently lower the eggs into the pan and cook for 4 minutes.
4. Remove from the pan and transfer to egg cups.
5. Cut the tops off the eggs straight away, sprinkle with the dukkah or sesame seeds and serve with the steamed asparagus.
READ: Dr Libby Explains Why You're Always Tired
AVOCADO AND EGG BOWLS
Serves 4
1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
4 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
1 tomato, chopped
Handful of small basil leaves, torn
Handful of small flat-leaf parsley leaves, torn
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 avocados, halved and stones removed
METHOD
1. Combine the lemon juice and olive oil. Place the egg, tomato and herbs in a bowl, season with salt and pepper and gently mix to combine.
2. Fill the avocado halves with the egg mixture and finish with a drizzle of the dressing.
OMELETTES WITH AVOCADO AND LEAFY GREENS
Serves 4
1 Tbsp olive oil
4 eggs, lightly beaten
2 sheets nori, sliced into 1 cm strips
2 avocados, thinly sliced
2 handfuls of baby spinach
1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
METHOD
1. Heat half the olive oil in a non-stick frying pan over medium heat. Add half the beaten egg and swirl to coat the base of the pan; you want a thin omelette so pour off the excess if you add too much.
2. Cook until the edge of the omelette starts to set, lifting it with a spatula and allowing any uncooked egg to run underneath. Once the base is set, flip and cook the other side. Remove the omelette from the
pan and repeat with the remaining beaten egg.
3. Top each omelette with nori, sliced avocado and spinach. Drizzle with lemon juice and season with salt and pepper, then roll up to enclose the filling.
4. Cut the omelettes in half and divide among four plates to serve.
• Extract printed with permission from The Energy Guide by Dr Libby Weaver, Macmillan, RRP $39.99.
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Print this article(Courtesy of HerInteractive)
You may think of Nancy Drew as a quaint relic of the Depression era, and associate her with dusty attics, old clocks and magnifying glasses.
If that's the case, you clearly need to revisit Nancy Drew. Nowadays, the original girl detective not only drives a car, but uses a cellphone and is preparing to star in her thirty-second video game.
Not bad for someone who, despite commemorating her 85th year this week, has never turned 19.
Nancy -- and surely the world is on a first-name basis with her by now -- has a classic can-do attitude and stunning reserves of pluck that make her role model for any time, said Jenn Fisher, president of the series fan club, the Nancy Drew Sleuths. "Her forwardness, her independence and her zeal to solve everything no matter how baffling -- she inspires."
(The Sleuths -- a ten-year-old group of roughly 900 American and international fans of all ages -- are holding conventions at several Nancy-related sites throughout the Midwest this week to celebrate this latest birthday.)
That characterization is exactly what makes Nancy such a good video game protagonist, said Penny Milliken, chief executive of HerInteractive -- the studio that's been making Nancy games exclusively since 1998. It's sold 9 million Nancy Drew games to date.
The newest, "Nancy Drew: Sea of Darkness" will debut on May 19, for Mac and PC and is set on a ghostly ship in the Netherlands. The company has also experimented with putting Nancy Drew on mobile devices, with a couple of mystery game apps.
Milliken said that the studio gets oodles of letters from fans who say they love seeing their childhood hero on the screen -- and others who've learned about Nancy Drew first from the game series.
Fisher, of Nancy Drew Sleuths, said that she likes the games a lot because they put players in Nancy's shoes. Movies, she said, can pull you out of the action. But video games, like books, give you first-person perspective and help revamp the older, fussier image of Nancy.
"What I love about the games is that you don't see that," Fisher said. "It allows you to picture Nancy however you want to picture her."
Milliken also likes the fact that the Nancy Drew games give young girls a series all their own -- she estimates that about 90 percent of the games' players are girls. HerInteractive's fan mail also includes a lot of letters from girls who say they've been inspired to make their own games; Milliken finds that encouraging at a time when there's a lot of concern that girls just aren't interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As a result, the studio is looking at ways to provide more internships and scholarships for girls interested in those fields.
"We’re inspiring girls, have been inspiring girls in the importance of STEM -- and I like to think of it as, STEAM adding art to that -- and we're looking at ways that we can increase our presence in that area," Milliken said.Vancouver Whitecaps FC are currently in one of the toughest spells of their season and it's testing Carl Robinson's squad depth to the max.
The 'Caps have one match left of a four-game road stretch that has seen them already endure the Texas heat for MLS matches in Houston and Dallas, and a trip to the Caribbean to face Central FC in CONCACAF Champions League action. It doesn't get any easier with a trip to the altitude of Colorado coming up on Saturday (6 p.m. PT - live on TSN2/TSN 1040).
With two games in a three-day period this week, Robinson has found himself using 22 players from his MLS squad and calling up four players from the 'Caps USL side for last night's Champion's League win. Robinson has already stated that this weekend's game with the Rapids "will be a totally different team again." It's why clubs have squads, of course.
"Football nowadays is not about 11 players, it's about a squad of players," Robinson believes. "I've assembled a very strong squad, group of players, and I want players who can play in multiple positions."
One such player is the latest Whitecaps FC signing Giles Barnes, and the former Houston Dynamo captain is expected to be part of that "different team" put out to face the Rapids on Saturday.
Scouting report: A closer look at Giles Barnes
Barnes' acquisition late on Saturday night surprised many, but he's a player Robinson has been after for a while, and one the 'Caps coach feels compliments the talent he currently has at his disposal and will be a key component to the 'Caps playoff push.
"Giles can do that," Robinson said of his new signing's positional adaptability. "I've known Giles for a number of years. I tried to get him two times prior to being able to get him this time. He'll add to all the attacking forwards that we have, because we need to try and get results to shoot us up the league. We're delighted to have him on board. He's an exceptional player and he will make us stronger."
With the transfer out of Designated Player Octavio Rivero to Chilean club Colo Colo, the 'Caps find themselves with a vacant DP spot.
Fans looking for that position to be filled quickly look like having to wait until January, but Robinson once again was keen to point out that acquiring players like Barnes fits Vancouver's team mentality better, than going out to make a splash on one highly paid, big name.
"There's no star players in my team," Robinson added. "Everyone is a star in my team and the team is the star. That's what I preach to them day in and day out and that won't change."
Be a part of the best sporting atmosphere in Vancouver! Whitecaps FC offer a flexible range of ticket products, including Half-Season Packs, 5-Packs, a Youth Soccer Half-Season Ticket, and single match tickets. For more information, visit whitecapsfc.com/tickets.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- These days, the closest Don Nelson gets to games on the road is when he travels to the mainland to visit family and happens to take in some hoops. The NBA's all-time winningest coach spends the bulk of his time on Maui, retired and relaxing.
Occasionally, however, Nellie can be coaxed into reminiscing, too. About the times when he coached the Dallas Mavericks, for instance, when he led the team to a record amount of road victories in back-to-back seasons (2001-2002). Or when he played for the Boston Celtics 1965-76 and won five NBA titles, picking up tricks on how to win anywhere.
With the Cavaliers sitting at a measly 2-15 on the road this season, and their big West Coast road trip beginning Friday, any advice is likely welcome – even if Nellie contends it's not rocket science.
"I always preached to the team to take care of the details more on the road," Nelson said during a brief interlude before catching a game in San Antonio coached by good pal Gregg Popovich. 'You just couldn't expect any breaks on the road. You had to do everything more perfectly and more focused on the road. Which is pretty easy to do, actually."
Easy, supposedly, because there are fewer demands from home life, and more time to focus on the game and the business of winning.
When Nellie was a player, his legendary carefree attitude worked in his favor. He didn't fret about his team's road record or how to change his style on the road. He had other concerns.
"We drank more beer," Nelson joked. "We had more fun on the road because you didn't have to worry about home life and all that kind of stuff. You were out amongst your friends so that was always fun."
When he coached, however, it was different. Whether in his stops in Milwaukee, Golden State, New York or Dallas, all of which included zany innovations such as the point forward or 7-foot-7 Manute Bol taking 3-pointers with regularity,
"As a coach I probably didn't take as many risks," Nelson said. "Maybe I didn't go to my bench quite as much, played the vets more.
"Young players just make more mistakes than the veterans. Mistakes hurt you more on the road than they do at home. You can rise above them at home because you have other positives going for you."
Which leads back to Cavaliers coach Mike Brown's long-preached sermon that Cleveland needs to buckle down on defense on the road, above all else. A steady defense can remain consistent, while offense can turn streaky when affected by boisterous rival crowds.
Then again, there's one factor that can work in a team's favor on the road above all else.
"The better your players, of course, the easier it is to win anywhere," Nelson reminded.
And there might not be any shortcuts to finding road success. Any tricks the 73-year-old Nellie learned over the years aren't the kind he's willing to spill now, in his retirement.
"I know a lot of good stories about the road," Nellie joked, "but I don't want to share them with you."
Fair enough.When Microsoft revealed that the next-gen Xbox’s name was going to be Xbox One, some people clambered to think of a shorthand term for it right off the gate.
Of course, that’s easier said than done since it’s not as easy as the Xbox 360 being nicknamed the X360 or Sony’s consoles continuing with numerical names (PlayStation 4 = PS4).
Unfortunately or fortunately — depending on your point-of-view — some people have nicknamed the Xbox One as “Xbone,” since it’s a play on Xbox, the word One, and the fact that some people considered Microsoft’s original DRM scheme for it as “boning” consumers.
Over on NeoGAF, Microsoft’s Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb has just recently gotten his membership approved and people already made a “Welcome @MajorNelson at GAF” thread started to officially welcome the Microsoft spokesman into the fray.
In it, Nelson proceeded to answer a few questions regarding the Xbox One and one user asked him what he thought of the Xbox One being nicknamed “Xbone” to which Nelson replied that he doesn’t like it, and thinks it disrespects the teams that worked hard on it.
I don’t like it…it disrespects the teams that have put in thousands of hours (already) into the development of the product. Sure, it’s cheeky but I don’t care for it myself.
I personally don’t use the term Xbone when referring to the Xbox One and honestly don’t have a problem with it. But then again, I’m not part of Microsoft or worked on the console itself so maybe Major Nelson has a point?
Are you fine with the Xbox One being called Xbone or should enthusiasts think of a better nickname for Microsoft’s next-gen platform?
For more on the Xbox One and Major Nelson, make sure to read up on how he’s looking forward to the “truth” to come out regarding the PS4’s alleged 30 percent power advantage over the Xbox One.A series of articles and videos about “wage theft” appeared last month on a University of Minnesota website, describing how a large number of workers in Minnesota are routinely not paid overtime, shorted in paychecks or not paid at all.
Those practices, which violate state and federal law, are described in detail at workdayminnesota.org, which is sponsored by the Labor Education Service, a unit at the U’s Carlson School of Management.
The subject is also being discussed at Minneapolis City Hall as one of the pillars of Mayor Betsy Hodges’ Working Families Agenda. But it’s unclear so far what role the city may play in cracking down on wage theft.
The Workday articles offer a glimpse into the myriad problems of lower paid workers, often undocumented, who are sometimes reluctant to challenge employers for fear of being fired or even deported.
“For 45 days we worked without pay and about a week later [the employer] filed for bankruptcy,” says Robin Pikala, a personal care assistant, in one video.
“My money was short, and I wasn’t able to look at the time sheet myself,” says Lovie Franklin, a temp worker in another incident. “They’re treating you like you’re a slave.”
The wage theft series includes nine articles and eight videos and is the biggest project in Workday’s 15 years of existence, says Barb Kucera, who has been editor of the online site since it started.
The lead article in the series cites data from a report in 2014 by the U.S. Department of Labor that states that in fiscal 2012, its wages and hours division collected more than $280 million in back wages for more than 308,000 workers.
Not just a Minnesota issue
The Economic Policy Institute reports that in 2012, state departments of labor recovered $172 million for workers, state attorneys general recovered $14 million and private attorneys recovered $467 million in wage and hour class action lawsuits.
“Wage theft” is relatively new terminology, born in the early 2000s as advocates in worker centers, pushing to improve wages and conditions for nonunion workers, searched for words to describe the deliberate withholding of pay. It gained popularity after the 2008 publication of a book, “Wage Theft in America,” by Kim Bobo, founder of Interfaith Worker Justice, a national organization.
In the past eight and a half years, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL), the Center of Workers United in Struggle in Minneapolis, has recovered over $2 million in stolen wages and damages through direct action and court cases, says Brian Merle Payne, the group’s co-director. In one instance, 30 workers at a local restaurant won $10,000 in back wages and unpaid overtime, after the workers and supporters picketed for about a month, he said.
The Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry has a fact sheet on wage theft. It reports that in the past four years state investigators returned more than $2.8 million to nearly 15,000 Minnesota workers through its enforcement efforts.
What struck Howard Kling of Labor Education Service, who oversaw the video reports for the Workday project, is that in some areas, wage theft has become what he calls a “business model.”
Burt Johnson, general counsel for the North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters, said subcontractors in the residential construction industry frequently pay straight time to workers, rather than time and half, even when they work overtime. The pay, he says, is funneled through labor brokers who pay the workers in cash. Failure to pay overtime to such workers is against the law.Getty Images
Mark Cuban may have been right.
It took me a while to type that. I don’t want Mark Cuban to be right, for various reasons. Including, you know, Mark Cuban.
But I’ve come to wonder whether Cuban may be on to something when he talks about the NFL getting too big for its own good. Of the league getting so big that the audience becomes taken for granted.
Whatever the motivation — the given excuse was a scheduling conflict at Radio City Music Hall for an event that eventually was canceled due to lack of interest — the NFL’s decision to bump back the draft by two weeks has been as much of a dud as the NFL-sanctioned film Draft Day. A palpable fatigue has emerged regarding the draft. We sense it, and we (or at least I) currently have it.
While the league reportedly would like to space out the three major offseason tent poles (Scouting Combine, free agency, and draft) to March, April, and May, respectively, moving the draft to May while leaving the other two in place has created the worst thing any media-driven industry can have: A lull.
No one likes the lull. Also, agents don’t like the fact that teams have more times to ask players to engage in private workouts. Teams don’t like having more time to evaluate and obsess and think and re-think.
As one G.M. said via text on Wednesday night, “Remind me again why the draft is not tomorrow? Is it so we can see another two weeks of mock drafts?”
We’ve yet to hear from anyone who likes the two-week delay, and the extended vacuum that it creates in the offseason.
By the time the draft begins, nearly two months will have passed since the start of free agency. And while the schedule release provided a temporary oasis from the lagging of the offseason calendar, a feeling remains that too much time is elapsing between major offseason events.
Here’s hoping the NFL, in its admirable desire to always improve the product, recognizes and admits that the effort to improve the product by delaying the draft by two weeks hasn’t. Here’s hoping that the NFL moves the draft back to what would have been tonight, keeping it there unless and until the other two major offseason events move deeper into the calendar as well.Coptic Christians flee an unwelcoming Egypt, seek refuge in Australia
Updated
A church in the middle of Cairo is bombed. A 70-year-old woman is stripped naked and paraded through a southern Egyptian village.
Military vehicles run over Coptic protesters, dismembering and mangling 27 people in the worst massacre of Christians in the country's history.
Firebrand preachers shout incensed anti-Christian messages from the pulpit and mobs attack Coptic churches, businesses and homes.
This is now a daily routine for Egypt's Coptic Christians, the largest Christian minority in the Middle East.
What Arab Spring?
During the 2011 protests that swept long-time Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak from power, Copts and Muslims stood side by side. Inspiring images showed Christians linking arms to protect Muslims from police during their daily prayers.
"Everyone was inspired by what we saw in Tahrir Square, and the solidarity between the various facets of Egyptian society," says Peter Tadros, spokesperson for the Australian Coptic Movement.
"Muslim, Coptic, Nubian, male, female: you name it, we were all there, hand in hand for one cause."
But in the aftermath of the revolution, life was no better for Egypt's Christians.
According to Mr Tadros, tensions had already been building. Twenty-one people were killed in a bombing outside the Two Saints Church in Alexandria on New Year's Eve in 2011.
When the Muslim Brotherhood and then the military came to power, things got much worse.
"We had a power vacuum," Mr Tadros says.
"The police started to disappear off the streets and then we started to see massacres [and] kidnappings for ransom. It really was a terrible, terrible period for Coptic Christians."
The Australian Refugee Review Tribunal echoed that point in a report on an application for asylum by a Coptic couple in 2014, noting an "increase in beatings, harassment, stealing, extortion and kidnapping of Copts (though also of Muslims) in Upper Egypt".
"There was no spring," says Jacqueline, a Coptic Christian now living in Sydney who did not want to be identified by her real name.
"We were living a different reality to what was on TV.
"The men went down into the streets to protect the neighbourhood from thugs who were attacking homes. Women were screaming, and you didn't know if it was because someone had broken into their house and attacked them."
Seeking asylum in Australia
It's Sunday, and Rifaat Boutros is picking up some donated furniture to take to a recently arrived family of Coptic asylum seekers.
Mr Boutros has been volunteering with the St Demiana and St Athanasius Church in the Sydney suburb of Punchbowl for more than 10 years, making him the go-to person for many of the 600 Coptic asylum seekers in the Bankstown area.
He helps people find work, a place to stay, access to a lawyer or assistance navigating Australian bureaucracy.
He spends his weekends doing what he's doing now: picking up furniture and material donations from the Coptic community.
"I noticed that over the last five years, the number has increased a lot since we started this work," Mr Boutros says.
"Most of them come as students and try to apply for a protection visa when they get here."
It's difficult to know the exact number of Copts who have been accepted under Australia's Special Humanitarian Program, because the Department of Immigration and Border Protection does not report publicly on humanitarian claims based on religion and applicants are not required to declare their religion.
But ABS figures on humanitarian visa recipients who nominated Coptic Orthodox Christian as their religion on the 2011 Census indicate that the numbers are small.
In the first eight months of 2011, 18 people were accepted as asylum seekers.
Refuge in Sydney
Mr Boutros unloads some household goods from his car for Saeed and his newly arrived family: a vacuum cleaner, some pots and pans, and other kitchen appliances.
Saeed is from the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, where he worked as a social worker.
He arrived in Australia in 2013, and Mr Boutros has been helping him settle into the country and prepare his application for asylum.
Saeed has recently been granted a protection visa, and his family has been able to join him in Sydney.
Saeed doesn't want to talk in detail about why his family fled Egypt, but says he never wanted to leave, but was forced to do so because his family didn't feel safe.
In halting English he tells me that for eight years, he couldn't let his son play outside the house as other children do.
"When people want money, they do everything to kidnap the children. When he was at school, I was very afraid that he could lose his life in one minute."
Harrowing tales
Jacqueline is another who didn't want to leave her home. She was a volunteer with a church charity and loved her work. But things had changed after the election of Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood government.
Jacqueline lived near a Salafist mosque that preached intolerance against Copts. She says Christians would get called infidels, pigs and the children of monkeys. People would spit at her on the street.
"Every time you went into the street, a big problem would happen," she says. "Every time you went out into the street."
"I was surprised one day when I was choosing food, a woman pushed me onto the ground and said: 'Are you all still here? You should all leave the country or be like us. You have to go, this is not your country. You shouldn't be here at all.'"
Bystanders intervened to separate the two women, but the attacker told Jacqueline that next time she'd kill her.
Jacqueline had a brother in Sydney whom she'd planned to visit. He urged her to leave as soon as possible, so she and her daughter fled days after she was attacked. Seven months later, both were given protection visas.
In Sydney, she has found the going tough because of language and cultural barriers. But she is positive about life here, despite the challenges.
"The future is my grandson," she says with a big smile. "He was born here, and he will grow up here.
"I came for my daughter, her future, and so that her children grow up in a country that respects them and can educate them.
"I hope that when he grows up, he understands that we did this so he can live in a good country. He's our hope and the reason why we cope with all the difficulties that come our way."
Topics: christianity, religion-and-beliefs, community-and-society, foreign-affairs, government-and-politics, discrimination, refugees, immigration, unrest-conflict-and-war, australia, egypt
First postedFIX for "WINDOWS 8" not starting dow2
turns out to be an easy fix thats worked for all "games for windows' games..you also have to have a "Games for Windows Marketplace" Account ready. (It also has be the same account tied to the game key if you have played with the game previously)basic steps:1. go to settings > control panel > uninstall programs2. uninstall the "microsoft games for windows" software(there might be 2 different versions on there)(both labeled "microsoft games for windows live/marketplace.."3. go to "http://www.xbox.com" and search for "Games for Windows Marketplace Client"it should be the 1st option.saying somthing similar to "Download the Games for Windows Client | PC Games Client"4. right click on the saved file and "run as administrator"it will then start redownloading the 40 or so megabites properly5. start your game, then log in, done :)edit: updated client link againThe Shakhtar Donetsk forward is still a devotee of the Wenger way – but he will do Arsenal no favours when they meet in the Champions League this week
Think of Eduardo da Silva, and it is impossible not to think of the incident at St Andrew's in February 2008, when a foul by Martin Taylor left his foot hanging limp from his leg, the ankle dislocated and the shinbone broken. That injury defines his time in England but, as he tries to rebuild his career with Shakhtar Donetsk, who face his former |
one of the performances of the song.
The National ended up playing the track 105 times, reports Pitchfork, who add that drummer Bryan Devendorf sat out one take of the song.
On the Facebook page, the band commented, jokingly: “For the encore, The National played ‘Sorrow’.” The one-track setlist is pictured.
The show took place at Moma PS1 in Long Island City, New York. A press release from the gallery reads: “By stretching a single pop song into a day-long tour de force the artist continues his explorations into the potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound.”
It continues: “As in all of Kjartansson’s performances, the idea behind A Lot of Sorrow is devoid of irony, yet full of humour and emotion. It is another quest to find the comic in the tragic and vice versa.”
Last month The National played two songs from their forthcoming sixth studio album ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.
Sharethrough (Mobile)
The Brooklyn band performed ‘Sea Of Love’ and a web exclusive of ‘I Need My Girl’ on the programme – scroll down to watch footage of both.
As previously reported, St Vincent, Sharon Van Etten and Sufjan Stevens will all make appearances on the new album which was produced by Craig Silvey. The follow-up to 2010’s ‘High Violet’, the record is due for release on May 20 via 4AD.
Matt Berninger recently revealed to NME the album is influenced by a preoccupation with death. “It’s a record about getting older, and all the fascinations and headaches that go with that,” he said. “But it’s not grim, honestly! It’s actually pretty fun.”
The National will play six gigs in the UK and Ireland this November. The dates are as follows:
Belfast Odyssey Arena (November 9)
Dublin O2 Arena (10)
Manchester O2 Apollo (11, 12)
London Alexandra Palace (13, 14)WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif., July 31, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- When wireless customers need to shift between care channels to resolve their initial inquiry, satisfaction declines considerably and the propensity to switch carriers more than doubles, according to the J.D. Power 2014 U.S. Wireless Customer Care Full-Service Performance StudySM—Volume 2 and the J.D. Power 2014 U.S. Wireless Customer Care Non-Contract Performance StudySM—Volume 2, both released today.
Now in their 12th year, these semiannual studies offer a detailed report card on how well wireless carriers provide customer service via three main contact channels: telephone (which consists of three sub-channels—Automated Response System (ARS) then Customer Service Representative (CSR); CSR only; and ARS only); walk-in (retail store); and online. The studies measure satisfaction with each contact method and analyze processing issues, such as the efficiency of problem resolution and the duration of hold times.
"It's imperative that wireless service carriers improve their ability to resolve customer issues in one contact and reduce the number of service channels customers need to visit to address their problem," said Kirk Parsons, senior director of telecommunications at J.D. Power. "Understanding the types of problems customers contact their carrier about and driving them to the appropriate channel for problem resolution the first time will reduce operating costs and improve the overall customer experience. Improving customer satisfaction leads to long-term loyalty."
Overall satisfaction among wireless full-service customers is 776 (on a 1,000-point scale) and 717 among non-contract wireless customers. Full-service customers experience higher service scores across most of the contact channels and have lower hold times and higher first-call resolution frequency. Overall satisfaction with the wireless care experience in both the full-service (786) and non-contract (732) segments has declined from the 2013 Volume 2 studies by 10 and 15 points, respectively.
KEY FINDINGS
Satisfaction with customer care among those requiring multiple channels to resolve their problem is 755, compared with 772 among those who resolve their issue using a single channel.
Forty percent of customers using multiple channels to resolve their problem say they "definitely will" or "probably will" switch their carrier, compared with just 17 percent of those who resolve their problem via a single channel.
Industry-wide, 25 percent of wireless service customers' contacts are the result of a previous attempt to resolve the same problem via another contact channel.
Thirty-eight percent of multi-channel customer service contacts originate in a store, followed by 33 percent originating online and 29 percent by phone.
Among customers originally going to a carrier store, 82 percent ultimately call their carrier, while 18 percent go online when they are unable to resolve their issue. Additionally, when customers originally contact by phone, 53 percent are sent to a store, while 47 percent are sent to the online channel to resolve their issue.
Multiple-channel contacts are more often required to resolve problems related to billing issues (36%); service options/equipment (35%); network connection issues (21%); and incorrect charges (13%) than are contacts resolved via a single channel.
On average, problems that are resolved via multiple contact channels take 21.7 minutes to resolve via the last channel used, compared with just 14.9 minutes for problems resolved using a single channel.
The 2014 U.S. Wireless Customer Care Full-Service Performance Study—Volume 2 is based on responses from 6,131 full-service wireless customers. The 2014 U.S. Wireless Customer Care Non-Contract Performance Study—Volume 2 is based on responses from 2,518 non-contract wireless customers. Both semiannual studies are based on the experiences of current customers who contacted their carrier's customer care department within the past six months. The study was fielded from January 2014 through June 2014.
Overall Customer Satisfaction Index Scores J.D. Power.com Power Circle RatingsTM
(Based on a 1,000-point scale) For Consumers
Full-Service
T-Mobile 792 5 AT&T 788 5 Full-Service Average 776 3 Verizon Wireless 772 3 Sprint Nextel 748 2
Non-Contract
MetroPCS 741 5 Virgin Mobile 733 4 Cricket 721 3 TracFone 720 3 Boost Mobile 718 3 Non-Contract Average 717 3 Straight Talk 684 2 Net10 667 2
Power Circle Ratings Legend
5 – Among the best
4 – Better than most
3 – About average
2 – The rest
Media Relations Contacts
John Tews; Troy, Mich.; 248-680-6218; media.relations@jdpa.com
About J.D. Power and Advertising/Promotional Rules www.jdpower.com/about-us/press-release-info
About McGraw Hill Financial www.mhfi.com
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130605/LA26502LOGO
SOURCE J.D. PowerOn April 28, at around 5:30 p.m., APD responded to a report of two shoplifters in a business in the 2300 block of Broadway Ave.
Officers responded and their attention was directed toward to male subjects who had been hiding items in their pockets. When officers contacted the two, one of the suspects pulled items from his pockets and put them on the shelf. This suspect then ran, throwing items off of the shelves at an officer, and even pushing a bystander in an effort to block the officer from chasing him.
The chase ended abruptly, as the suspect tripped over his pants and the officer was able to take him to the ground. The suspect attempted to fight with the officer, who was able to maintain control until other officers reached him to help handcuff him. The suspect at first lied about his name, however, officers were able to identify him as Kendrick Chaney, 34, of Alexandria.
In addition to shoplifting, Chaney was in possession of several baggies containing suspected methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and Xanax, as well as drug paraphernalia.
Chaney was charged with Theft of Goods Under $500, Possession of CDS I, two counts of Possession of CDS II, Possession of CDS IV, two counts of Possession of Drug Paraphernalia, and Resisting an Officer with Force or Violence. He was also charged with an active warrant for Contempt of Court through RPSO. He was booked into the Rapides Parish Detention Center.
The second suspect, a male, was also charged with Theft of Goods Under $500, and Resisting an Officer; both are misdemeanors.Django URL Names should be Underscore Separated
Robert Roskam Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 8, 2016
This is a nuts-and-bolts, idiosyncratic discussion of something that I can’t prove that I’m factually right on. So I realize this is going to sound like a tabs vs. spaces debate.
But hear me out.
Last September someone opened a ticket (#25473) to complain that the docs didn’t agree with themselves on whether a URL name should be ‘author-detail’ or ‘author_detail’.
Given the community (e.g., django-social-auth, wagtail) has generally used underscores, this should have been a simple ticket conclusion: “make them all underscores” because that’s what we as a community do.
Instead aaugustin made an offhand comment and somehow this had more weight than the entire community standard, and so it was assigned, fixed, and merged into the master branch.
Oh, but actually it wasn’t, because Django itself is still using the underscore separator pattern in django.contrib.auth because changing them would break other packages. In fact, the project maintainers even said so in the ticket.
This was the wrong decision. For the following reasons,
It was a well-accepted community standard that was seemingly changed on a whim without much conversation or weighing of the consequences. The reason given for the change was purely in service of doing a mass find and replace of the same type. That is, they won’t conflict with template or FBV names. A gain for sure, but refactoring the name of a URL isn’t a very common exercise. (Also, won’t there be times where the names clash with the actual URLs?) However, scanning for hyphens vs underscores in templates is a very common problem. Looking for hyphenated URL names among all the CSS gets very hard to parse visually, and this forces you to have to parse it visually.
I’d advocate that anyone in the community wondering if they should change. IMO, don’t bother. This is one docs example I will be ignoring, and you should too.More States Looking To Neutralize The NSA Through Local Legislation
from the a-widening-split-between-the-federal-government-and-its-constituents dept
The NSA's new data center in Utah has provided the flashpoint for legislation targeted at "nullifying" the agency by cutting off its access to public utilities and/or leveraging the powers granted to states to combat federal government overreach. An activist group known as The Tenth Amendment Center proposed a state law that would cut off the new data center's much needed water supply, along with any other public utility or service, like sanitation and road repair, in hopes of (at minimum) forcing the NSA to reconsider its collection tactics, or failing that, to find a new home.
Now, more states are joining the push-back against the agency, again using legislation crafted at the state level to curtail the NSA's overreach, as The New American reports.
Arizona
In Arizona, SB1156, which has 14 Republican sponsors, was introduced by state Sen. Kelli Ward. It would bar the state from providing material support to the agency’s activities and ban any data collected without a warrant from being used in court.
Ward announced her intentions in December to introduce a bill that would keep Arizona from supporting the NSA.
HB 1533 is a bipartisan bill sponsored by two GOP lawmakers and one Democrat. The measure requires law enforcement to obtain “a warrant to search information in a portable electronic device.”
Section IV of the bill mandates that “A government entity that purposely violates the provisions of this section shall be guilty of a class A misdemeanor.”
An individual shall have an expectation of privacy in personal information, including personal identifiers, content, and usage, given or available to third-party providers of information and services, including telephone; electric, water and other utility services; internet service providers; social media providers; banks and financial institutions; insurance companies; and credit card companies.
The Tennessee Fourth Amendment Protection Act was introduced by State Sen. Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) late Tuesday evening. Rep. Andy Holt (R-Dresden) will file the companion bill in the House.
Based on model legislation drafted by the OffNow coalition, SB1849 would prohibit the state of Tennessee from “providing material support to…any federal agency claiming the power to authorize the collection of electronic data or metadata of any person pursuant to any action not based on a warrant” as required by the Fourth Amendment.
New Hampshire's government is also considering another bill ( HB 1619 ), which restores the expectation of privacy to information given to third parties, something the NSA, FBI and others have relied on for years to acquire data without warrants.As The New American notes, this restoration goes even further than just protecting American citizens. The wording specifically notes this applies to "individuals" rather than just "citizens," extending the protection to non-citizen US residents and visitors.The entity mentioned in the legislation, OffNow, is a creation of the Tenth Amendment Center, and its legislative activity seeks to nullify the agency through the power of states and their public utilities. With enough support, many states could make themselves inhospitable hosts for the NSA by tying utility access to stipulations like the above. At the very least, state governments who pass laws like these will be "on the record" as not being complicit in the NSA's questionable collection activities. It also indicates they're willing to combat government overreach, which in the age of Real ID, nationalized health care and domestic surveillance, is a good stance to be taking.The real test of legislation like those above will be when the NSA offers to set up shop in these locations. Turning down the agency means turning down a whole lot of federal money and additional employment, something that may not sit well with many constituents, and even less so with certain politicians.New Hampshire's and Arizona's bills will face additional challenges as neither limits the wording tothe NSA's collections/"searches." (New Hampshire's bill only says "federal agency.") Arizona's in particular will affect local law enforcement as well, and if they've become used to a certain level of warrantless access, they won't be too thrilled to give that up. The heaviest push-back there may be from local PDs and sheriffs departments, although the arguments against the bills will be very familiar -- swapping only "crime" (or "drugs") for "terrorism."
Filed Under: nsa, privacy, state laws, states, surveillanceBike Party Presents…. A Birthday Ride for Bob Marley!
Friday, February 8, meetup 7:30 PM Rollout 8 PM.
WHERE: Start at Mosswood Park (3 blocks from Macarthur BART)
Ends Downtown Berkeley
Come out to ride as we celebrate the life and love of a legend.
Remember to bring your LIGHTS, LOCKS, and LAYERS.
The Bay Area gets dark! It gets cold! And leaving your bike unattended and unlocked can put it as risk of getting lifted. Bike Party is 100% volunteer led, 100% self supported ride. There is no operating budget or official leadership of bike party. YOU ALL MAKE BIKE PARTY! So make sure you be prepared with snacks, water, and bike tools as well.
HOW WE RIDE:
*Stay to the Right
*Stop at Lights
*Ride Straight
*Don’t Hate (one love!)
*Pack your Trash
*Don’t get Smashed
BIKE PARTY!!!
These simple ride rules help our large group ride safely together. Please call out folks that you see riding unsafely, displaying bad / rude riding behavior, or are generally being jerks.
Are you interested in helping make Bike Party great??! Step up to volunteer at turn corners the night of bike party. Find the green flag to find our volunteer coordinator.Failing to provide critical information on a project. Spreading malicious rumors about coworkers. Destroying or stealing company equipment. Giving classified product information to a competitor.
These are just a few of the ways I’ve seen employees retaliate toward a company for perceived injustices. Plaintiffs don’t talk about what happened (I’m suing because I lost my job or because I was sexually harassed) nearly as much as they relate stories of interpersonal inconsideration and abuse (no one took my complaint seriously, I was marched out the door accompanied by a security guard).
When Employee Trust is Broken
In a work environment, revenge occurs in response to violations of trust, i.e., when expectations concerned another person’s behavior are not met, or when that person does not act consistent with one’s values. Violations of interpersonal justice, i.e.., how one expects to be treated, tend to evoke the strongest emotional responses, ranging from anger to moral outrage.
There is evidence, for example, that dismissals or terminations do not provoke violence in and of themselves. Rather, vengeful attitudes and behaviors result from the humiliation that occurs when terminations are conducted in an abusive and insensitive manner. In fact, numerous studies have found a relationship between unpopular decisions or outcomes (being terminated, for example) and retaliation only when there was anger over how the decision was carried out (was the person treated with respect?) and how it was made (was the decision-making process fair?).
Over 80% of the cases of workplace homicide involve employees who want to get even for what they perceived as their organizations’ unfair or unjust treatment of them. This is not to deny the role of individual differences and how they interact with different workplace situations. An employee who explodes may have a higher level of aggression to contribute to the outburst.
Workplace Retaliation: Don’t Break Your Psychological Contract
Retaliation at work doesn’t just occur in response to interpersonal abuse or humiliation. It can also result from the perceived violation of a psychological contract, i.e., the expectations that both employees and employees bring to the employment relationship that operate above and beyond the formal job responsibilities.
The currency of the psychological contract is not traditional compensation. Rather, it involves intangibles such as respect, freedom from harassment, recognition, continuous, accurate, and updated communications, and opportunities-to-grow and develop. An abusive manager, unrealistic sales projections given to a candidate during a hiring interview, a grievance that falls on deaf ears – these are all things that can lead to a sense of betrayal and injustice – and fantasies of revenge.
Improving Your Fairness Quotient
Human resources can play a vital role in organizational justice by:
Checking all policies and work rules to assure that there are procedures that create fairness. The important ones center on pay, diversity, and etc. Look at decisions made in implementing these rules and general working practices to assure that fairness and equality is explicit in all supervisory and management decisions about employees and their work. Including leadership and interpersonal skills in your management development program, including 360-degree evaluations by subordinates, coworkers and management. Making sure all candidates are provided with “realistic job previews” (i.e., providing an accurate description of the job, organization, and opportunities, including both positive and negative features). Providing multiple avenues for employees to deal with grievances (and the feelings associated with them). For example, in addition to formal grievance procedures, engage your EAP to give informal talks during corporate transitions and offer outplacement services during layoffs.
The Bottom Line
“Revenge is a confession of pain,” says a Latin proverb. While there are many reasons employees engage in sabotaging or aggressive acts in the workplace, HR can play an active role in reducing the odds it would be in response to an unfair or abusive work environment.
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Like this: Like Loading... RelatedWhat happens when women represent 7 out of every 10 students across an entire class of colleges?
Men’s athletics get the ax – or more accurately, they get clear-cut.
This is the situation facing historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) as they struggle to comply with Title IX and its “proportionality standard,” according to a report in ESPN’s race and culture site The Undefeated:
When Clark Atlanta University announced this summer that it was suspending its men’s track and field program, alarms were sounded in some corners of the historically black colleges and universities landscape — as well in the community at large. Here is a school in Atlanta, which hosted the Summer Olympics just 20 years ago. Those games featured gold medal-winning sprinter Michael Johnson and long jumper Carl Lewis. Was there not sufficient momentum built to sustain a viable track and field program for at least a couple of generations? Isn’t there an almost unlimited number of potential men in the Atlanta area alone who can run and jump?
Clark Atlanta is 74 percent women – yet the athletic director cited “resources, competitiveness, gender equity and facilities” as factors behind the decision to “right-size the department.”
Historically Black Colleges and Universities struggle with Title IX compliance #SavingSports https://t.co/npPiVhJGv5 — Saving Sports (@SavingSports) August 1, 2016
It’s emblematic of schools in predominantly black conferences, where more than a dozen sports – “mainly of the nonrevenue variety” – have been dropped or suspended in the past five years.
MORE: Club sports under threat from Title IX
Because “HBCUs are facing stiffer competition for students from predominantly white mid-major institutions looking to keep all their numbers in balance,” their sports programs are out of whack.
The commissioner of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Conference said baseball is “on the watch” and men’s tennis “is a concern. I am concerned about the men’s sports in our conference.”
It’s not just male athletes that suffer – it’s the people of color that coach them, according to Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Commissioner Gregory Moore:
“Although HBCUs make up approximately 5 percent of NCAA institutions, 32 out of 38 NCAA Division II African-American head football coaches for example [almost 90 percent] are employed at HBCUs. “So when an HBCU institution drops a sport, it’s not simply a loss of an invaluable participation opportunity for our student-athletes, but very often a person of color has also lost a coaching opportunity at a time when we desperately need more minority and women coaches — not less.”
Read the story and previous research by the American Sports Council on Title IX’s disparate impact on black men.
MORE: Forget transgender students – let straight men in women’s locker rooms
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IMAGE: Brook Ward/FlickrThis post kicks off our "DCoded" series, a partnership with the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, DC. Each installment takes you inside Washington and provides a look at the most important bills, regulations, think tankery, and bloviation on issues that will affect your Internet experience. First up: smartphones and privacy.
I have nostalgic memories of building computers with my father in the early 1990s. We’d set jumpers on motherboards, string together previously unrelated pieces of hardware, and pray for a successful boot screen. The process was arcane and often frustrating—definitely not for everyone. But the result was a machine that was decidedly our own.
When connectivity dawned on personal computing, users were still squarely in the driver’s seat. My first dial-up Internet access was limited to twenty hours per month, requiring careful timekeeping on a clipboard that hung next the monitor. I would dart onto the Web, download articles and shareware games, then log off to preserve precious connection time. I was in control.
Today, it’s a different story; our devices are more opaque and more connected than ever before. As a result, gadget geeks face a whole stack of privacy concerns the minute they fire up a new smartphone. Wireless carriers might be using their online browsing habits for market research; the hardware itself comes equipped with GPS, a camera, a microphone, and other sensors; the operating system might quietly compile logs of the user’s location; and other pre-installed software might include hidden processes like CarrierIQ.
And this is all before installing the first app.
Recently, data security expert Bruce Schneier said, “I have much less control over this iPhone than I do over my computer... I cannot do things on this machine that I can do on my computer. I can’t erase data to my satisfaction; I can’t run an antivirus program to anybody’s satisfaction. Because Apple isn’t giving me the same level of control, of access that I have to a PC or even to a Mac.”
Schneier’s point holds true for other smartphones and consumer electronics of all kinds.
It’s also true that not all users need—or even want—root level access to their devices. Heavily sandboxed computing environments have led to more stable, user-friendly devices. But the less we know, the less we can understand and control. “Computers seem more like specific appliances—but it’s never an appliance, it’s a computer with spyware on it out of the box,” is Cory Doctrow’s blunt assessment.
This creates a puzzle pitting convenience against privacy. Solving it has urgency because smartphones are deeply personal, always-connected, and increasingly cloud-reliant. They have all the power of traditional computing platforms plus the ability to precisely track our location. They’ve already become our personal assistants and will eventually replace our wallets. We’re literally falling in love with the things.
These two trends—receding control and increasing reliance on third parties to manage and serve up our personal data—mean that we badly need an update to our privacy laws.
The incomplete patchwork of US privacy laws sets a low bar for many companies. The Federal Trade Commission can police companies that lie about their data practices, but this isn’t enough on its own. As companies rush to collect more data, they’re also making fewer disclosures. As result, it can be hard, even for privacy professionals, to know what’s being collected and how it’s being used.
Piecemeal policy
A small set of federal lawmakers have struggled recently to address privacy threats in the mobile space. The result is a handful of bills (which have yet to be passed) and letters to companies and regulators (which have no legal effect, but can exert pressure). These efforts hit on important issues and are worth highlighting, but this piecemeal approach has yet to produce meaningful protections.
A number of recent bills have focused on location. Senators Al Franken (D-MN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) have introduced the Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011, which would require consent before a company collects or shares our location information. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) proposed the Geolocational Surveillance and Privacy (GPS) Act, which would require government agencies to obtain a warrant—in accordance with our Fourth Amendment rights—to track our location, and also to restrain companies from sharing location data about their customers without consent. Both bills would be welcome protections, especially given that even phones without GPS can still be used to track owners who connect to cell towers and to Wi-Fi networks.
Highly publicized software scandals have also drawn the attention of Congress. The CarrierIQ uproar prompted letters from Franken to carriers and handset makers. Recently, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) released a draft of the Mobile Device Privacy Act, which would require your permission before monitoring software is used on a mobile device. This is a complicated issue, but it’s hard to argue against the idea that users should always be able to see what software is running on their devices. This bill might not be primed for passage, but it recognizes the importance of true transparency and control.
This scattershot approach from Congress demonstrates that at least some policymakers are paying attention. Even without the bills’ passage into law, these efforts raise awareness and put pressure on companies to observe responsible policies. Unfortunately, the introduction of these bills hasn’t changed the ground rules: at the end of the day, we have little control over or even awareness about how our information is collected and used. This is unsustainable.
The Obama Administration recently published a Consumer Bill of Rights and recommended that it be codified into federal law. The principles contained in the report are designed to empower individuals in the highly connected environment we live in today. They include concepts like “individual choice,” transparency,” and reasonable limits on the personal data that companies can collect—fundamental building blocks of a sound privacy framework.
In the absence of legislation, the administration has committed to working with companies, advocates, and academics to advance these goals. This process is currently in the planning stage, and the Administration has indicated that the mobile space is a top concern (see its recent report).
The Federal Trade Commission recently released a much-anticipated Privacy Report and joined the administration in asking Congress to consider a law. The Report itself is a nuanced articulation of privacy challenges and solutions—all good stuff—but it’s not legally binding. Without Congressional support, some of the best suggestions in the Privacy Report don’t have teeth.
Non-governmental actors can have some sway, too. The GSMA, a trade group for mobile operators and related companies worldwide, recently released a strong set of mobile privacy guidelines. CDT recently published a set of app developer best practices in an effort to help with the app side of the equation. Other initiatives are underway across the industry and public interest spheres.
But the bottom line is this: we deserve to have better laws on the books. Modest progress is welcome, but without fundamental change, our privacy remains at risk.2018 - Arkansas Ballot Issue Voter Guide
Issue 1 - An Amendment Concerning Civil Lawsuits and the Powers of the General Assembly and Supreme Court to Adopt Court Rules Struck from the ballot
Issue 2 - A Constitutional Amendment Adding as a Qualification to Vote that a Voter Present Certain Valid Photographic Identification when Casting a Ballot In Person or Casting an Absentee Ballot Voters approved
Issue 3 - Arkansas Term Limits Amendment Struck from the ballot
Issue 4 - An Amendment to Require Four Licenses to be Issued for Casino Gaming at Casinos, One Each in Crittenden (to Southland Racing Corporation), Garland (to Oaklawn Jockey Club, Inc.), Pope, and Jefferson Counties Voters approved
Issue 5 - An Act to Increase the Arkansas Minimum Wage Voters approved
2016 - Arkansas Ballot Issue Voter Guide
Issue 1 - An Amendment to the Arkansas Constitution Concerning the Terms, Election, and Eligibility of Elected Officials Voters approved
Issue 2 - A Constitutional Amendment to Allow the Governor to Retain His or Her Powers and Duties When Absent From the State Voters approved
Issue 3 - An Amendment to the Arkansas Constitution Concerning Job Creation, Job Expansion, and Economic Development Voters approved
Issue 6 - The Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment of 2016 Voters approved
2014
Issue 1 - An Amendment Empowering the General Assembly to Provide for Legislative Committee Review and Approval of State Agencies' Administrative Rules Voters approved
Issue 2 - An Amendment Allowing More Time to Gather Signatures on a State-Wide Initiative or Referendum Petition Only if the Petition as Originally Filed Contained at Least 75% of the Valid Signatures Required Voters approved
Issue 3 - An Amendment Regulating Contributions to Candidates for State or Local Office, Barring Gifts from Lobbyists to Certain State Officials, Providing for Setting Salaries of Certain State Officials, and Setting Term Limits for Members of the General Assembly Voters approved
Issue 4 - The Arkansas Alcoholic Beverage Amendment Voters rejected
Issue 5 - An Act to Increase the Arkansas Minimum Wage Voters approved
2012
• Issue Number 1 - Providing Additional Funds for State Highways County Roads, City Street, Bridges, and Other Surface Transportation - FSPPC309 (PDF) - An amendment to provide additional funding for state highways, county roads, city streets, bridges, and other surface transportation. [Spanish - FSPPC309SP]
• Issue Number 2 - Giving Cities and Counties Additional Financing Powers - FSPPC311 (PDF) - An amendment concerning municipal and county financing of sales tax anticipated revenue bond projects, unfunded liabilities of closed local police and fire pension plans, and real and tangible personal property. [Spanish - FSPPC311SP]
• Issue Number 5 - Making the Medical Use of Marijuana Legal Under Arkansas Law and Creating a System for Cultivation, Acquisition and Distribution - FSPPC310 (PDF) - An amendment to make the medical use of Marijuana legal under Arkansas law and create a system for cultivation, acquisition and distribution.
2011
• Issuance of State of Arkansas Federal Highway Grant Anticipation and Tax Revenue Bonds and Pledge of Full Faith and Credit of the State Of Arkansas - FSPPC308 (PDF) - Issuance of State of Arkansas Federal Highway Grant Anticipation and Tax Revenue Bonds and Pledge of Full Faith and Credit of thee State Of Arkansas.
2010
• Issue No. 1 An Amendment to Provide a Constitutional Right to Hunt, Fish, Trap, and Harvest Wildlife - FSPPC305 (PDF) - An amendment providing that Arkansas citizens have a right to hunt, fish, trap, and harvest wildlife subject to regulations that promote wildlife conservation and management.
• Issue No. 2 - An Amendment Concerning Interest Rate Limits And The Issuance Of Government Bonds For Energy Efficiency Projects – FSPPC306 (PDF) - An amendment concerning interest-rate limits and the issuance of governmental bonds to finance energy efficiency projects.
• Issue No. 3 An Amendment to Lower the Threshold For Issuing State Bonds to Attract Major Industries – FSPPC307 (PDF) - An amendment to the Arkansas Constitution Amendment 82 removing fixed criteria for the issuance of economic development bonds bearing the full faith and credit of the state of Arkansas and giving the General Assembly the authority to set criteria through legislation.
2008
• Proposed Constitutional Amendment No. 1 - FSPPC301 (PDF) - An amendment concerning voting, qualifications of voters and election officers, and the time of holding general elections.
• Proposed Constitutional Amendment No. 2 - FSPPC300 (PDF) - An amendment providing that no legislative appropriation shall be for a period longer than one year, providing for fiscal legislative sessions, requiring the General Assembly to meet every year with regular sessions continuing to be held in odd-numbered years and fiscal sessions held in even-numbered years, unless the General Assembly votes to hold regular sessions in even-numbered years and fiscal sessions in odd-numbered years, and allowing the General Assembly to consider non-fiscal matters during a fiscal session upon approval of two-thirds of both houses.
• Proposed Constitutional Amendment No. 3 - FSPPC304 (PDF) - A constitutional amendment authorizing the General Assembly to establish, operate, and regulate state lotteries to fund scholarships and grants for Arkansas citizens enrolled in certified two-year and four-year colleges and universities in Arkansas.
• Proposed Initiative Act No. 1 - FSPPC302 (PDF) - An act providing that an individual who is cohabitating outside of a valid marriage may not adopt or be a foster parent of a child less than eighteen years old.
• Referred Question No. 1 - FSPPC 303 (PDF) - Arkansas Water, Waste Disposal, and Pollution Abatement Facilities Financing Act of 2007
2006
• Proposed Constitutional Amendment No. 1 - Bingos and Raffles - PPC001 (PDF) - Proposed Constitutional Amendment to allow Bingo and Raffles to be conducted by charitable organizations and to authorize the General Assembly to adopt laws regulating and taxing charitable Bingo and Raffles.
• Referred Question No. 1 - Arkansas Higher Education Technology and Facility Improvement Act of 2005 - PPC002 (PDF) - Arkansas Higher Education Technology and Facility Improvement Act of 2005
• General Information About Bonds - PPC003 (PDF)
2005
• Referred Question No. 1, Arkansas Interstate Highway Financing Act of 2005 - PIEC001 (PDF) - Arkansas Interstate Highway Financing Act of 2005
• Referred Question No. 2, Arkansas Higher Education Technology and Facility Improvement Act of 2005 PIEC002 (PDF) - Arkansas Higher Education Technology and Facility Improvement Act of 2005
• General Information About Bonds - PIEC003 (PDF)The EU's counter-terrorism chief Gilles de Kerchove has said that around 3,000 people from across Europe are now working alongside Isis fighters, compared with about 2,000 just a few months ago.
Gilles de Kerchove told news agency AFP that at least eleven European countries including Sweden have seen citizens travel to Iraq and Syria.
He said that numbers may have been boosted by the Isis declaration in June of a caliphate (an area ruled by a supreme religious and political leader) straddling the two countries. "The flow has not dried up and therefore possibly the proclamation of the caliphate has had some impact," de Kerchove said.
Just over a month ago a Swedish terrorism expert - Magnus Ranstorp - estimated that between 300 and 350 Scandinavians had links to Isis.
On Wednesday the Swedish National Defense College representative told The Local that the average age of fighters who have left Sweden to join the group is 21.
"That means that there are of course younger ones too who are 18 or 19, that is common," said Ranstorp.
In Germany, growing numbers of teenagers are also reported to be joining Isis, with at least 24 people under 18 known to have made the journey to Syria or Iraq.
Magnus Ranstorp is currently in Brussels where he is heading up a working group that is researching foreign fighters for the EU's Radicalization Awareness Network.
"We have been working hard to help affected cities across Europe, by seeing what we can do locally to stop people from signing up and how local authorities can help re-integrate fighters who have returned home," he told The Local.
"But it is a big challenge, " he added.
He hopes that former Social Democrat leader Mona Sahlin's recent appointment as Sweden's national coordinator against violent extremism will help improve communication between cities, organisations and agencies dealing with Isis recruits.
"The problem is that many people signing up are from Sweden's poorer suburbs and their decision is linked to other factors such as housing problems, difficulties securing jobs - even at a low level - and territorial gangs."
Most Isis fighters from Sweden have so far been recruited from Gothenburg, where at least 50 are known to have signed up.
Islamic militants are also known to have travelled abroad from Stockholm and Malmö as well as smaller towns such as Norköpping and Linköping in eastern Sweden. Magnus Ranstorp told The Local he is also aware of Islamic militants living in the north of the country.
The US has begun air strikes in Syria. Photo: Uncredited. Source: TT
Gilles de Kerchove's comments about the Europe-wide increase in Isis fighters came hours after the United States and its Arab allies began strikes from land and sea |
ry, born in Stuttgart, followed a path in football despite also being a talented sprinter as a youngster.
The versatile winger joined Arsenal in 2011 after impressing for VfB Stuttgart.
Gnabry made his first-team debut for the Gunners in a League Cup triumph over Coventry City in 2012 and has since gone on to gain Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup experience, signing a new long-term contract with the London club in 2013.
In all, he has played 19 times for Arsenal, scoring once – that goal coming in a Premier League victory at Swansea City in 2013.
Gnabry also featured for Germany in this summer’s UEFA European Under-21 Championships.You are not my worst nightmare, Linda Sarsour. What is my worst nightmare is another radical extremist waging jihad against people I know and love.
On September 11, 2001, Islamic extremists killed 2,977 innocent people on American soil. Among the dead were two of my classmates’ fathers who worked in the Twin Towers. We were in seventh grade at the time, just old enough to understand what happened, but too young to understand why.
Over the next decade, I became obsessed with understanding the ideology behind these attacks. How could humans harbor so much hate? To this day, it’s still hard for me to comprehend. But what I learned over the years is that the 19 al-Qaeda terrorists who committed those atrocious attacks were inspired by “jihad.” Since then, many more have followed in their footsteps.
So last week when I heard Muslim-American activist Linda Sarsour call for “jihad” against President Donald Trump, I was “triggered,” to say the least. To be clear, Sarsour did not call for violent jihad against Trump. Anyone who suggests otherwise is intellectually dishonest. For context, Sarsour said in her original speech (which can also be viewed in full here):
“I hope, that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad. We are struggling against tyrants and rulers not only abroad in the Middle East but here in the United States of America, where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.”
What’s also intellectually dishonest, however, is Sarsour’s assertion that those criticizing her for evoking jihad against the Trump administration is doing so because she’s “their worst nightmare.” You are not my worst nightmare, Sarsour. In fact, I respect you for having the strength to speak out about your beliefs. What is my worst nightmare, however, is another radical extremist waging jihad against people I know and love.
We’re Not Ignorant About the Meaning of Jihad
Since giving her speech at the Islamic Society of North American convention, Sarsour has faced an onslaught of criticism. She says those attacking her are taking the term “jihad” out of context. In The Washington Post, Sarsour responded:
Most disturbing about this recent defamation campaign is how it is focused on demonizing the legitimate yet widely misunderstood Islamic term I used, ‘jihad,’ which to majority of Muslims and according to religious scholars means ‘struggle’ or ‘to strive for.’ This term has been hijacked by Muslim extremists and right-wing extremists alike, leaving ordinary Muslims to defend our faith and in some cases silenced. It sets a dangerous precedent when people of faith are policed and when practicing their religion peacefully comes with consequences.
Here, Sarsour suggests that anyone who has a problem with her use of “jihad” is peddling and promoting a false definition of the term for the sole purpose of defaming her. She furthermore implies that it’s the fault of our own ignorance that the term “jihad” is so profoundly misunderstood. (What the true meaning ultimately is, I’ll leave to Muslim scholars to decide.)
But if Sarsour really cared about reclaiming this word from the terrorists who so obviously “hijacked” it, she might first consider educating news outlets of its meaning prior to evoking it as a “peaceful” form of protest. Among those news outlets that could use her wisdom are The Washington Post and The New York Times. Certainly, headlines like, “Fifteen Years After 9/11, the Jihadist Threat Looms Larger Than Ever Across the Globe” (The Washington Post) and “The Origins of Jihadist-Inspired Attackers In the U.S.” (The New York Times) suggest a fundamental “misunderstanding” of the term.
Don’t Blame Us For Offense At Deliberate Provocation
In wake of the backlash she received from this speech, Sarsour wrote in The Washington Post, “It saddens me deeply that my three children are frightened.” She added, “It angers me that I have to think about securing my physical safety even while walking through the neighborhoods of Brooklyn.”
Well, Sarsour, it saddens me that Islamic extremists justified the slaughter of my classmates’ fathers with “jihad” when they were only in the seventh grade. It saddens me that every day after that, I felt compelled to pray that my father would make it home after he boarded his train for New York City. It also angers me that when I graduated college and moved to New York City, I, too, had to fear for my physical safety, worried that someone might justify an attack against me in the name of jihad.
If you want to have a theological debate about the true meaning of jihad, you’re blessed with the platform to start it. But in using the term during your speech, that’s not what you were doing. A smart, educated activist, you knew calling for jihad against our president would be inflammatory. Then you went one step further—you blamed us for being offended.
I pray that when I raise children of my own, they’ll have to know only about the peaceful side of “jihad” of which you so fondly speak. But in a day and age where terror attacks happen so regularly, we have no choice but to view jihad as an ugly, violent, and painful part of our personal experience. In the least, I would hope you can respect that.In my long-term quest to host all of my data on my systems, one of the major points is to replace the note-taking app Google Keep with something that allows me to take my notes back to me. I've looked at various open-source apps for taking and synchronizing notes, but they either feel like overdesigned monsters that don't fit my workflow (Laverna) or don't have good synchronization from mobile phone to the server.
So, I've been writing my own, which is an interesting travel investigating Javascript, HTML and offline Javascript applications running in the browser. Wanting to put up an online demo has made me paranoid with regards to (g)zip bombs in HTTP requests and responses, and I found no easy way to limit the request size before decompression.
My first target is HTTP::Message, because it is used by LWP. I implemented a rough and ugly prototype for limiting the size of a response before decompressing. I'm not a big fan of the API, but in my limited tests, it was easy to set a global or per-message limit of the size of responses and the decompression would die when the resource limit was reached.
The patch is unapplied, but I'm considering simply releasing it as HTTP::Message::Paranoid or HTTP::Message::ResourceLimit, just to get the code out onto CPAN. Many modules allow specifying the package used for request handling and that module can monkey-patch HTTP::Message anyway.
Another slow-burning project I have is a module for automatic convenient content extraction from web pages. An interesting project for that is ftr-site-config who maintain a set of web page description and extraction. I contributed some syntax corrections to some of their files, because my parser choked on them.
Maybe I should automate the syntax check for the project, to give some kind of continous integration. One problem with web scraping is that sites constantly change, so a test suite that talks to the outside world requires permanent attention and review.This article is about public sex. For sexual position, see Doggy style. For other uses, see Dogging
Vandalised "Dog On Leash Only" sign amended to refer to dogging, Kennington Park, London, 2012
Dogging is a British English slang term for engaging in sexual acts in a public or semi-public place or watching others doing so.[1] There may be more than two participants; both group sex and gang banging can be included. As observation is encouraged, voyeurism and exhibitionism are closely associated with dogging. The two sets of people involved often meet either randomly or (increasingly) arrange to meet up beforehand over the Internet.[2]
In September 2003 BBC News[3] reported on the "new" dogging craze. They cited the Internet and text messaging as common ways of organising meetings. The original definition of dogging—and which is still a closely related activity—is spying on couples having sex in a car or other public place,[4] and the term had been in use on Britain's railways for many years. It would have been well-known at least as far back as 1951[5].
There is some evidence on the Internet that the "craze" has begun to spread to other countries, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Barbados, Brazil, Denmark,[6] the Netherlands, Norway,[7] Poland,[8] and Sweden.[9][10]
Legality [ edit ]
In Great Britain, dogging comes under laws related to voyeurism, exhibitionism, or public displays of sexual behaviour; the laws on dogging are ambiguous. Prosecution is possible for a number of offences such as section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986,[11] exposure under section 66 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003,[12] or for the common law offence of outraging public decency. As of 2010, Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) policy was that arrests are a last resort and a more gradual approach should be taken in such circumstances.[13]
Some countries may also have laws regarding permitting, or being reckless as to whether, a minor watches or becomes exposed to sexual activities.
Terminology [ edit ]
The Sunday Herald of Scotland wrote in 2003, "The term dogging originated in the early 1970s to describe men who spied on couples having sex outdoors—these men would 'dog' the couples' every move and watch them."[14] An alternative etymology posits dog walking as the origin of the term; audience members, and indeed participants, could use the ordinary exercise of their pets as cover for their sexual assignations.[1]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes
BibliographyA Hair Mystery: Curly Hair Gone Straight
toggle caption David Scharf/Corbis
Web Chat Web Chat: How Often Should You Shampoo? The reason for your lackluster locks? You may be washing your hair too much. See what the experts had to say in response to your questions.
Some people have straight hair and want curly hair. Others have curls and straighten them out. But for a few people, their hair actually changes shape and texture on its own — and not just because of the weather. Scientists don't know exactly why this happens, but it probably has to do with a combination of genetics, hormones and body chemistry.
"Every seven to 10 years, my hair tends to change texture, going from straight to wavy to curly," says Kimberly Fasting-Berg, a marketing executive in New York City.
"I can't predict but then it happens and I am like, 'Oh, here we go again,'" she says.
Judy Butler, a midwife in Tucson, Ariz., also has hair that's gone from straight to curly and vice versa, so when she saw changes in the hair of her three kids she wasn't surprised.
"My first two [kids] had very straight hair as infants, I mean stick straight," Butler says. But when her kids hit puberty, she says their hair become "very curly, very wavy and very frizzy."
Curly locks have always sprung from my head, so I wondered, how often does hair change, and could it happen to me?
I set off on a quest to find out.
Searching For Hair Clues In Our Genes
First I started with Dr. Barry Starr, a geneticist at Stanford University. He told me most people's hair doesn't change from straight to curly.
"If your mom gives you a curly version of the gene and so does your dad, you end up with curly hair. If both parents give you the straight version you end up with straight hair," Starr says. And if one gives you curly and the other straight, you could wind up with something in between.
But, he couldn't tell me why some people go through a hair transformation. "It is an interesting genetic question, but I don't think there is an answer yet — and there may not be," he says.
What Shapes Our Hair?
The next person I called is Dr. Paradi Mirmirani, a dermatologist in Vallejo, Calif., who specializes in hair. "We do know that curly hair has a different shape than straight hair," says Mirmirani.
That shape depends on the shape of the hair follicle. This tiny structure guides the hair fiber up a sort of tube as it grows. The inside of the tube determines if the hair is curly or straight — ovals produce curly hair and circular tubes yield straight hair.
"If you think about gift wrapping ribbon, when you try to make it curly, you take the scissors and you pull it on one side, so you kind of flatten the one side and it curls. So you're changing the shape of one side compared to the other," says Mirmirani. "When it's oval, one side is curved and the other side is flat, which makes it curl."
So if your hair changes from straight to curly it suggests that the follicles must be changing, but Mirmirani couldn't tell me why that would happen, though she thought it could have something to do with hormones.
An Influence From Hormones?
After all, hair changes in other ways during adolescence or after having a baby, two events that generate hormonal changes in the body.
"Hormones are a logical guess but I have no evidence to prove that," says Dr. Val Randall, an endocrinologist at the University of Bradford in England.
Randall is one of the few people doing research on hormones and hair. She says it is difficult to figure something like this out because it doesn't happen very often.
But, says Randall, change is possible because hair is always replacing itself:
"The hair that you have on your head age 10 is not the hair that you have on your head age 2, and it is not the hair you have on your head age 50," Randall says.
If the new follicles grow back a different shape, then your new hair will be different, too.
Hair Care From The Inside-Out
I made at least a dozen more calls but I couldn't find anyone who knew more about the curly-straight question. I did find out that there is an entire industry working on it.
"There are multimillion-dollar research projects going on looking at how to change hair shape because this would be a billion-dollar business," says Dr. Zoe Draelos, a dermatologist in High Point, N.C. Her research is supported by the cosmetics industry, which is looking beyond perms and irons. For the industry, figuring out a simple way to turn hair straight or curly would be a goldmine.
"Wouldn't it be great if you took a pill and your hair turned curly?" says Draelos. "I mean, can you imagine how that would revolutionize hair care, and then you could take another pill, and you could reverse it the next day."
Until then, I think I will stick with my curls.The city’s Campaign Finance Board slapped Mayor Bill de Blasio this afternoon with $47,778 in penalties for an array of violations connected with his 2013 campaign—including verboten post-election expenses, travel costs for his son and “makeup services” for his family.
The mayor, who did not have anyone appear on his behalf at the board’s monthly meeting, also has to repay $485.02 in public funds, which represents the campaign’s final bank balance. The decision comes just as the City Council is set to vote on a package of bills that seek to restructure the city’s campaign finance system, and two weeks after the board whacked ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner with $64,856 in fines for his improprieties in the Democratic primary for mayor three years ago.
“While we strongly disagree with many of the CFB’s findings, we are pleased that the 2013 campaign audit is now complete,” Dan Levitan, a campaign spokesman for de Blasio, said in an emailed statement.
His biggest fine was $21,159 for making impermissible post-election expenditures. In a summary of its final determination for the de Blasio, the board said that the campaign paid Hilltop Public Solutions $168,750 for post-election services, $116,250 of which they said are improper post-election expenses.
The mayor’s campaign said that Hilltop served as its general consultant and that it was qualified to oversee the initial post-election “winding down work” as well as the “final winding down” work—and cited the hiring of Bill Hyers as contributing to the firm’s “unique” qualifications. The campaign also said the firm was paid on an as-needed basis as opposed to a standard monthly retainer so the fees paid under contract are nominal.
Hyers is one of the five infamous “agents of the city” whose email correspondence with the administration de Blasio has refused to release—even in the face of lawsuits from the press.
But the board said that the campaign failed to provide ample documentation and explanations outlining the responsibilities, work product and other services Hilltop provided.
The next biggest fine was $12,483 for accepting over-the-limit contributions, followed by $6,086 for accepting contributions from corporations, limited liability companies or partnerships and $3,200 for failing to demonstrate compliance with intermediary reporting and documentation requirements.
He was also fined for $2,087 for failing to file/late filing of daily pre-election disclosure statements and $1,000 for accepting contributions from unregistered political committees.
Other smaller penalties were $407 for failing to report transactions, $300 for failing to document transactions and $250 for commingling with campaign funds accepted for a different election.
The mayor was also fined $806 for failing to demonstrate that spending was in furtherance of the campaign. In particular, the board notes $550 spent on makeup services for de Blasio and his family on Election Night, which his campaign descried as a legitimate expense because it was meant to prepare them for their scheduled televised public campaign appearances “at a likely victory celebration.” But the board stated that using campaign funds for “personal grooming” is prohibited.
Levitan said that the use of makeup for election night appearances is “clearly a campaign expense” and called the Washington, D.C. trip an important one “taken as part of the campaign.” He also said that the board’s own rules would prohibit Hilltop from not charging for the campaign’s wind-down work.
Another expenditure that the board flagged as not campaign-related was $287.70 to Delta Air for his son Dante to accompany him to a National Action Network march and rally to commemorate the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. in 2010.
The campaign said was an opportunity for Dante to appear at the event “as a visible manifestation of how the [C}andidate’s life experience was resonant to the spirit of the occasion.” The campaign also said the appearance was equivalent to television ads featuring any candidate’s family members. But the board dismissed the explanations as insufficient.
Christine Quinn, who challenged de Blasio in the 2013 mayoral primary, was fined a total of $13,611 for her campaign. City Comptroller Scott Stringer, a rumored rival to de Blasio in next year’s Democratic primary, got charged more than $10,000 for failing to report transactions in his 2013 bid to become the city’s chief financial officer.
The majority of the fines stem from accepting over-the-limit contributions, for which she was charged $5,425. The next biggest fine was $3,200 for failing to demonstrate compliance with intermediary reporting and documentation requirements, followed by $1,962 for accepting contributions from corporations, LLCs or partnerships.
She was also fined for $975 for accepting contributions from unregistered political committees, $750 for failing to report bank accounts used for campaign purposes, $502 for failing to document transactions, $500 for failing to provide bank/merchant statements and $297 for failing to report transactions.Resident Evil fans have a lot to look forward to next year, what with the release of the latest instalment in the movie franchise, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, along with the hotly-anticipated video game Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.
Well, we can now add a CG-animated feature to that list, with Resident Evil: Vendetta announced at the Tokyo Game Show this past week. Here’s a couple of promotional images which were shown at TGS:
The film, titled Biohazard: Vendetta in Japan, will feature the characters of Leon S. Kennedy, Chris Redfield and Rebecca Chambers in an original story, which is said to be similar to the plot for the original videogame.
Takanori Tsujimoto (Bushido Man) is directing Vendetta from a script by Makoto Fukami (Psycho-Pass), with Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge) executive producing. It is set for release in Spring 2017 in Japan.Readers have been awestruck by the “missing day” legend since at least 1936, when the story emerged into popular culture via a book by Harry Rimmer, titled The Harmony of Science and Scripture, as reflected in this 1999 example from the Internet:
For all the scientists out there and for all the students who have a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the Bible … here’s something that shows God’s awesome creation and shows that He is still in control. Did you know that the space program is busy proving that what has been called “myth” in the Bible is true? Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore Maryland and a consultant in the space program,
relates the following development. “I think one of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at GreenBelt, Maryland. They were checking the position of the sun, moon, and planets out in space where they would be 100 years and 1000 years from now. We have to know this so we won’t send a satellite, up and have it bump into something later on in its orbits. We have to lay out the orbits in terms of the life of the satellite, and where the planets will be so the whole thing will not bog down. They ran the computer measurement back and forth over the centuries and it came to a halt. The computer stopped and put up a red signal, which meant that there was something wrong either with the information fed into it or with the results as compared to the standards. They called in the service department to check it out and they said, “What’s wrong?” Well, they found there is a day missing in space in elapsed time. They scratched their heads and tore their hair. There was no answer. Finally, a Christian man on the team said, “You know, one time I was in Sunday School and they talked about the sun standing still.” While they didn’t believe him, they didn’t have an answer either, so they said, “Show us.” He got a Bible and went back to the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for any one with “common sense.” There they found the Lord saying to Joshua, “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not a man of them stand before thee.” Joshua was concerned because he was surrounded by the enemy and if darkness fell they would overpower them. So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still! That’s right — “The sun stood still and the moon stayed — and hasted not to go down about a whole day!” (Joshua 10:12-13) The astronauts and scientists said, “There is the missing day!” They checked the computers going back into the time it was written and found it was close but not close enough. The elapsed time that was missing back in Joshua’s day was 23 hours and 20 minutes — not a whole day. They read the Bible and there it was “about (approximately) a day” These little words in the Bible are important, but they were still in trouble because if you cannot account for 40 minutes you’ll still be in trouble 1,000 years from now. Forty minutes had to be found because it can be multiplied many times over in orbits. As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible where it said the sun went BACKWARDS. The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but they got out the Book and read these words in 2 Kings that told of the following story: Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet Isaiah who told him that he was not going to die. Hezekiah asked for a sign as proof. Isaiah said “Do you want the sun to go ahead 10 degrees?” Hezekiah said “It is nothing for the sun to go ahead 10 degrees, but let the shadow return backward 10 degrees.” Isaiah spoke to the Lord and the Lord brought the shadow ten degrees BACKWARD! Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes! Twenty-three hours and 20 minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in Second Kings make the missing day in the universe!” Isn’t it amazing?
In his own work, Rimmer cited an 1890 book as his proof of the calculations behind the tale. Scholars dismissed Rimmer’s claims as baseless, but despite the authoritative debunkings of that time and in the years since, the legend continues to thrive. Indeed, the Internet has given it new legs, and spreading it to new audiences is as easy as clicking the ‘forward’ button.
Although the notion of a “lost day” in time has been circulating for well over a century, the version cited here, which has been bedevilling NASA since the 1960s, achieved pre-eminence through the tireless efforts of Mr. Harold Hill, who was indeed both a real person and the President of the Curtis Engine Company. However, he had no real connection to NASA, he was not a “consultant in the space program,” and he did not witness the events described. Mr. Hill merely heard a “lost day” legend that had been circulating for many years, embellished it with some details about NASA scientists, and delighted in repeating it when speaking before school groups. His version of the legend made its way into various church bulletins and was eventually picked up and spread by the mainstream media as well, and he devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book,(This book lent additional credibility to his tenuous NASA connections — and thus to the legend itself — when he stated that he “was involved [in the space program] from the start, through contractual arrangements with my company.” His “involvement” was merely that the Curtis Engine Company had a contract with NASA to service electrical generators.) Even Hill’s admission that he hadn’t actually witnessed the events he described clearly wasn’t intended to dissuade anyone from believing in the literal truthfulness of his story: “[M]y inability to furnish documentation of the ‘Missing day’ incident in no way detracts from its authenticity.”
The Public Affairs Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, responded to the prevalence of Hill’s fictitious story by issuing a press release that noted (among other things):
[This center] has no knowledge of the use of its computers supposed by Mr. Harold Hill and attributed to our scientists. Goddard does not apply its computers to the task of projecting thousands of years into the future or past, as this would be irrelevant to the operational lifetime of satellites, which rarely exceeds a dozen years. [Harold Hill] worked briefly at Goddard early in the 1960s as a plant engineer, a position which would not place him in direct contact with our computer facilities or teams engaged in orbital computations.
Historically, the notion of a “lost day” in time comes from a combination of two Old Testament passages. The first is from the Book of Joshua and describes Joshua’s defense of Gibeon from the five kings of the Amorites. In order to enable Joshua to finish off his enemies before they had a chance to flee under cover of darkness, God provided additional daylight by causing the sun to stand still in the sky for nearly a day:
10:12 Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. 10:13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day
The second passage, from 2 Kings, describes Hezekiah’s request that God move the sun ten degrees backwards as confirmation of his promise that Hezekiah would be delivered into Heaven:
20:8 And Hezekiah said unto Isaiah, What shall be the sign that the LORD will heal me, and that I shall go up into the house of the LORD the third day? 20:9 And Isaiah said, This sign shalt thou have of the LORD, that the LORD will do the thing that he hath spoken: shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees? 20:10 And Hezekiah answered, It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees: nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees. 20:11 And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.
One of the first issues we have to consider is that the Bible is thousands of years old, and the accounts it contains have come to us through many oral tellings, re-copyings, printings, and translations. We have to be very careful about presenting a specific interpretation of a single English word or phrase from one particular version of the Bible as being “what the Bible actually says.” Therefore, the first difficulty this legend presents is that nowhere in the Bible (in the Book of Joshua or elsewhere) is it stated that God made the sun stand still for exactly 23 hours and 20 minutes. Various translations word Joshua 10:13 differently, but most agree that the sun stood still for something less than a day: “about a whole day” or “nearly a day.” We’re told nothing more specific — “about a whole day” could also mean 22 hours and 48 minutes or 23 hours and 2 minutes; we have no way of telling. (The primary means of reckoning the passage of time in Joshua’s era was by observing the apparent movement of celestial bodies through the sky relative to the observer. It’s not likely any contemporary of Joshua’s could have recorded the length of time the sun stood still with this degree of precision under the best of circumstances, and certainly not when the sun and moon were both fixed in the sky, and the sun’s light prevented the sighting of any other stars.) As it turns out, the “23 hours and 20 minutes” figure was almost certainly an amount of time chosen by the legend’s originator for extra-scriptual reasons we’ll explain later.
The next difficulty is the interpretation presented in this legend of the statement in 2 Kings 20 about God’s moving “the shadow” backwards “ten degrees” as meaning that the sun’s shadow was moved backwards through ten angular degrees of measurement on a dial (presumably a sundial). Since a dial is a circle, and a circle contains 360 degrees, moving the sun’s shadow backwards ten degrees would correspond to resetting time by one thirty-sixth of day. One thirty-sixth of a twenty-four hour day is two-thirds of an hour, or forty minutes. Voilà! The problem is, 2 Kings 20 doesn’t quite say this — the word “degree” is an artifact of certain English translations. How this passage is presented in other translations is more general: that the sun’s shadow moved backwards ten steps (or ten units or ten intervals or ten markings) on the “dial of Ahaz.” Since we have no idea exactly what the “dial of Ahaz” was, nor how much time was represented by one of its units, we cannot make any real estimate as to how far the sun actually moved. (If the dial of Ahaz had forty evenly-spaced markings on it, for example, ten of those units would represent one-fourth of a day, or six hours.)
We can only speculate, but it seems likely that once the originator of this legend decided upon an interpretation of 2 Kings 20 that created a “lost” 40 minutes of time, he also decided that the “about a whole day” described in Joshua 10 was a period of exactly 23 hours and 20 minutes so that the two amounts combined would equal exactly one day (even though the length day is actually about 23 hours and 56 minutes). Why? Perhaps because God is associated with balance and perfection, and any natural process that appears ordered is often attributed to divine handiwork: if scientists discovered a “missing” 23 hours and 18 minutes, that could be taken as some random fluke of the cosmos, but if the “missing” period were exactly one day, that would be evidence of a directed celestial intervention by a higher power.
Regardless of the amount of time involved, the discovery of a “missing” period of time remains implausible. If the sun had indeed stood still for a day a few millennia ago, we would have no way of determining that fact through astronomic observations today. We have no frame of reference, no cosmic calendar or master clock to check against to see if we’re overdrawn at the Bank of Time. The concept described here would be like giving someone a non-functioning clock and asking him to determine how much time had elapsed since the clock had stopped running. One could note the positions of the hands on the dial and make a reasonable guess about what the time of day was when the clock stopped running, but without knowing whether that time was A.M. or P.M., and without knowing the calendar date on which stoppage occurred, one could not possibly make any reasonable estimate about how long ago the clock stopped.
Even the putative reasons offered for the scientists’ performing the calculations described in this legend make little sense. We need not know about any “missing time” in the past in order to be able to launch spacecraft today. Even if the sun really did once stand still for a day, that would have absolutely no effect on where the sun, the moon, or the other planets are going to be one hundred or one thousand years from now. If we put a new battery in our stopped clock, all we have to do to get it back on track is to set it to the correct time; we don’t need to determine how much time the clock “lost” while it wasn’t running to be assured that it will display the correct time in the future.
The appeal of this legend isn’t difficult to see: the tale confirms not only the existence of God, but also the literal truth of the Bible. Moreover, it pits the scientists versus the believers, with the believers emerging victorious and the (presumed godless) scientists left ground into dust by the very science they’d so long and so loudly upheld. David (in the form of the pure-hearted believer) takes on the Goliath of Science who continally bleats for independently verifiable proof of the Almighty, and for once the faithful are able to deliver up on a silver platter what’s been asked for.
To those who’ve given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend. Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of non-believers) feeling unsatisfied. As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions. And this is a heavy burden to shoulder. A legend such as the “missing day explained” tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life. Being right isn’t always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.
That recognition, and that satisfaction, is what this legend provides. Intoxicatingly heady stuff, that. No wonder this tale has survived from generation to generation and withstood the ravages of countless debunkings. Nonetheless, its factual details are wrong, the scientific processes it describes are dubious, and its premise of a “missing day” depends upon some very selective and questionable intepretations of scripture.
Authenticity matters little, though: our willingness to accept legends depends far more upon their expression of concepts we want to believe than upon their plausibility. If the sun once really did stand still for a day, the best evidence we’d have for proving it would be the accounts of people who saw it happen. That is what the Bible is said to offer. Some people accept that as sufficient proof, and others don’t.Who Cares About the Invention of the Sewing Machine?
I first want to thank Eugene for inviting me to blog on the invention and commercialization of the sewing machine in the antebellum era. I've long been a consumer of the Volokh Conspiracy, and it's quite exciting to experience it from the producer's side. More important, I'm really looking forward to sharing my research and to receiving some valuable feedback. So, let's jump in!
As someone who writes on topics in legal history, I often face the question: Who cares? I appreciate this question, as I've always believed it's critical for an academic to connect abstract identifications to concrete reality. I will give an in-depth answer to that question at the end of my posts, after I have identified the facts of the invention and commercialization of the sewing machine that make it possible to infer lessons for the modern policy debates. For those readers who may not have a burning personal interest in the history as such, I hope this introductory posting will set enough of the modern policy context to keep you interested.
There is currently a raging debate in the patent literature about patent thickets. A "patent thicket" exists when too many patents covering individual elements of a commercial product |
remains a cause of P∗ as well). Moreover, this goes against the spirit of emergentism in any case: emergents are supposed to make distinctive and novel causal contributions.[11]
If M is the cause of M∗, then M∗ is overdetermined because M∗ can also be thought of as being determined by P. One escape route that a strong emergentist could take would be to deny downward causation. However, this would remove the proposed reason that emergent mental states must supervene on physical states, which in turn would call physicalism into question, and thus be unpalatable for some philosophers and physicists.
Meanwhile, others have worked towards developing analytical evidence of strong emergence. In 2009, Gu et al. presented a class of physical systems that exhibits non-computable macroscopic properties.[12][13] More precisely, if one could compute certain macroscopic properties of these systems from the microscopic description of these systems, then one would be able to solve computational problems known to be undecidable in computer science. They concluded that
Although macroscopic concepts are essential for understanding our world, much of fundamental physics has been devoted to the search for a `theory of everything', a set of equations that perfectly describe the behavior of all fundamental particles. The view that this is the goal of science rests in part on the rationale that such a theory would allow us to derive the behavior of all macroscopic concepts, at least in principle. The evidence we have presented suggests that this view may be overly optimistic. A `theory of everything' is one of many components necessary for complete understanding of the universe, but is not necessarily the only one. The development of macroscopic laws from first principles may involve more than just systematic logic, and could require conjectures suggested by experiments, simulations or insight.[12]
Emergence and interaction [ edit ]
Emergent structures are patterns that emerge via collective actions of many individual entities. To explain such patterns, one might conclude, per Aristotle,[2] that emergent structures are other than the sum of their parts on the assumption that the emergent order will not arise if the various parts simply interact independently of one another. However, there are those who disagree.[14] According to this argument, the interaction of each part with its immediate surroundings causes a complex chain of processes that can lead to order in some form. In fact, some systems in nature are observed to exhibit emergence based upon the interactions of autonomous parts, and some others exhibit emergence that at least at present cannot be reduced in this way. In particular renormalization are methods in theoretical physics which enables scientists to study systems that are not tractable as the combination of their parts.[15]
Objective or subjective quality [ edit ]
The properties of complexity and organization of any system are considered by Crutchfield to be subjective qualities determined by the observer.
Defining structure and detecting the emergence of complexity in nature are inherently subjective, though essential, scientific activities. Despite the difficulties, these problems can be analysed in terms of how model-building observers infer from measurements the computational capabilities embedded in non-linear processes. An observer’s notion of what is ordered, what is random, and what is complex in its environment depends directly on its computational resources: the amount of raw measurement data, of memory, and of time available for estimation and inference. The discovery of structure in an environment depends more critically and subtly, though, on how those resources are organized. The descriptive power of the observer’s chosen (or implicit) computational model class, for example, can be an overwhelming determinant in finding regularity in data.(Crutchfield 1994)[citation needed]
On the other hand, Peter Corning argues "Must the synergies be perceived/observed in order to qualify as emergent effects, as some theorists claim? Most emphatically not. The synergies associated with emergence are real and measurable, even if nobody is there to observe them."(Corning 2002)
The low entropy of an ordered system can be viewed as an example of subjective emergence: the observer sees an ordered system by ignoring the underlying microstructure (i.e. movement of molecules or elementary particles) and concludes that the system has a low entropy.[16] On the other hand chaotic, unpredictable behaviour can also be seen as subjective emergent, while at a microscopic scale the movement of the constituent parts can be fully deterministic.
In religion, art and humanities [ edit ]
In religion, emergence grounds expressions of religious naturalism and syntheism in which a sense of the sacred is perceived in the workings of entirely naturalistic processes by which more complex forms arise or evolve from simpler forms. Examples are detailed in The Sacred Emergence of Nature by Ursula Goodenough & Terrence Deacon and Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman, both from 2006, and in Syntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age by Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist from 2014. An early argument (1904–05) for the emergence of social formations, in part stemming from religion, can be found in Max Weber's most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.[17]
In art, emergence is used to explore the origins of novelty, creativity, and authorship. Some art/literary theorists (Wheeler, 2006;[18] Alexander, 2011[19]) have proposed alternatives to postmodern understandings of "authorship" using the complexity sciences and emergence theory. They contend that artistic selfhood and meaning are emergent, relatively objective phenomena. Michael J. Pearce has used emergence to describe the experience of works of art in relation to contemporary neuroscience.[20] Practicing artist Leonel Moura, in turn, attributes to his "artbots" a real, if nonetheless rudimentary, creativity based on emergent principles.[21]
In international development, concepts of emergence have been used within a theory of social change termed SEED-SCALE to show how standard principles interact to bring forward socio-economic development fitted to cultural values, community economics, and natural environment (local solutions emerging from the larger socio-econo-biosphere). These principles can be implemented utilizing a sequence of standardized tasks that self-assemble in individually specific ways utilizing recursive evaluative criteria.[22]
In postcolonial studies, the term "Emerging Literature" refers to a contemporary body of texts that is gaining momentum in the global literary landscape (v. esp.: J.M. Grassin, ed. Emerging Literatures, Bern, Berlin, etc. : Peter Lang, 1996). By opposition, "emergent literature" is rather a concept used in the theory of literature.
Emergent properties and processes [ edit ]
An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. In other words, there is often a form of top-down feedback in systems with emergent properties.[23] The processes causing emergent properties may occur in either the observed or observing system, and are commonly identifiable by their patterns of accumulating change, generally called 'growth'. Emergent behaviours can occur because of intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback, known as interconnectivity. The emergent property itself may be either very predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and represent a new level of the system's evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities, and might in fact be irreducible to such behavior. The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds [1] or school of fish are good examples of emergent properties.
One reason emergent behaviour is hard to predict is that the number of interactions between a system components increases exponentially with the number of components, thus allowing for many new and subtle types of behaviour to emerge. Emergence is often a product of particular patterns of interaction. Negative feedback introduces constraints that serve to fix structures or behaviours. In contrast, positive feedback promotes change, allowing local variations to grow into global patterns. Another way in which interactions leads to emergent properties is dual-phase evolution. This occurs where interactions are applied intermittently, leading to two phases: one in which patterns form or grow, the other in which they are refined or removed.
On the other hand, merely having a large number of interactions is not enough by itself to guarantee emergent behaviour; many of the interactions may be negligible or irrelevant, or may cancel each other out. In some cases, a large number of interactions can in fact hinder the emergence of interesting behaviour, by creating a lot of "noise" to drown out any emerging "signal"; the emergent behaviour may need to be temporarily isolated from other interactions before it reaches enough critical mass to self-support. Thus it is not just the sheer number of connections between components which encourages emergence; it is also how these connections are organised. A hierarchical organisation is one example that can generate emergent behaviour (a bureaucracy may behave in a way quite different from the individual departments of that bureaucracy); but emergent behaviour can also arise from more decentralized organisational structures, such as a marketplace. In some cases, the system has to reach a combined threshold of diversity, organisation, and connectivity before emergent behaviour appears.
Unintended consequences and side effects are closely related to emergent properties. Luc Steels writes: "A component has a particular functionality but this is not recognizable as a subfunction of the global functionality. Instead a component implements a behaviour whose side effect contributes to the global functionality [...] Each behaviour has a side effect and the sum of the side effects gives the desired functionality".(Steels 1990) In other words, the global or macroscopic functionality of a system with "emergent functionality" is the sum of all "side effects", of all emergent properties and functionalities.
Systems with emergent properties or emergent structures may appear to defy entropic principles and the second law of thermodynamics, because they form and increase order despite the lack of command and central control. This is possible because open systems can extract information and order out of the environment.
Emergence helps to explain why the fallacy of division is a fallacy.
Emergent structures in nature [ edit ]
Ripple patterns in a sand dune created by wind or water is an example of an emergent structure in nature.
Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland is an example of a complex emergent structure.
Emergent structures can be found in many natural phenomena, from the physical to the biological domain. For example, the shape of weather phenomena such as hurricanes are emergent structures. The development and growth of complex, orderly crystals, as driven by the random motion of water molecules within a conducive natural environment, is another example of an emergent process, where randomness can give rise to complex and deeply attractive, orderly structures.
Water crystals forming on glass demonstrate an emergent, fractal process occurring under appropriate conditions of temperature and humidity.
However, crystalline structure and hurricanes are said to have a self-organizing phase.
It is useful to distinguish three forms of emergent structures. A first-order emergent structure occurs as a result of shape interactions (for example, hydrogen bonds in water molecules lead to surface tension). A second-order emergent structure involves shape interactions played out sequentially over time (for example, changing atmospheric conditions as a snowflake falls to the ground build upon and alter its form). Finally, a third-order emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism's genetic code affects the form of the organism's systems in space and time.
Nonliving, physical systems [ edit ]
In physics, emergence is used to describe a property, law, or phenomenon which occurs at macroscopic scales (in space or time) but not at microscopic scales, despite the fact that a macroscopic system can be viewed as a very large ensemble of microscopic systems.
An emergent property need not be more complicated than the underlying non-emergent properties which generate it. For instance, the laws of thermodynamics are remarkably simple, even if the laws which govern the interactions between component particles are complex. The term emergence in physics is thus used not to signify complexity, but rather to distinguish which laws and concepts apply to macroscopic scales, and which ones apply to microscopic scales.
However, another, perhaps more broadly applicable way to conceive of the emergent divide does involve a dose of complexity insofar as the computational feasibility of going from the microscopic to the macroscopic property tells the'strength' of the emergence. This is better understood given the following definition of emergence that comes from physics:
"An emergent behavior of a physical system is a qualitative property that can only occur in the limit that the number of microscopic constituents tends to infinity."[24]
Since there are no actually infinite systems in the real world, there is no obvious naturally occurring notion of a hard separation between the properties of the constituents of a system and those of the emergent whole. As discussed below, classical mechanics is thought to be emergent from quantum mechanics, though in principal, quantum dynamics fully describes everything happening at a classical level. However, it would take a computer larger than the size of the universe with more computing time then life time of the universe to describe the motion of a falling apple in terms of the locations of its electrons[citation needed]; thus we can take this to be a "strong" emergent divide.
Some examples include:
Classical mechanics: The laws of classical mechanics can be said to emerge as a limiting case from the rules of quantum mechanics applied to large enough masses. This is particularly strange since quantum mechanics is generally thought of as more complicated than classical mechanics.
complicated than classical mechanics. Friction: Forces between elementary particles are conservative. However, friction emerges when considering more complex structures of matter, whose surfaces can convert mechanical energy into heat energy when rubbed against each other. Similar considerations apply to other emergent concepts in continuum mechanics such as viscosity, elasticity, tensile strength, etc.
Patterned ground: the distinct, and often symmetrical geometric shapes formed by ground material in periglacial regions.
Statistical mechanics was initially derived using the concept of a large enough ensemble that fluctuations about the most likely distribution can be all but ignored. However, small clusters do not exhibit sharp first order phase transitions such as melting, and at the boundary it is not possible to completely categorize the cluster as a liquid or solid, since these concepts are (without extra definitions) only applicable to macroscopic systems. Describing a system using statistical mechanics methods is much simpler than using a low-level atomistic approach.
Electrical networks: The bulk conductive response of binary (RC) electrical networks with random arrangements, known as the Universal Dielectric Response (UDR), can be seen as emergent properties of such physical systems. Such arrangements can be used as simple physical prototypes for deriving mathematical formulae for the emergent responses of complex systems. [25]
Weather
Temperature is sometimes used as an example of an emergent macroscopic behaviour. In classical dynamics, a snapshot of the instantaneous momenta of a large number of particles at equilibrium is sufficient to find the average kinetic energy per degree of freedom which is proportional to the temperature. For a small number of particles the instantaneous momenta at a given time are not statistically sufficient to determine the temperature of the system. However, using the ergodic hypothesis, the temperature can still be obtained to arbitrary precision by further averaging the momenta over a long enough time.
Convection in a liquid or gas is another example of emergent macroscopic behaviour that makes sense only when considering differentials of temperature. Convection cells, particularly Bénard cells, are an example of a self-organizing system (more specifically, a dissipative system) whose structure is determined both by the constraints of the system and by random perturbations: the possible realizations of the shape and size of the cells depends on the temperature gradient as well as the nature of the fluid and shape of the container, but which configurations are actually realized is due to random perturbations (thus these systems exhibit a form of symmetry breaking).
In some theories of particle physics, even such basic structures as mass, space, and time are viewed as emergent phenomena, arising from more fundamental concepts such as the Higgs boson or strings. In some interpretations of quantum mechanics, the perception of a deterministic reality, in which all objects have a definite position, momentum, and so forth, is actually an emergent phenomenon, with the true state of matter being described instead by a wavefunction which need not have a single position or momentum. Most of the laws of physics themselves as we experience them today appear to have emerged during the course of time making emergence the most fundamental principle in the universe[according to whom?] and raising the question of what might be the most fundamental law of physics from which all others emerged. Chemistry can in turn be viewed as an emergent property of the laws of physics. Biology (including biological evolution) can be viewed as an emergent property of the laws of chemistry. Similarly, psychology could be understood as an emergent property of neurobiological laws. Finally, free-market theories understand economy as an emergent feature of psychology.
According to Laughlin (2005), for many particle systems, nothing can be calculated exactly from the microscopic equations, and macroscopic systems are characterised by broken symmetry: the symmetry present in the microscopic equations is not present in the macroscopic system, due to phase transitions. As a result, these macroscopic systems are described in their own terminology, and have properties that do not depend on many microscopic details. This does not mean that the microscopic interactions are irrelevant, but simply that you do not see them anymore — you only see a renormalized effect of them. Laughlin is a pragmatic theoretical physicist: if you cannot, possibly ever, calculate the broken symmetry macroscopic properties from the microscopic equations, then what is the point of talking about reducibility?
Living, biological systems [ edit ]
Emergence and evolution [ edit ]
Life is a major source of complexity, and evolution is the major process behind the varying forms of life. In this view, evolution is the process describing the growth of complexity in the natural world and in speaking of the emergence of complex living beings and life-forms, this view refers therefore to processes of sudden changes in evolution.
Life is thought to have emerged in the early RNA world when RNA chains began to express the basic conditions necessary for natural selection to operate as conceived by Darwin: heritability, variation of type, and competition for limited resources. Fitness of an RNA replicator (its per capita rate of increase) would likely be a function of adaptive capacities that were intrinsic (in the sense that they were determined by the nucleotide sequence) and the availability of resources.[26][27] The three primary adaptive capacities may have been (1) the capacity to replicate with moderate fidelity (giving rise to both heritability and variation of type); (2) the capacity to avoid decay; and (3) the capacity to acquire and process resources.[26][27] These capacities would have been determined initially by the folded configurations of the RNA replicators (see “Ribozyme”) that, in turn, would be encoded in their individual nucleotide sequences. Competitive success among different replicators would have depended on the relative values of these adaptive capacities.
Regarding causality in evolution Peter Corning observes:
Synergistic effects of various kinds have played a major causal role in the evolutionary process generally and in the evolution of cooperation and complexity in particular... Natural selection is often portrayed as a “mechanism”, or is personified as a causal agency... In reality, the differential “selection” of a trait, or an adaptation, is a consequence of the functional effects it produces in relation to the survival and reproductive success of a given organism in a given environment. It is these functional effects that are ultimately responsible for the trans-generational continuities and changes in nature.(Corning 2002)
Per his definition of emergence, Corning also addresses emergence and evolution:
[In] evolutionary processes, causation is iterative; effects are also causes. And this is equally true of the synergistic effects produced by emergent systems. In other words, emergence itself... has been the underlying cause of the evolution of emergent phenomena in biological evolution; it is the synergies produced by organized systems that are the key.(Corning 2002)
Swarming is a well-known behaviour in many animal species from marching locusts to schooling fish to flocking birds. Emergent structures are a common strategy found in many animal groups: colonies of ants, mounds built by termites, swarms of bees, shoals/schools of fish, flocks of birds, and herds/packs of mammals.
An example to consider in detail is an ant colony. The queen does not give direct orders and does not tell the ants what to do. Instead, each ant reacts to stimuli in the form of chemical scent from larvae, other ants, intruders, food and buildup of waste, and leaves behind a chemical trail, which, in turn, provides a stimulus to other ants. Here each ant is an autonomous unit that reacts depending only on its local environment and the genetically encoded rules for its variety of ant. Despite the lack of centralized decision making, ant colonies exhibit complex behavior and have even demonstrated the ability to solve geometric problems. For example, colonies routinely find the maximum distance from all colony entrances to dispose of dead bodies.[28]
It appears that environmental factors may play a role in influencing emergence. Research suggests induced emergence of the bee species Macrotera portalis. In this species, the bees emerge in a pattern consistent with rainfall. Specifically, the pattern of emergence is consistent with southwestern deserts' late summer rains and lack of activity in the spring.[29]
Organization of life [ edit ]
A broader example of emergent properties in biology is viewed in the biological organisation of life, ranging from the subatomic level to the entire biosphere. For example, individual atoms can be combined to form molecules such as polypeptide chains, which in turn fold and refold to form proteins, which in turn create even more complex structures. These proteins, assuming their functional status from their spatial conformation, interact together and with other molecules to achieve higher biological functions and eventually create an organism. Another example is how cascade phenotype reactions, as detailed in chaos theory, arise from individual genes mutating respective positioning.[30] At the highest level, all the biological communities in the world form the biosphere, where its human participants form societies, and the complex interactions of meta-social systems such as the stock market.
Emergence of mind [ edit ]
Among the considered phenomena in the evolutionary account of life, as a continuous history, marked by stages at which fundamentally new forms have appeared - the origin of sapiens intelligence.[31] The emergence of mind and its evolution is researched and considered as a separate phenomenon in a special system knowledge noogenesis[32]
In humanity [ edit ]
Spontaneous order [ edit ]
Groups of human beings, left free to each regulate themselves, tend to produce spontaneous order, rather than the meaningless chaos often feared. This has been observed in society at least since Chuang Tzu in ancient China. A classic traffic roundabout is a good example, with cars moving in and out with such effective organization that some modern cities have begun replacing stoplights at problem intersections with traffic circles [2], and getting better results. Open-source software and Wiki projects form an even more compelling illustration.
Emergent processes or behaviors can be seen in many other places, such as cities, cabal and market-dominant minority phenomena in economics, organizational phenomena in computer simulations and cellular automata. Whenever there is a multitude of individuals interacting, an order emerges from disorder; a pattern, a decision, a structure, or a change in direction occurs.[33]
Economics [ edit ]
The stock market (or any market for that matter) is an example of emergence on a grand scale. As a whole it precisely regulates the relative security prices of companies across the world, yet it has no leader; when no central planning is in place, there is no one entity which controls the workings of the entire market. Agents, or investors, have knowledge of only a limited number of companies within their portfolio, and must follow the regulatory rules of the market and analyse the transactions individually or in large groupings. Trends and patterns emerge which are studied intensively by technical analysts.[citation needed].
World Wide Web and the Internet [ edit ]
The World Wide Web is a popular example of a decentralized system exhibiting emergent properties. There is no central organization rationing the number of links, yet the number of links pointing to each page follows a power law in which a few pages are linked to many times and most pages are seldom linked to. A related property of the network of links in the World Wide Web is that almost any pair of pages can be connected to each other through a relatively short chain of links. Although relatively well known now, this property was initially unexpected in an unregulated network. It is shared with many other types of networks called small-world networks. (Barabasi, Jeong, & Albert 1999, pp. 130–31)
Internet traffic can also exhibit some seemingly emergent properties. In the congestion control mechanism, TCP flows can become globally synchronized at bottlenecks, simultaneously increasing and then decreasing throughput in coordination. Congestion, widely regarded as a nuisance, is possibly an emergent property of the spreading of bottlenecks across a network in high traffic flows which can be considered as a phase transition [see review of related research in (Smith 2008, pp. 1–31)].
Another important example of emergence in web-based systems is social bookmarking (also called collaborative tagging). In social bookmarking systems, users assign tags to resources shared with other users, which gives rise to a type of information organisation that emerges from this crowdsourcing process. Recent research which analyzes empirically the complex dynamics of such systems[34] has shown that consensus on stable distributions and a simple form of shared vocabularies does indeed emerge, even in the absence of a central controlled vocabulary. Some believe that this could be because users who contribute tags all use the same language, and they share similar semantic structures underlying the choice of words. The convergence in social tags may therefore be interpreted as the emergence of structures as people who have similar semantic interpretation collaboratively index online information, a process called semantic imitation.[35][36]
Architecture and cities [ edit ]
Emergent structures appear at many different levels of organization or as spontaneous order. Emergent self-organization appears frequently in cities where no planning or zoning entity predetermines the layout of the city.(Krugman 1996, pp. 9–29) The interdisciplinary study of emergent behaviors is not generally considered a homogeneous field, but divided across its application or problem domains.
Architects may not design all the pathways of a complex of buildings. Instead they might let usage patterns emerge and then place pavement where pathways have become worn, such as a desire path.
The on-course action and vehicle progression of the 2007 Urban Challenge could possibly be regarded as an example of cybernetic emergence. Patterns of road use, indeterministic obstacle clearance times, etc. will work together to form a complex emergent pattern that can not be deterministically planned in advance.
The architectural school of Christopher Alexander takes a deeper approach to emergence, attempting to rewrite the process of urban growth itself in order to affect form, establishing a new methodology of planning and design tied to traditional practices, an Emergent Urbanism. Urban emergence has also been linked to theories of urban complexity (Batty 2005) and urban evolution.(Marshall 2009)
Building ecology is a conceptual framework for understanding architecture and the built environment as the interface between the dynamically interdependent elements of buildings, their occupants, and the larger environment. Rather than viewing buildings as inanimate or static objects, building ecologist Hal Levin views them as interfaces or intersecting domains of living and non-living systems.[37] The microbial ecology of the indoor environment is strongly dependent on the building materials, occupants, contents, environmental context and the indoor and outdoor climate. The strong relationship between atmospheric chemistry and indoor air quality and the chemical reactions occurring indoors. The chemicals may be nutrients, neutral or biocides for the microbial organisms. The microbes produce chemicals that affect the building materials and occupant health and well being. Humans manipulate the ventilation, temperature and humidity to achieve comfort with the concomitant effects on the microbes that populate and evolve.[37][38][39]
Eric Bonabeau's attempt to define emergent phenomena is through traffic: "traffic jams are actually very complicated and mysterious. On an individual level, each driver is trying to get somewhere and is following (or breaking) certain rules, some legal (the speed limit) and others societal or personal (slow down to let another driver change into your lane). But a traffic jam is a separate and distinct entity that emerges from those individual behaviors. Gridlock on a highway, for example, can travel backward for no apparent reason, even as the cars are moving forward." He has also likened emergent phenomena to the analysis of market trends and employee behavior.[40]
Computational emergent phenomena have also been utilized in architectural design processes, for example for formal explorations and experiments in digital materiality.[41]
Computer AI [ edit ]
Some artificially intelligent (AI) computer applications utilize emergent behavior for animation. One example is Boids, which mimics the swarming behavior of birds.
Language [ edit ]
It has been argued that the structure and regularity of language grammar, or at least language change, is an emergent phenomenon (Hopper 1998). While each speaker merely tries to reach his or her own communicative goals, he or she uses language in a particular way. If enough speakers behave in that way, language is changed (Keller 1994). In a wider sense, the norms of a language, i.e. the linguistic conventions of its speech society, can be seen as a system emerging from long-time participation in communicative problem-solving in various social circumstances (Määttä 2000).
Emergent change processes [ edit ]
Within the field of group facilitation and organization development, there have been a number of new group processes that are designed to maximize emergence and self-organization, by offering a minimal set of effective initial conditions. Examples of these processes include SEED-SCALE, Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search, the World Cafe or Knowledge Cafe, Open Space Technology, and others (Holman, 2010[42]).
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]Maurice Brinton
Capitalism and Socialism
1968
Published: in Solidarity, V, 6 (December 1968)
Transcribed: by Jonas Holmgren
What is basically wrong with capitalism? Ask a number of socialists and you will get a number of different answers. These will depend on their vision of what socialism might be like and on their ideas as to what political action is all about. Revolutionary libertarian socialists see these things very differently from the trad "left". This article is not an attempt to counterpoise two conceptions of socialism and political action. It is an attempt to stress a facet of socialist thought that is in danger of being forgotten.
When one scratches beneath the surface, "progressive" capitalists, liberals, Labour reformists, "communist" macro-bureaucrats and Trotskyist mini-bureaucrats all see the evils of capitalism in much the same way. They all see them as primarily economic ills, flowing from a particular pattern of ownership of the means of production. When Khrushchev equated socialism with "more goulash for everyone" he was voicing a widespread view. Innumerable quotations could be found to substantiate this assertion.
If you don't believe that traditional socialists think in this way, try suggesting to one of them that modern capitalism is beginning to solve some economic problems. He will immediately denounce you as having "given up the struggle for socialism". He cannot grasp that slumps were a feature of societies that state capitalism had not sufficiently permeated and that they are not intrinsic features of capitalist society. "No economic crisis" is, for the traditional socialist, tantamount to "no crisis". It is synonymous with "capitalism has solved its problems". The traditional socialist feels insecure, as a socialist, if told that capitalism can solve this kind of problem, because for him this is the problem, par excellence, affecting capitalist society.
The traditional "left" today has a crude vision of man, of his aspirations and his needs, a vision moulded by the rotten society in which we live. It has a narrow concept of class consciousness. For them class consciousness is primarily an awareness of "non-ownership". They see the "social problem" being solved as the majority of the population gain access to material wealth. All would be well, they say or imply, if as a result of their capture of state power (and of their particular brand of planning) the masses could only be ensured a higher level of consumption. "Socialism" is equated with full bellies. The filling of these bellies is seen as the fundamental task of the socialist revolution.
Intimately related to this concept of man as essentially a producing and consuming machine is the whole traditional "left" critique of laissez-faire capitalism. Many on the "left" continue to think we live under this kind of capitalism and continue to criticize it because it is inefficient (in the domain of production). The whole of John Strachey's writings prior to World War II were dominated by these conceptions. His Why You Should Be a Socialist sold nearly a million copies - and yet the ideas of freedom or self-management do not appear in it, as part of the socialist objective. Many of the leaders of today's "left" graduated at his school, including the so-called revolutionaries. Even the usual vision of communism, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", usually relates, in the minds of "Marxists", to the division of the cake and not at all to the relations of man with man and between man and his environment.
For the traditional socialist "raising the standard of living" is the main purpose of social change. Capitalism allegedly cannot any longer develop production. (Anyone ever caught in a traffic jam, or in a working class shopping area on a Saturday afternoon, will find this a strange proposition.) It seems to be of secondary importance to this kind of socialist that under modern capitalism people are brutalized at work, manipulated in consumption and in leisure, their intellectual capacity stunted or their taste corrupted by a commercial culture. One must be "soft", it is implied, if one considers the systematic destruction of human beings to be worth a big song and dance. Those who talk of socialist objectives as being freedom in production (as well as out of it) are dismissed as "Utopians".
Were it not that misrepresentation is now an established way of life on the "left", it would seem unnecessary to stress that as long as millions of the world's population have insufficient food and clothing, the satisfaction of basic material needs must be an essential part of the socialist programme (and in fact of any social programme whatsoever, which does not extol the virtues of poverty.) The point is that by concentrating entirely on this aspect of the critique of capitalism the propaganda of the traditional "left" deprives itself of one of the most telling weapons of socialist criticism, namely an exposure of what capitalism does to people, particularly in countries where basic needs have by and large been met. And whether Guevarist or Maoist friends like it or not, it is in these countries, where there is a proletariat, that the socialist future of mankind will be decided.
This particular emphasis in the propaganda of the traditional organizations is not accidental. When they talk of increasing production in order to increase consumption, reformists and bureaucrats of one kind or another feel on fairly safe ground. Despite the nonsense talked by many "Marxists" about "stagnation of the productive forces", bureaucratic capitalism (of both the Eastern and Western types) can develop the means of production, has done so and is still doing so on a gigantic scale. It can provide (and historically has provided) a gradual increase in the standard of living - at the cost of intensified exploitation during the working day. It can provide a fairly steady level of employment. So can a well-run gaol. But on the ground of the subjection of man to institutions which are not of his choice, the socialist critiques of capitalism and bureaucratic society retain all their validity. In fact, their validity increases as modern society simultaneously solves the problem of mass poverty and becomes increasingly bureaucratic and totalitarian.
It will probably be objected that some offbeat trends in the "Marxist" movement do indulge in this wider kind of critique and in a sense this is true. Yet whatever the institutions criticized, their critique usually hinges, ultimately, on the notion of the unequal distribution of wealth. It consists in variations on the theme of the corrupting influence of money. When they talk for instance of the sexual problem or of the family, they talk of the economic barriers to sexual emancipation, of hunger pushing women to prostitution, of the poor young girl sold to the wealthy man, of the domestic tragedies resulting from poverty. When they denounce what capitalism does to culture they will do so in terms of the obstacles that economic needs puts in the way of talent, or they will talk of the venality of artists. All this is undoubtedly of great importance. But it is only the surface of the problem. Those socialists who can only speak in these terms see man in much less than his full stature. They see him as the bourgeoisie does, as a consumer (of food, of wealth, of culture, etc.). The essential, however, for man is to fulfil himself. Socialism must give man an opportunity to create, not only in the economic field but in all fields of human endeavour. Let the cynics smile and pretend that all this is petty-bourgeois utopianism. "The problem", Marx said, "is to organize the world in such a manner that man experiences in it the truly human, becomes accustomed to experience himself as a man, to assert his true individuality".
Conflicts in class society do not simply result from inequalities of distribution, or flow from a given division of the surplus value, itself the result of a given pattern of ownership of the means of production. Exploitation does not only result in a limitation of consumption for the many and financial enrichment for the few. This is but one aspect of the problem. Equally important are the attempts by both private and bureaucratic capitalism to limit - and finally to suppress altogether - the human role of man in the productive process. Man is increasingly expropriated from the very management of his own acts. He is increasingly alienated during all his activities, whether individual or collective. By subjecting man to the machine - and through the machine to an abstract and hostile will - class society deprives man of the real purpose of human endeavour, which is the constant, conscious transformation of the world around him. That men resist this process (and that their resistance implicitly raises the question of self-management) is as much a driving force in the class struggle as the conflict over the distribution of the surplus. Marx doubtless had these ideas in mind when he wrote that the proletariat "regards its independence and sense of personal dignity as more essential than its daily bread".
Class society profoundly inhibits the natural tendency of man to fulfil himself in the objects of his activity. In every country of the world this state of affairs is experienced day after day by the working class as an absolute misfortune, as a permanent mutilation. It results in a constant struggle at the most fundamental level of production: that |
The defence secretary laid a wreath at a memorial obelisk in remembrance of the 255 British servicemen killed in the 1982 conflict, when Margaret Thatcher sent a task force to the South Atlantic to reclaim the islands after the Argentinian invasion. His handwritten note said: “In grateful memory of those who sacrificed their lives for the liberation of these islands.”FLORHAM PARK -- Well, file this one under the mind-boggling category.
On Thursday, Jets defensive end Muhammad Wilkerson finally opened up about his injured ankle, stemming from offseason leg surgery, which has been plaguing him throughout the season.
The stunning part? Wilkerson said the Jets' training staff had no "game plan" for rehab early in the year. It took them until midway through the season to get one.
"There should have been one," Wilkerson said. "There wasn't. There's one in place now. That's all that matters."
Despite having offseason surgery to repair a broken fibula, Wilkerson received the lion's share of the defensive reps to begin the year. Heading into Week 6, he had played an astounding 299 of the Jets' 309 defensive snaps (97 percent).
His production? Eh, at best.
After recording 12 sacks in a Pro Bowl season in 2015, Wilkerson had just 19 tackles and 1.5 sacks in the Jets' first six games. Thursday, he indicated injuries played a role in his sluggish start.
"It wasn't feeling the way I thought it should feel," Wilkerson said. "I knew I wasn't moving around the field like I feel I'm capable of doing."
Swan Song: Last game in green for these Jets?
Multiple times in October, reporters asked coach Todd Bowles if the Jets considered, or would consider, limiting Wilkerson's playing time. Despite Wilkerson telling a reporter he wasn't 100 percent on Oct. 20, Bowles denied there was any correlation between his on-field struggles and abundance of reps.
"If we saw it affecting his play, yes," Bowles said the same day. "But it hasn't affected his play yet. He's going to sore here and there throughout, which is going to be maintenance regardless of what he does during the game. It can be 50 snaps, he'll still be sore after the game. That's just normal."
Wilkerson said when he initially had the surgery, his doctor told him it would be roughly a calendar year before he returned to form. Still, the training staff, according to Wilkerson, let him take the field without any limitations after missing a portion of training camp, and the majority of the preseason.
"Like I said," Wilkerson said, "It's my first major injury. It was new to me. Once the doctor said it was fine, we figured it was good.
"Point is, there is a game plan intact now. My ankle is feeling good now. I'm happy with that. The trainers are happy with the progress I'm making. That's it."
This season, Wilkerson has 54 tackles and 3.5 sacks. The Jets awarded Wilkerson with a five-year, $86 million contract extension back in July.
Connor Hughes may be reached at chughes@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @Connor_J_Hughes. Find NJ.com Jets on Facebook.Hours after Malacañang denied that it had distributed cash gifts for cops, a police source revealed to INQUIRER.net that top officials started receiving their Christmas bonuses worth at least P100,000 each on Monday.
A police official, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, admitted to claiming the cash gift from President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday, upon the instructions of Philippine National Police chief Director General Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa.
“It’s true. They’ve given it to us yesterday,” he told INQUIRER.net in a phone interview on Tuesday.
“It’s given in cash. They had prepared the envelopes already. You just have to sign a list before claiming the money,” he said.
He and the rest of PNP officials got the cash from Dela Rosa’s office in Camp Crame in Quezon City.
Earlier Tuesday Presidential spokesperson Ernesto Abella said the Christmas bonus for key PNP officials “has not been given and is apparently, not forthcoming.”
Meanwhile, Dela Rosa also backtracked on his earlier announcement that Duterte will give Christmas bonuses worth P40,000 to P50,000 only to high-ranking police officials.
“Akala ko meron akong malaking matanggap kahapon dahil akala ko may ibibigay na bonus ang Malacañang (I thought I was going to receive a big amount of money yesterday because I thought Malacañang was going to hand out bonuses),” he said.
“Kaso kinulit ng media. Nagtatanong ‘yung media saan daw ang source (ng pera), saan galing hanggang sa sige lang tayo hintay, walang dumating (But the media kept on asking where the money came from so we had to wait until nothing came),” Dela Rosa added.
Now that the release of bonuses for PNP is uncertain, Dela Rosa said Duterte might give the officials a sack of rice each as a substitute.
“Sabi ng Malacañang, ‘Sige hintay lang kayo, maghanap pa kami ng pera. Baka bago mag New Year bigyan ko kayo ng tig-isang sako ng bigas (Malacañang told us, ‘Just wait as we look for money, probably before the New Year we will give you a sack of rice each’),” he said.
The police chief publicly announced this during a Christmas event on Monday at the PNP Grandstand in Camp Crame attended by police officials, non-commissioned officers, non-uniformed personnel and their family members.
Being the only PNP official with a four-star rank, Dela Rosa said he will receive P400,000. Francisco Uyami and Ramon Apolinario, who both have a rank of Deputy Director General, a three-star rank, will receive P300,000 each. All officers with Police Director or two-star rank will receive P200,000.
Chief Superintendent or star-rank officers in the PNP directorial staff, regional and provincial directors and heads of national support units down will also receive P100,000.
Key officials with ranks of Senior Superintendent below will receive cash above P50,000.
Dela Rosa has raised eyebrows for accepting cash gifts, which could total millions of pesos, from Duterte for select officials, a move that could be considered a violation of Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials.
Dela Rosa also refused to divulge the source of Duterte’s funds.
“Definitely it’s not allowed by law that’s why they are denying it,” the source said.
Some junior officials and non-commissioned police officers also found it unfair for the President to give hefty sums of money to select officials rather than spend them on improving the equipment of the police as the government continues with its war against drugs./rga
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Police: Truck attack that killed 12 in Berlin ‘intentional’Donald Trump has made so many promises, from wiping out the national debt — a pledge dismissed last week by his own budget director as “hyperbole” — to changing the name of the Denali peak back to Mount McKinley, that it can be hard to keep track of how many he’s breaking. So here’s a partial list of his reversals and revisions, large and small, to date:
SYRIA In 2013, when Barack Obama sought congressional approval for military action in response to President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, Mr. Trump rejected any intervention, in a storm of tweets. On April 6, without consulting Congress, the administration attacked Syria, with the surreal explanation that Mr. Obama’s “weakness and irresolution” made it necessary.
RUSSIA Mr. Trump has lavished praise on Russia, complicit for years in Mr. Assad’s brutality; he has even encouraged its meddling in the affairs of other nations, like the United States. On April 5, under heavy fire for his campaign’s ties with Russia, he declared relations with Russia worse than ever, “because they’re aligned” with Syria. In another reversal, he denies knowing Vladimir Putin.
NATO For months, Mr. Trump condemned NATO as “obsolete,” falsely claiming that it doesn’t fight terrorism. Last week, after meeting with NATO’s secretary general, Mr. Trump declared, “It’s no longer obsolete … they made a change and now they do fight terrorism.” NATO didn’t change; Mr. Trump’s mind did.
HEALTH CARE Mr. Trump vowed not to cut Medicare or Medicaid, then embraced a Republican Obamacare replacement that would drastically raise costs for older Americans. It failed. Now he says he’ll force Democrats to negotiate by cutting Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies for seven million poor people.Few figures invoke the tensions of urban planning in New York City like the larger than life Robert Moses. But it is another iconic figure, Paul Rudolph, who may have the last word on the project that Moses hoped would seal his legacy — the Lower Manhattan Expressway. An important new exhibit at Cooper Union, organized by the Drawing Center, provides a much-needed reminder of Rudolph’s breadth of vision for Lower Manhattan.
In 1967, following Rudolph’s tenure as dean of the Yale School of Architecture, the Ford Foundation commissioned him to do a study of the Lower Manhattan Expressway project. The idea for an expressway connecting the Holland Tunnel with the east side of Manhattan was, of course, nothing new. City planners had conceived of such a project in the ’30s and Moses, with his broad brushstrokes across the New York City canvas, envisioned three major expressways in Manhattan: the Lower Manhattan Expressway, using Broome Street as a corridor; an elevated midtown route that would punch through skyscrapers; and a third expressway uptown coursing through Central Park. Moses attempted to break ground several times throughout the next three decades. By the 1960s, however, with a trail of condemned lots, razed blocks and miles and miles of new highways behind him, the City and Governor Rockefeller had finally grown tired of his particular brand of public works and, perhaps, his hubris. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published her famous tome about preserving the social fabric of the city, very much in reaction to Moses, and this contributed to and reflected his waning influence. In 1968, Moses was removed from his position and his LoMEX project was demapped and eventually canceled.
Into this atmosphere of Moses disfavor and a nascent, outspoken preservation movement entered the Gropius-trained, modernist Paul Rudolph. From 1967-1972, with the continuous financial backing of the Ford Foundation, Rudolph devoted himself to this study.
Rudolph was known as one of the best architectural draftsmen, and it is through his drawings that the Lower Manhattan Expressway has come to life, at first to Brett Littman, director of the Drawing Center, and then to us, in the exhibit Littman organized with Cooper Union and Ed Rawlings’ architecture office.
It is only recently that any attention was paid to Rudolph’s original drawings for the study and it is their “rediscovery” that fueled this exhibit. In 2008, after years of fermenting curiosity about the LoMEX study, Littman went to the Library of Congress to look at Rudolph’s drawings. According to Rachel Liebowitz, a curator at the Drawing Center, “It was the first time anyone had looked at the drawings and until we came, the Library of Congress hadn’t catalogued and photographed [them].” It is because of Littman’s interest, and the work on this exhibit, that the Library of Congress has now catalogued, scanned and uploaded this portion of the archive.
Using 31 reproductions of drawings found in the archive, the curators, Ed Rawlings and Jim Walrod, recreated the vision of Lower Manhattan Rudolph developed over those four years. The drawings on display range from skeletal sketches that he must have used as notes to himself, to immense, colorful perspectives of the project that don’t seem to have possibly been made by a human hand. At the center of the room, anchoring the exhibit, is an amazing 33’ × 16’ model built by the curators and students from Cooper Union and based on the archive material and on some pictures of a film Rudolph made of his project (the script of the film is also on display, though no copy of the film could be found). You can spend a long time surveying that model, and, after understanding the project further by studying the drawings, you will surely return to it with renewed curiosity. If you have lived in New York for any significant amount of time, the moment you fully comprehend what it is you are looking at in the exhibit, the drawings become utterly jarring. There is one drawing, just in front of the model, that looks east across Manhattan Island with the Williamsburg Bridge in the distance. For some reason that image, possibly because it is the most contextualized, makes Rudolph’s vision seem most real.
Rudolph’s conception of the LoMEX took some inspiration from Moses’ plan but mostly used it as a point of departure for his own vision of tomorrow. His study consisted not just of a super expressway and a massive central HUB, like Moses’ plan, oriented by traffic flowing to and from the Holland Tunnel in the west and the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges to the east. His was a completely integrated world where the flow of cars existed in tandem with life in the residential towers above. This included monorails, people movers, and a surreal vertical expanse of multilevel parking lots that are likewise integrated into the buildings, leaving space surrounding the structures. The basic unit composing this megastructure was Rudolph’s “20th century brick,” which can be added infinitely and in various ways, unifying the whole structure while also providing variety, like a large modernist Lego.
Rudolph’s design differs from Moses’ in another significant way. Moses planned his expressway to career down Broome Street and, as he had made plain before, buildings and neighborhoods in his path posed no obstacle. Simply condemn and raze. Perhaps as a token gesture to Jane Jacobs and other preservationists, Rudolph’s expressway would use the back gardens between Spring and Broome as its corridor, though the scale of the project would still disrupt the street life of any neighborhood it passed through, even if one block removed. Like Moses, and many other utopian modernizers of the post War era, Rudolph designed with the automobile in mind. As the curators described the HUB in their wonderful essay, “It is automotive transit fetish at its most decadent.” The other mid-century modernizer’s imperative – slum clearing – also characterizes Rudolph’s approach and he designed his tall towers to house a mass of people and also provide each one with an outdoor terrace.
For various reasons, projects of this scale and vision, at least in New York, might be a thing of the past. Futuristic utopian solutions have fallen out of favor (indeed they had already fallen out of favor when Rudolph created this) and the public does not have the appetite to appropriate public funds for such large scale projects. Ratner’s Atlantic Yards is minuscule in comparison. However, Norman Foster, who studied with Rudolph, just recently unveiled his own megastructure in Abu Dhabi, the same week this exhibit opened. It even includes people-movers, elevated buildings and an underground world, much like the LoMEX. And as one of the curators pointed out, Mayor Bloomberg’s demapping of streets in the heart of the city is very much related to Rudolph’s vision of our world.
Several interdisciplinary projects, like MoMA’s and PS1’s Rising Currents, have recently attempted to address New York’s 21st century infrastructural needs. The time seems ripe for novel approaches to New York’s urban fabric, and this exhibit is a brilliant way to further tap into that creativity and stoke the imagination.
Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway
On view: October 1 – November 14, 2010
Arthur A. Houghton Gallery, The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street, 2nd Floor
Mon–Fri 12:00–7:00pm, Sat 12:00–5:00pm (Closed Sun)Internet activity in Syria dropped off sharply on Tuesday afternoon, according to various sources.
Internet monitoring firm Renesys tweeted this afternoon that it confirmed a "loss of Syrian Internet connectivity 18:43 UTC. BGP routes down, inbound traces failing."
Google later tweeted "Google services inaccessible in Syria," with a link to its Transparency Report, which showed a complete drop in activity from the region shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern (left).
In a blog post, Umbrella Security Labs, a research division of OpenDNS, said that at 2:45 p.m. Eastern, "OpenDNS resolvers saw a significant drop in traffic from Syria. On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet."
"Effectively, the shutdown disconnects Syria from Internet communication with the rest of the world," OpenDNS CTO Dan Hubbard wrote in the post. "It's unclear whether Internet communication within Syria is still available. Although we can't yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fiber cuts and power outages."
The shutdown comes in the wake of reports that Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime has used chemical weapons in the region, and Israeli military strikes near Damascus.
This is not the first time Internet access has been cut off in Syria. It went down in Nov. 2012, as well as June 2011 amidst protests, and again the following month.
Syria is also no stranger to Internet outages and blockades of popular websites like Facebook and YouTube.OAKLAND (CBS/AP) – Judgement day may finally be at hand for a California evangelical radio network used by a preacher to predict—incorrectly—the apocalypse.
Oakland-based Family Radio has sold its three largest radio stations, and tax records show the nonprofit network saw its net assets drop to $29.2 million by the end of 2011, from a net worth of $135 million four years earlier.
The radio network is run by Harold Camping, who predicted the world would end on May 21, 2011, only to later concede he had no evidence of an impending apocalypse. The network spent millions of dollars—some of it from donations made by followers—putting up thousands of billboards plastered with the Judgment Day message.
Some of Camping’s followers quit their jobs or donated some of their retirement savings or college funds to support the ads.
Camping, 91, suffered a stroke at his Alameda home after his prediction did not materialize and has since said he has no more interest in considering future dates for the end of the world.
By the end of 2011, Family Radio had a little less than $283,000 in cash on hand, down from $1.5 million at the start of the year and $2.5 million at the end of 2008, according to published reports. In 2012, records show it took out a $30 million bridge loan to keep operating while awaiting money from the sale of the stations.
Board member Tom Evans, who has taken over operation of the network since Camping’s stroke, said the network is hurting during the economic slowdown like other nonprofits. But he said it is not closing.
“Sufficient funds were in the bank and, thankfully, we didn’t spend everything,” he said, referring to the May 2011 prediction. “But it did force us to make quick changes.”
Evans said the nonprofit would be more efficient going forward.
Family Radio, founded more than a half-century ago, had 66 full-service radio stations, more than 100 FM broadcast relay stations and a handful of television stations across the country at one point.
There were no commercials, giving listeners nonstop Christian programming. The network relied on donations.
(Copyright 2013 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)There are no teams, Sligo Rovers excepted, that I'd prefer to see winning the League of Ireland title than Dundalk and Cork City, who meet in a final showdown at Oriel Park on Friday night with everything on the line. I'd imagine few neutrals would begrudge either team ultimate honours.
There are no teams, Sligo Rovers excepted, that I'd prefer to see winning the League of Ireland title than Dundalk and Cork City, who meet in a final showdown at Oriel Park on Friday night with everything on the line. I'd imagine few neutrals would begrudge either team ultimate honours.
Dundalk, after all, are a club with a great tradition who among other things gave the league's finest ever European performances back in the Jim McLaughlin era of the late 1970s and early '80s. Lately, though, times have been tougher for them. As recently as a couple of seasons back, the club looked to be in rag order and only avoided relegation by defeating Waterford United in a play-off.
Since then, however, Stephen Kenny has wrought wonders and in doing so rebuilt his own managerial reputation which had slumped after a disastrous spell at Shamrock Rovers ended with his sacking. Dundalk have played wonderful attractive attacking football all season and looked the best team in the country.
With one game left they've already scored 15 more goals than St Pat's did when winning last year's title and 18 more than champions Sligo Rovers did in 30 games the previous year. You have to go back to the 1977-'78 season and the Bohemians team which scored 74 goals in 30 games for the last league champions to top the 70-goal mark. Dundalk's goal difference is a whopping 47, 19 ahead of their rivals on Friday.
Their key weapons are the triumvirate of midfield general Richie Towell, easily the most talented player in the league, goal machine centre-forward Pat Hoban and Daryl Horgan, a winger who looks quick enough to moonlight as an electric hare at the local greyhound park. That they've played such football on an Oriel Park artificial pitch which looks downright dodgy is little short of miraculous.
As has been Cork City's ability to hold on to Dundalk's coat tails so that they've actually edged ahead by a point and only need a draw to win the title. All season pundits have waited for City to fall away but they have hung on thanks to a series of remarkable escapes, last-gasp winners by Colin Healy against St Pat's and Dan Murray against Shamrock Rovers and a late penalty save by Mark McNulty against Sligo Rovers keeping the dream alive. Their manager has arguably performed even more impressively than Kenny. No-one thought City would be contenders when the season started yet new boss John Caulfield has coaxed great things from a squad which seemed on the surface of it much less accomplished than Dundalk's.
The emblematic figure of their season has been Mark O'Sullivan, a striker plucked from non-league football and the building trade at the age of 31 who has not just scored 11 league goals but led the line with an exuberance and lack of respect for reputation which epitomised City's can-do spirit.
The club has known relegation and lean times in recent seasons but Caulfield has brought the buzz back to Turners Cross, as can be seen by home attendances which make City the best supported club in the country by some distance.
Both clubs have been a tremendous credit to the league this season and it's fitting that they get to battle it out head to head in the finale. And, in keeping with the deja vu theme, it's worth noting that this isn't the first time this has happened. Back in 1991, City needed just a point at home to Dundalk on the final day to win the title but the visitors won 1-0 with a Tom McNulty goal to take the spoils.
It's also not the first time that City have stood between Stephen Kenny and the title on the last day. Back in 2005 he brought Derry City to Turners Cross knowing that a win would secure them the crown. On that occasion Cork won 2-0 with goals from John O'Flynn and Liam Kearney to win the title. The atmosphere was as electrifying as I've experienced at any Irish sporting occasion. I'd imagine it won't be very different on Friday.
It's a pity they can't both win it.
Win One of Five Pairs of Tickets to Ireland v France - Click here
Sunday Indo SportFremont spends most on coffee, SF is third-best coffee scene in U.S., study says
A barista prepares a drink at Blue Bottle Coffee. Explore the gallery to see the top rated coffee spots in San Francisco, according to Yelp. A barista prepares a drink at Blue Bottle Coffee. Explore the gallery to see the top rated coffee spots in San Francisco, according to Yelp. Photo: Myung J. Chun, TNS Photo: Myung J. Chun, TNS Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close Fremont spends most on coffee, SF is third-best coffee scene in U.S., study says 1 / 14 Back to Gallery
Fremont spends more on coffee each year than any other city in America, according to rankings released Tuesday by WalletHub.
Households in Fremont spend an average of $185 per year on coffee, more than triple the average expenditure for the city that spends the least on coffee, Detroit, where households spend about $61, the report found.
With the general priciness of the Bay Area, San Francisco ranked No. 3 and San Jose No. 5 for average spending per year on coffee, according to the report.
The spending data were released as part of a ranking of the best cities in the U.S. for coffee drinkers, with San Francisco No. 3 and Seattle and Portland, Ore., taking the top two spots.
In calculating the rankings, WalletHub considered factors like the share of households that own a coffee maker, number of affordable, highly-rated coffee shops per capita, and the per-capita number of coffee and tea manufacturers.
Three other Bay Area cities appeared in the top 50 in the overall rankings: Oakland ranked No. 13, San Jose No. 24 and Fremont No. 26.
Three Bay Area cities, San Francisco, Oakland and Fremont, were in a 3-way tie for third-most coffee manufacturers per capita, after Portland and Seattle.
And San Francisco tied with New York, Seattle and Portland for the most coffee shops, coffee houses and cafes per capita. Not a shocker considering, as some commentators have observed, coffee shops tend to crop up as neighborhoods gentrify.
The Chronicle recently looked into the factors that make San Francisco such fertile ground for local coffee shops, finding that San Francisco has the lowest percentage of chain coffee shops of any major city in the U.S.
FIlipa Ioannou is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at fioannou@sfchronicle.com and follow her on TwitterDocumentary film-maker Michael Moore has issued a five point “morning after to-do list” for Americans struggling to come to terms with Donald Trump’s election victory.
Michael Moore to release surprise 'Trumpland' documentary Read more
Moore, who unexpectedly released his Trumpland documentary last month, wrote a post on Facebook where he provided his step-by-step guide, which includes taking over the Democratic party, firing TV pundits and reiterating that Clinton won the popular vote.
“Take over the Democratic party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably,” reads his first point. He continues: “Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn’t let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on.”
His third point focuses on Democratic politicians who he says should “step out of the way”, unless they are willing to “fight, resist and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years”.
How the Simpsons – and others – predicted President Trump Read more
Moore voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries but in Trumpland he made a strong argument why America should choose her Clinton over Trump. He also made the correct prediction that the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio would be key and could become what he termed “Brexit states”.
In his plan he adds that people must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked”, adding: “What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair.”
He added that Trump should have never been treated lightly and, echoing the sentiments of Stephen Colbert, said that the media was complicit in helping him rise. “He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that.”
His final point struck a more optimistic tone. “You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: “HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!” The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don’t.”Qualified Players
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griffin CLAMP
CLAMP erebux
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Necrophag1st gellehsak
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Alliance The Defendants
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Important Matches
Summaries...
The first weekend of qualifiers forEurope andNorth America wrapped up last night as the first group of players successfully managed to secure a berth into the regional qualifiers. The road tois still far away as there are many more weekends worth of qualifiers left. The list of competitors are to numerous to mention individually but it appears likeof the legends from the genre have shown up to compete.The following players have been able to secure their spot at the regional qualifiers for duel:Although there were many great matches, we would recommend the following games as they were quite good:I don't really have the time (or quite frankly the interest) to be following every game for the qualifiers but ourwas relatively well received, and I was asked by admins & players where the equivalent for the North American qualifiers were. If someone is interested in writing the actual content, I am willing to help with respect editing and presentation but I cannot deliver muchmaterial without actually watch the games... which I won't really be doing. You can see the issue here. Message me if you think you can do this :)While it has been reported more than once that AI systems have been taken offline by human researchers, as they’d created languages people couldn’t understand (the reality was a little more complex than that), xHamster is doing precisely the opposite by encouraging its homegrown AI to develop its own language by using porn clips.
Exactly what sort of hideous linguistic creation could result remains to be seen – and let’s face it, we probably aren’t going to understand much of what it’s communicating anyway given the recent record on AI languages but the wider purpose behind this entire effort, xHamster says, is so that it can better serve your porn needs.
All the clips that xHamster’s bots are learning from are user-uploaded movies and ultimately the endeavour will provide the company with more data about its users through a better understanding of them, their viewing habits and how content preferences evolve over time.
The more specific point of encouraging xHamster bots to develop their own language is to make their own machine-t0-machine communication more efficient, and therefore speed up the rate at which they learn. AI-developed languages, while nonsensical to people, are considerably more efficient for computers than English, for example.
To encourage this to happen, each time a bot learns and communicates a new word, task or concept using audio sound from a video uploaded to the site, it is rewarded.
If, for some reason, you want to hear some indiscernible porn-like noises, xHamster’s also provided a 30-second clip of the sort of audio the bots are learning from which is below. Probably best not to listen without headphones on the bus though, eh.
Download clip
Read next: Xhamster IPB pushes for roll back of IPB1968 De Tomaso Mangusta Reading time: about 2 minutes. American
Cars
Ford
Italian
Luxury
Vintage
Alejandro de Tomaso was a popular Argentinian racing driver who moved to Italy as a young man, allegedly to escape prosecution in his home country for his part in a political conspiracy that, if successful, would have fundamentally changed the modern face of the country.
In the 1950s, shortly after his arrival in Italy, de Tomaso took part in a couple of Grand Prix races and a significant number of slightly less salubrious production car races before deciding that what he really wanted to do was build cars.
He began by building racing cars, before developing the stunningly beautiful De Tomaso Vallelunga. He had hoped to sell the Vallelunga design to an established automaker, but had no takers, so he set about building it himself. The production run for the model finished once 54 units had been built, and de Tomaso’s appetite for building road cars had been well and truly established.
de Tomaso had Giorgetto Giugiaro design a modern mid-engined body that utilised the same same fundamental chassis as the Vallelunga to minimise costs. The Americans were (and still are) the kings of the reliable, inexpensive V8, so Alejandro formed a partnership with Ford. The initial production run used the HiPo 289 cubic inch V8, tucked under the distinctive gullwing engine bay doors. Suspension was independent on all four corners and disc brakes were fitted front and back – an unusual move for the era.
Although the Mangusta looks utterly beautiful, they do have a reputation for being a little exciting to drive. This is largely because of the 32/68 weight distribution (American V8s aren’t particularly lightweight) and the fact that the chassis had originally been developed to house a 1.5 litre engine – meaning it tended to flex a little when under load with its new 4.8 litre V8.
That said, the De Tomaso Mangusta has legions of fans around the world, it’s remembered as one of the first supercars, and its Ford V8 power plant means that it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to maintain than a period Lamborghini or Ferrari.
The Mangusta you see here is due to be auctioned by RM Sotheby’s on the 23rd of May 2015, and it has an estimated value of between €210,000 and €260,000.
Click here to visit the official lot listing.
Photo Credits: Cymon Taylor 2015 © RM SothebysRoasted Asparagus, Tomatoes & Egg Salad
Roasting is one of my favorite ways to serve vegetables because there’s little preparation needed. The process also intensifies the natural flavor of vegetables, making them sweeter with a kick of smokiness. It’s very little work that yields great results! This recipe is similar from one I saw in Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbook, Plenty, though it has a few more ingredients and some sherry vinegar, for a zestier effect.
The eggs are boiled, peeled and mashed like you would if you were making egg salad, except without mayonnaise and mustard. This was the first time I served eggs this way with asparagus, as I usually prefer them poached or in a creamy Hollandaise sauce. It was delicious nonetheless and with the addition of roasted tomatoes and sherry vinegar, rounded up the flavors of the dish very nicely. It’s a wonderful salad that screams summer and outdoor barbecues because of its sharp, clean and refreshing properties.
I like serving this asparagus and egg salad with a nice big steak, or for a healthier choice, a simple sushi rice egg drop soup and some yummy strawberries with coulis for dessert. Ooh and a nice cold glass of white wine too, mmm..
You can make this recipe in advance and refrigerate the ingredients separately until ready to be served. I ended up with extra mashed eggs and ate it with crackers and cheese. That’s another cool things about this salad; each ingredient is just as yummy on its own!WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp, which won a ban last year on importing some phones made by a Google Inc subsidiary, filed a motion in a U.S. court on Friday asking the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection to enforce the measure.
The Microsoft logo is seen at their offices in Bucharest March 20, 2013. REUTERS/Bogdan Cristel
The U.S. International Trade Commission, which hears a long list of high-tech patent complaints, said in May 2012 that Google’s Motorola Mobility infringed a Microsoft patent for generating and synchronizing calendar items. It barred any infringing Motorola Mobility device from being imported into the United States.
All phones with Google’s Android software are affected by the ban, Microsoft said. But Google said that it should have applied to only some Motorola Mobility Android phones.
That order was to have gone into effect 60 days after it was issued but, according to Microsoft’s court filing, it still has not been enforced.
“CBP (Customs and Bureau Protection) has repeatedly allowed Motorola to evade that order based on secret presentations that CBP has refused to share with Microsoft,” the complaint said.
Google argued that Microsoft tried to broaden the order beyond what the ITC had intended.
“U.S. Customs appropriately rejected Microsoft’s effort to broaden its patent claims to block Americans from using a wide range of legitimate calendar functions, like scheduling meetings, on their mobile phones,” said Matt Kallman, a Google spokesman.
A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs declined comment.
The filing is the latest salvo in an international smartphone patent war that has embroiled a half dozen companies in lawsuits filed in about a dozen countries.
The dispute is a sign that deciding which product infringes a patent is harder now that the world has gone high tech, and that Customs may not have the needed expertise to make that determination and perhaps should rely on the ITC, said Deanna Tanner Okun, a former ITC chairman who is a partner at Adduci, Mastriani & Schaumberg, LLP.
“Problems have increased. The system is outdated,” she |
AN is a unique string of numbers signifying a specific bank account, and should see customers able to access wages more quickly. Previously, an EU-based customer might have found themselves waiting for a claim to go through.
“With our new unique IBANs, users receiving wages for EU companies no longer need to create deposit claims, as payment descriptions are no longer required for these transactions,” the startup said in a statement.
San Francisco-based Bitwage further positioned the upgrade as part of a broader push into the European market, saying:
“We hope to bring our innovative solution from the US into the European markets so that people can begin receiving their wages in digital assets and leverage the solution for faster, cheaper payments across borders.”
The firm raised $760,000 at the end of 2015 in a seed funding round, and just over a year ago moved to add support for credit card payments.
Europe image via ShutterstockWA Senate election: Liberals secure three seats, one for Labor, Palmer United Party and Greens
Updated
Labor has won just a single West Australian Senate seat while the Liberals have secured three spots in the re-run election.
The results of the recontested poll, which was held on April 5, were announced by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) in Perth on Tuesday afternoon.
The new senators-elect are Liberals David Johnston, Michaelia Cash and Linda Reynolds, the ALP's Joe Bullock, the Greens' Scott Ludlam and Dio Wang from the Palmer United Party.
Results from last September's Senate election were declared void when about 1,400 ballots disappeared during a vote re-count, forcing a re-run of the poll.
The AEC promised improved procedures in the wake of the vote loss but it again came under fire after 75 pre-poll votes were ruled invalid because of a ballot box problem at a Perth retirement home, forcing the residents involved to vote for a third time.
The fresh election attracted a record 77 candidates including a host of new micro parties.
The original vote was declared void by the High Court because of the missing votes.
A re-count was ordered because of the close result which saw Mr Wang and Senator Pratt lose out to Senator Ludlam and the Australian Sports Party's Wayne Dropulich.
Topics: federal-elections, federal-government, government-and-politics, greens, alp, liberals, clive-palmer, wa
First postedOver the weekend a lot of tech bloggers got into a tizzy over a suggestion that Twitter search should rank Tweets by authority, with Tweets from people who have the most followers coming up first. Some bloggers quickly objected that this was somehow undemocratic or would give spammers more of an incentive to trick people into following them, and thus would be easy to game. One developer went ahead and created exactly that search experience with Twitority anyway. (Update: Make that two, check out Twithority also). While others didn’t understand what the big deal was in the first place because their relatives in Scranton have never heard of Twitter (sigh).
One thing that is clear is that there needs to be a better way to filter Twitter (which is a finalist for a Crunchies Award this year) as it grows into a broader public communications and publishing system. I like to think of Twitter as public IM. But with possibly more than one billion Tweets out there, how do you know which ones to pay attention to? What is the best way to measure the authority of a Tweet (and, thus, where it should rank as a Twitter search result)?
A better proxy for authority than the absolute number of followers someone has on Twitter may be how many times their messages get retweeted. Retweeting occurs when someone takes an original message on Twitter (a Tweet), sticks an “RT” in front of it, and spreads it further to their followers. It’s another way to separate some signal out of the cacophony of Twitter.
These numbers are, of course, related because the more followers someone has, the more likely that one of their messages will be retweeted. But they are not exactly the same. For instance, here are the top 100 people on Twitter ranked by number of followers and here is another list ranked by the number of retweets. Guy Kawasaki is No. 1 on the Retweet list (his messages have been retweeted 335 times in the past week), and is No. 9 on the followers list (with 40,496 followers). Not surprisingly, he thinks looking at retweets is the way to go (so he tells me).
The nice thing about retweets is that it offers a potential way to sort though not just people on Twitter, but their individual Tweets. An important Tweet that gets replicated around the world from someone with 5 followers or less (which is a third of all Twitterers), should have more authority than a Tweet from Kawasaki or Robert Scoble or even Barack Obama that has no impact.
You could go even deeper than just the number of retweets a person has. An even better proxy might be the number of retweets per follower. Someone with a high ratio might be worth listening to more than someone with simply a lot of followers.
Looking at the propagation of retweets is also helpful. Dan Zarella, the man behind the retweet list, recently crunched some numbers and found that most retweets die after the second retweet. That is they get picked up by one follower and that’s it. Only 7.57 percent get retweeted again. But the retweeting rate then grows after that. He refers to it as the “depth” (See chart below). Messages that have ben retweeted three times have an 11.47 percent chance of being retweeted again. By the time a message has been retweeted five times, it has a 48.44 percent chance of being retweeted. I would love see all Tweets that have been retweeted three or more times, especially whenever I do a Twitter search.
The problem with retweets I suspect is that not many people use them or even know what they are. What’s with all the abbreviated commands on Twitter, anyway? How hard would it be for Twitter to add a retweet button or link, at least as an option? (In fact, they should take the most popular commands and turn them into buttons—usage would skyrocket).
Then, just as Webpages and Websites have different link authority, individual Tweets and Twitterers could gain retweet authority. A Website that gains link authority over time has an advantage over others, just as someone like Kawasaki has an advantage over other Twitterers by dint of how often his messages have been retweeted in the past.8 years ago
Washington (CNN) - A majority of voters in Massachusetts say that Republican Sen. Scott Brown deserves to be re-elected next year, according to a new poll.
A Suffolk University/7 News survey released Wednesday night also indicates that more than half of Bay State voters say that Brown's kept his promise to be an independent voice in the Senate.
Fifty-five percent of people questioned say that Brown deserves re-election, with 29 percent saying they would like to give someone else a chance, and 16 percent undecided. The vast majority of Republicans questioned and more than six in ten independent voters say Brown deserves a full term in office, with Democrats divided.
"Brown's surprising re-election rating among registered Democrats could make it a monumental task for any potential Democratic challenger to defeat Brown," David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, tells CNN.
Brown won his seat in a January 2010 special election to fill the office formerly held for nearly five decades by the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy. Brown's upset election victory over the Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, to fill the final two years of Kennedy's term, changed the power structure in the Senate at the time, as the Democrats lost their 60 seat supermajority.
Brown won the contest, thanks in part to strong support from many in the Tea Party movement. But in Brown's 14 months in the Senate, he's sided at times with the Democrats, infuriating some in the Tea Party movement. Late last month, in the most recent example, Brown disagreed with the efforts by House Republicans to cut off support for Planned Parenthood as part of the on-going budget negotiations.
While Brown says he's a proud Republican, he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in a February interview on "The Situation Room" that he tries instead to be an "independent voter and thinker and focus on the very real issues and where we find commonality."
The poll indicates a majority of Massachusetts voters agree. By a 56 to 24 percent margin, voters say Brown has kept his promise to be an independent voice, with one in five unsure. Most Republicans, a majority of independents, and even a plurality of Democrats say Brown's kept his promise.
"Even though he votes the majority of the time with the Republicans, Brown keeps saying he's an independent vote, and that's the perception among Massachusetts voters. Even Democrats believe it," adds Paleologos.
According to the survey, Brown leads by double digits and is above 50 percent in six of the seven hypothetical 2012 general election matchups against possible Democratic challengers. The only close showdown is with former Rep. Joe Kennedy. The poll indicates Brown leading Kennedy 45 to 40 percent. The former seven-term congressman said last month that he won't challenge Brown next year.
Besides his advantage in the poll, Brown is building a large campaign chest. He plans to report later this month that his campaign raised $1.7 million in the first three months of this year, with more than $8.3 million cash on hand.
The Suffolk University/7 News poll was conducted April 3-5, with 500 registered voters in Massachusetts questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points.
- Follow Paul Steinhauser on Twitter: @psteinhausercnnRepublican strategists work on calibrating approach aimed at protecting the party against charges of being racist or sexist. | Composite image by POLITICO GOP fears charges of racism, sexism
Top Republican strategists are working on plans to protect the GOP from charges of racism or sexism in the general election, as they prepare for a presidential campaign against the first ever African-American or female Democratic nominee.
The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved. The secretive effort underscores the enormous risk senior GOP operatives see for a party often criticized for its insensitivity to minorities in campaigns dating back to the 1960s.
Story Continued Below
The RNC project is viewed as so sensitive that those involved in the work were reluctant to discuss the findings in detail. But one Republican strategist, who asked that his name be withheld to speak candidly, said the research shows the daunting and delicate task ahead.
Republicans will be told to “be sensitive to tone and stick to the substance of the discussion” and that “the key is that you have to be sensitive to the fact that you are running against historic firsts,” the strategist explained.
In other words, Republicans should expect a severe backlash if they say or do anything that smacks of politicizing race or gender. They didn’t need an expensive poll to learn that lesson, however.
They could simply have asked Joe Biden, John Edwards, Bill Clinton or any number of Democratic politicians who stung over their choice of words in this campaign already.
GOP officials are certain their words will be scrutinized ever more aggressively. They anticipate a regular media barrage of accusations of intolerance – or much worse.
They seem most concerned about Obama right now.
“You can’t run against Barack Obama the way you could run against Bill Clinton, Al Gore or John Kerry,” said Jack Kemp, the 1996 GOP vice presidential nominee, who expressed concern that the party could be reduced to an “all white country club party” if it does not tread cautiously.
“Being an African American at the top of the ticket, if he makes it, is such a great statement about the country,” he added, “Obviously you have to be sensitive to issues that affect urban America. …You have to be careful.”
GOP operatives have already coined a term for clumsy rhetoric: “undisciplined messaging.” It appears as a bullet point in a Power Point presentation making the rounds among major donors, party leaders and surrogates. The presentation outlines five main strategic attacks against an Obama candidacy, with one of them stating how “undisciplined messaging carries great risk.”From Internet Movie Firearms Database - Guns in Movies, TV and Video Games
Work In Progress
This article is still under construction. It may contain factual errors. See Talk:Fallout 4 for current discussions. Content is subject to change.
Fallout 4 Official PC cover Release Date: 2015 Developer: Bethesda Game Studios Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Series: Fallout Platforms: PC
Playstation 4
Xbox One Genre: Action Role-Playing
Fallout 4 is the fourth main game and the fifth installment in the popular Fallout series, developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks for Windows PC, PS4 and Xbox One in November 2015. Like the previous games Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, it is an open world RPG playable from first or third-person perspective.
As is normal for the series, the plot centres on a single wandering protagonist who leaves one of Vault-Tec's "Vault" fallout shelters following a nuclear war between a retro-futuristic United States and China, to find themselves in a wasteland full of mutants and rogues. In this case, the player character (whose name and gender is determined by the player) is a former resident of Vault 111 in Boston, a facility carrying out secret cryogenic experiments on its residents. Briefly waking up to helplessly watch their baby being abducted, they are later re-woken by the failure of the cryogenic equipment to find two hundred years have passed and they are the only survivor in the facility, and set out to recover their child.
The following weapons appear in the video game Fallout 4:
Overview
Fallout 4 introduces a new weapon modification system to the series. Unlike Fallout: New Vegas, which allowed the player to attach suppressors, extended magazines etc. to their gun, Fallout 4 gives the player the tools to completely rebuild a gun; typically the weapons have slots for the grip, barrel, barrel accessory, sights, receiver, magazine and stock. Each type of mod has associated stat modifiers, with some weapons able to completely alter their function depending on what mods are used. For example, a semi-auto weapon can be modified to be fullauto, or a stock and long barrel fitted to turn a pistol into an ersatz sniper rifle.
The most flexible weapons are the fictional "pipe" guns, presumably so called because they are crudely handmade, though they are vastly more durable than actual zipguns.
The weapon modification system is a crafting system, using basic resources derived from the usual "vendor trash" objects found in the game world; for example, a shovel can be used if wood or steel is required to make something. Bizarrely, most firearm modifications require the "adhesive" component, with the primary sources of this being duct tape, superglue and vegetable starch (no, really). Certain modifications also require the player to have adequate levels in specific skills; for firearms, these are "Gun Nut" and "Science!"
As in the Borderlands games, enemy weapons are procedurally generated and the name of a weapon is based on the accessories equipped to it; the system is rather less expansive, and rather than only assigning the weapon's highest-priority name prefix it generates a name which generally describes most or all of its accessories. It is possible to strip an unwanted weapon for accessories in the Workbench menu prior to scrapping it for materials, though the method of doing so is counter-intuitive; the player must replace the ones they want to keep, whereupon the desired parts will be kicked into their inventory. If this is not done, the modifications will be scrapped along with the weapon.
Special "unique" weapons can also be found in the game world, with effects not found on standard weapons; some of these use the model for an existing weapon, while others are true one-offs. There are also "legendary" weapons which are standard ones with a specific modifier such as a poison damage effect or immediately refilling the player character's action points on a successful critical hit, but these just use the normal weapon model. Such weapons can generally be further modified if desired.
Handguns
"10mm Pistol"
The fictional "10mm Pistol" returns as a rather common firearm throughout the game, chambered in the less-common 10mm Auto. The weapon no longer really resembles an ultra-chunky Desert Eagle as previous incarnations did, since the safety has been removed and the long sides of the Desert Eagle slide have had their shape changed. Modifications allow it to be converted to fully automatic fire, replacing the "10mm SMG" from previous installments, in addition to a variety of other options such as receivers with various bonuses, extended or quick-release magazines, and a selection of iron sights and optics. The long barrel mod restores the enormous chunky front end of the Fallout 3 and New Vegas incarnations.
It is the first firearm acquired in the game, found on the Overseer's desk in Vault 111.
The default barrel of the "10mm pistol."
The "10mm Pistol" with a long barrel, making it look closer to the gun from the previous two games.
Having equipped herself with an extremely fetching hat, the player character takes aim with her "10mm Pistol" in VATS as she skillfully avoids tedious jokes about Bethesda games being full of bugs.
Walther PPK
The Walther PPK appears as a unique 10mm pistol under the name "Deliverer", The player can acquire it in the "Tradecraft" quest. It's chambering in 10mm is rather strange; a PPK is too small to feed such a cartridge, and it is depicted holding 12 rounds in its standard magazine, a feat not possible without making the weapon significantly bulkier and extending the magazine past the grip. A slightly more realistic caliber in game would be.38.
The Nuka-World add-on adds the Acid Soaker, which is a Deliverer modified to squirt armor-reducing acid at its targets.
Walther PPK with a sound suppressor -.380 ACP (Brown factory grips)
The PPK as seen in on a loading screen.
The suppressor can be removed from the weapon via the Weapons Workbench.
The player character pulls out his PPK in Goodneighbor, chambering a new round.
Later he is doing his best James Bond impression, PPK in hand. Note the complete disregard of any trigger discipline.
The Acid Soaker. Like a Super Soaker, but with acid.
Smith & Wesson Model 29
The ".44 Pistol" is a Smith & Wesson Model 29. It is a powerful revolver that can be customised with various barrel lengths, though it is not nearly as flexible as the fictional "pipe" revolver. The player character will always cock the hammer after each shot.
The Enforcer. Smith & Wesson Model 29 -.44 Magnum. This is the Screen used Model 29, carried and fired by Clint Eastwood in the movie
Snub-barrel Model 29 on the weapon customization menu.
The Sole Survivor holds his Revolver, wondering if the strange woman is using some kind of hovering tech or has an invisible chair and table.
Browning Hi-Power
A Browning Hi-Power can be seen in the hands of a US soldier on the cover of one of the "Guns & Bullets" in-game magazines.
Browning Hi-power MK III - 9x19mm.
Submachine Guns
Thompson Submachine Gun
The "Submachine Gun" is for the most part an M1928A1 Thompson, though it incorrectly ejects to the left and features a side-mounted charging handle (on the wrong side) and low-profile safety and fire selector like an M1 Thompson; by default, it also has an M1 barrel. Some modifications can give it an original Cutts compensator and a classic finned barrel (oddly described as the "lightweight" version), and it is also possible to develop the same unsawing technology from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker to restore the weapon's odd cut-down stock to its former glory. Sadly it can never be given the classic vertical foregrip of an M1928. The drum, oddly, starts out much too small, but still has a capacity of 50 rounds; upgrading it provides a normal-sized drum which somehow contains 100. Amusingly, going by its modifications, a substantial part of the Thompson is made of aluminium and springs.
M1928A1 Thompson with 50-round drum magazine -.45 ACP
M1 Thompson with 20-round magazine -.45 ACP
The Thompson. Note the tiny drum and left-handed ejection port. The two odd bumps on the side of the receiver are presumably supposed to be an M1-style fire selector and safety, though they are missing their circular pivot points; the selector is set to auto, while the safety is somewhat predictably set to safe.
A unique version of the SMG with a silver finish.
The player character, dressed as the Silver Shroud, strikes a pose with his special silver SMG after having iced a thug.
Shotguns
12 Gauge Double Barreled Shotgun
With a high enough level in the "Gun Nut" skill it is possible to unsaw the sawed-off shotgun into a regular 12 Gauge Double Barreled Shotgun, giving it long barrels and a full stock. Like its shorter friend, the shotgun is fired one barrel at a time; in video game tradition, there is only a single reloading animation which replaces both shells, even if one has not been fired.
Savage/Stevens 311A Shotgun - 12 gauge
The player character prepares to put down a ghoul with his Double-barrel.
The player character reloads his shotgun after some Feral Ghoul slaying.
Sawed-Off Double Barreled Shotgun
The "shotgun" starts out life as a Sawed-off Double Barrel Shotgun. Modifications allow it to have its barrels sawed off even shorter to a pistol sized hand-cannon, or to reattach a wooden stock to reduce recoil.
Stevens 311R (sawed-off) - 12 gauge
"Shotgun" on the customise menu.
"Combat Shotgun"
The "Combat Shotgun" like previous games is also heavily based on the PPSh-41 but now has a magazine from a Browning Automatic Rifle in the proper place, instead of having a drum magazine ahead of the actual action of the weapon. In addition it has a wooden foregrip resembling the forend of a pump-action shotgun, complete with a "magazine tube" which is presumably supposed to be the gas tube.
Soviet PPSh-41 Submachine Gun - 7.62x25mm Tokarev
The Combat Shotgun
The Sole Survivor strikes a dramatic pose with his modified Combat shotgun, contemplating if he should have brought a weapon more suited for long-range gunblasting.
Rifles
Brown Bess Flintlock Musket
A statue of a Minuteman holding a Brown Bess Flintlock Musket can be seen outside the town of Sanctuary. It is also shown equipped on the mannequins of Redcoats, a mural, and a banner in the Freedom Museum.
Original "Short Land Pattern" Brown Bess musket made 1768-1805 -.75 caliber
Iowa refit in the centre of the mural (presumably supposed to be a WW2 ship given her location), distinguished by the design of the radar and the communications antenna on the bow. The upper section of her bridge tower is not right for an Iowa and is closer in design to the spotting top of the USS Arizona: she may also have been incorrectly drawn with two rear turrets like the never-built Montana-Class, though this could be a trick of perspective and they are supposed to be her 5-inch dual-purpose guns. A revolutionary war-era soldier can be seen brandishing a Brown Bess to the left of the mural. Note the incorrect inclusion of a 1980srefit in the centre of the mural (presumably supposed to be a WW2 ship given her location), distinguished by the design of the radar and the communications antenna on the bow. The upper section of her bridge tower is not right for anand is closer in design to the spotting top of the USS: she may also have been incorrectly drawn with two rear turrets like the never-built-Class, though this could be a trick of perspective and they are supposed to be her 5-inch dual-purpose guns.
M1 Carbine
In the live-action opening cinematic, a US infantryman, presumably a Marine fighting in the Pacific Theater during 1945, is running with an M1 Carbine. Another can be seen on the mural and banner in Freedom Museum.
World War II Era M1 Carbine -.30 Carbine
US Marine running with his M1 Carbine.
The Marine to the right aims his M1 Carbine.
M1 Garand
A US Marine with a bayonet-equipped M1 Garand rifle can be seen on a mural and banner in the Freedom Museum.
M1 Garand semiautomatic Rifle with leather M1917 sling -.30-06
The central Marine brandishes his M1 Garand.
Galil ARM
During the live-action, opening cinematic, a Chinese soldier can be seen holding a Galil ARM during the invasion of Alaska. The gun was probably meant to represent the "Chinese Assault Rifle" from Fallout 3.
IMI Galil ARM - 5.56x45mm NATO
A Chinese soldier holds a Galil ARM in the live-action intro.
Remington Model 700
A left-handed Remington Model 700 appears, normally named the "Hunting Rifle". It is renamed the "Sniper Rifle" if given a full stock and a scope. In a rare display of a videogame understanding which part of a bolt-action rifle constitutes the stock, the handguard length depends on which stock is fitted rather than which barrel.
Remington Model 700 CDL -.300 Win Mag
The player's first encounter with the rifle is often this extremely compact version.
A rifle with a full stock, long barrel, and a scope.
Remington Model 700 VTR
Equipping the synthetic body and long lightweight barrel mods turn the Model 700 into a Remington Model 700 VTR with a custom grip and rear stock.
Remington 700 VTR -.308 Winchester
A version of the rifle with a synthetic body, muzzle brake, VTR-style triangular barrel, 7-round extended magazine, and an unusable bipod.
The player character holds his suppressed VTR with a night-vision scope, ready to snipe some good-for-nothing Raiders.
"Combat Rifle"
The Combat Rifle appears very similar to the Combat Shotgun, sharing the PPSh-41 stock, receiver, and trigger guard, while also possessing the same action as the Combat Shotgun. Additionally, one modification allows the installation of a hooded front sight similar to that of a PPSh-41. The barrel, however, lacks the barrel shroud, and the magazine no longer resembles a Browning Automatic Rifle magazine. Overall, with the lengthened barrel and.308 receiver, the Combat Rifle bears a slight, superficial resemblance to the Browning Automatic Rifle, sans bipod.
Soviet PPSh-41 Submachine Gun - 7.62x25mm Tokarev
The combat rifle with full length barrel and stock.
With the hooded front sight and short barrel modification, the combat rifle more closely resembles both the combat shotgun and PPSh-41. Note the.45 casing being ejected. If the player chambers the weapon for.308, it will eject a.308 casing.
The player character wears a mask while shooting ghouls to ensure they can't identify him to authorities. This picture shows that the Combat Rifle's receiver was clearly designed with the Combat Shotgun in mind first, as the Combat Rifle's magazine is very thin for its magazine well.
H&K G3
The R91 Assault Rifle from Fallout 3 (which is based on the H&K G3) appears on the Commonwealth Weaponry sign in Diamond City.
Early Heckler & Koch G3 rifle with wooden handguard and buttstock - 7.62x51mm NATO
Arturo patiently waits for the player to stop staring at his sign and actually buy something already. The two rifles on the sign are R91s, based on the H&K G3.
Volkssturmgewehr 1-5
The "Far Harbor" DLC add-on features the Volkssturmgewehr 1-5, appearing as the "Radium Rifle". The rifle has various sci-fi components added to its body, including an optional wire and tin-foil dish that can be added to the barrel. These allow the rifle to cause "radiation damage" to targets. With the full stock, short barrel, and extended magazine modifications, it is roughly identical to the Volkssturmgewehr.
Volkssturmgewehr 1-5 - 7.92x33mm Kurz
The Volkssturmgewehr as seen in the crafting menu. Note the various electronic components, such as the fictional "Gamma Rounds" welded onto the rifle, which do not exist on its real life counterpart.
The player character cosplaying as a World War II German officer while aiming the Volkssturmgewehr 1-5.
"Lever Action Rifle"
The "Far Harbor" DLC add-on also features what appears to be a mixture of a Marlin 1895G "Guide Gun" and a Marlin Model 336 appearing as the "Lever Action Rifle". It is fitted with a straight stock and chambered for.45-70 like the "Guide Gun" but has a barrel similar to the Model 336. It has a five round magazine, fitted with a rear aperture sight, and the loading and ejection port located on the left. The base rifle comes in a "Mare's Leg" style configuration with a short stock, short barrel, and an enlarged lever loop. One interesting thing to note is that the rifle is always reloaded with 5 rounds regardless of how many are still remaining in the magazine.
Marlin 1895G "Guide Gun" -.45-70
Marlin 336A Carbine -.30-30 Carbine
The base rifle. Note the disproportionately large lever/trigger guard.
With stock and scope.
The Lone Survivor prepares to save Open Mic Night from McCready's awful jokes.
I miss New Vegas.
Much to the Brotherhood of Steel's chagrin, the player character re-enacts a scene from Cowboys vs Aliens.
AKM
The "Nuka World" DLC features the AKM.
AKM - 7.62x39mm
The "Handmade Rifle," as it's called in game, fitted with a Galil -esque stock, an odd upper handguard, an early-pattern slab-side magazine, and no slant compensator. The ventilated handguard is reminiscent of a similar design featured on the "Kalash" from Metro: Last Light
Machine Guns
"Assault Rifle"
Though called an "Assault Rifle," this evil mutation actually has more in common with a medium machine gun. It has a large barrel jacket based on that of the World War I Lewis Gun with the narrower part at the front flattened down to almost nothing on the default barrel (it is restored if the barrel is lengthened), a coolant line and two ports near the muzzle like the water jacket of a Maxim or Browning M1917, the swinging charging handle of a Vickers Machine Gun, a receiver and grip resembling that of the MAS AA-52, the foregrip of the FN M249 SAW series, a small antiaircraft-style front sight, and a side loading box magazine like an FG42.
According to the official Fallout 4 artbook the weapon was originally called the "machine gun" and designed both to look large in the oversized hands of the usable power armour suit, and to test the modular weapon customisation.
Lewis Gun -.303 British
MAS AA-52 GPMG - 7.5x54mm French
M249-E2 SAW - upgraded M249 with heat shield and full synthetic Stock, equipped with a 200 round ammo drum - 5.56x45mm
It should be noted that even though the ejection port is on the right side of the weapon, brass actually ejects to the left, clipping through the gun. Note the randomly added coolant line, which just vanishes into the handguard.
Note the very Lewis-like barrel jacket with fins at the rear, even though it also has a water coolant line: the Lewis used forced-air cooling, not liquid. The stock appears to be a severely distorted version of the synthetic E2 SAW stock with the shoulder pad flipped upside-down, and has an odd cap added to the diagonal section at the base which seems to imply it is supposed to somehow be a reservoir for the cooling system.
Handheld M134 Minigun
A handheld rotary gun similar to a GE M134 Minigun can be found in the game, useable by the player character and found in the hands of elite enemies. It has a massive 500-round under-barrel drum similar to the "Sasha" configuration from Team Fortress 2, though the drum is shorter and deeper. In-game it is said to be chambered for 5mm rounds, even smaller than the XM214 Microgun, which is odd considering it is the size of a regular 7.62mm minigun, and most likely just an attempt to provide a story explanation for the weapon's relatively puny per-shot damage. The rate of fire is very slow for a minigun, more akin to a movie minigun than a real one. Bizarrely, when using power armor, the barrels spin clockwise in first person, but counter-clockwise in third person.
The weapon can be customised in several ways, the most substantial of which gives it three barrels, improving accuracy and turning it into a weapon very similar to the General Dynamics GAU-19/A.
Airsoft handheld M134 Minigun with 'Chainsaw grip' to handle the recoil force. This variant was seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This is an airsoft version which retains the half-circle attachment point for the M60 foregrip from Predator; the real T2 minigun did not have this - (fake) 7.62x51mm NATO handheld M134 Minigun with 'Chainsaw grip' to handle the recoil force. This variant was seen in. This is an airsoft version which retains the half-circle attachment point for the M60 foregrip from; the real T2 minigun did not have this - (fake) 7.62x51mm NATO
Handheld minigun in the weapon customisation menu.
As the player character and their family make their way to Vault 111 during the game's introductory sequence, a power armour soldier with a minigun is seen providing rather excessive security at the gate.
After successfully acquiring her own suit of power armour, the player character eyes up the minigun mounted on a crashed "Vertibird" transport, oddly in the exact same configuration used by infantry.
Being a generous sort, she is soon sharing her discovery with a group of raiders.
As in quite a few recent games, the minigun seems to expend most of its propellant heating up the barrels rather than firing the projectiles; after even a relatively short period of firing the barrel group will look like it was just shoved into a furnace. Oddly, this doesn't seem to have any actual effect.
There is also a unique version of the M134 known as the Ash Maker, which on top of filling anything on the wrong side of the barrel(s) with lead, also lights them on fire. No such kill as overkill.
M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle
The mural and banners in the Freedom Museum depict another of the WW2 troops with an M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle, specifically a late-war version with a carry handle.
M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle -.30-06
The Marine to the left aims his BAR: note the carry handle, showing this is a late-war M1918A2.
PKM
The redesigned "Gauss Rifle" sports what looks to be the stock of a PKM due to the raised cheek rest, albeit made entirely out of wood and lacking the M model's hinged butt plate.
PKM - 7.62x54mm R
The PKM stock is pretty much the only recognizable part in this bundle of wires, rebar and magnetic coils.
Launchers
"Broadsider"
A hand-held cannon made from what appears to be an 18th century muzzle-loading swivel gun is one of the unique weapons in the game; it can only be acquired through a remarkably silly mission involving helping a group of robots to launch the museum frigate USS Constitution from her berth in Boston Naval Dockyard. Oddly, the weapon is only ever loaded with cannonballs, and not any powder, which would lead to some rather obvious problems.
Swivel gun
The "Broadsider." The hydraulic recoil-dampening assembly is at least a start, but this still would not even approach being practical as a handheld weapon. Also note the taped-on button, which connects to wires that lead to the cannon's touch hole, which explains how the powder is lit, but not where it comes from.
"Missile Launcher"
The "Missile Launcher" appears to be loosely based on the RPG-7, with the rear sight and trigger group of a PIAT. Oddly, the lower furnishings of the front end of the tube, the foregrip and the diagonal section just behind the muzzle seem to modelled after the Heckler & Koch MP7. The weapon can be modified with a scope and "stabilizer" tube, and can increase its capacity to three and four rockets, the former taking the form of a strange cartridge that sits in the barrel and slides left to right as the missiles fire, and the latter taking on a quad barrel form similar to an M202A1 FLASH. Rather oddly, the exhaust tube is never modified to account for the additional three missiles, so three missiles are essentially launching directly in the users face.
RPG-7 - 40mm
Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank (PIAT) - 3.25 in
Heckler & Koch MP7A1 with factory magazine and iron sights - 4.6x30mm
The most feared of all mutants.
The Sole Survivor introduces an unsuspecting Feral Ghoul to the Missile Launcher.
Leuchtpistole
The Leuchtpistole appears as the "Flare Gun", and is used only for summoning nearby Commonwealth Minutemen for assistance. It is almost useless as a combat weapon, due to its very low damage.
Leuchtpistole - 26.65mm
Mounted weapons
Browning M2
In the Freedom Museum mural, what appears to be an M26 Pershing tank is visible firing its cannon to the right of the group of |
itarianism“.
When a civilization reaches this effete stage in its decay, only a very rare historical occurrence can halt the final collapse of the society as the decadence grows daily more apparent. Only when the dying society still has enough life-energy to produce a spiritual giant, a godlike throwback to the ancient heroism of its people who is able to shock and drive the civilization out of its natural historical night of sleep and death, in spite of the suicidal opposition of the dying peoples who long only for „peace“ and the slumber of death, can a society once again rise for a while.
Western, Aryan civilization passed the historical point of no return on its journey into limbo during the nineteenth century, as was duly noted by Spengler, Chamberlain, and others. Were it not for the unbelievable, miraculous arrival of Adolf Hitler at the last possible moment, the only bearable course for an intelligent, perceptive, and sensitive man surrounded by a disgusting and suicide-bent civilization would have been resigned enjoyment of such momentary pleasures as provided escape from the soul-crushing reality of a Judaized, cannibalized and boob-ized civilization rushing headlong back to the jungle in the name of „humanitarianism“.
But the appearance in history of Adolf Hitler is evidence that there still remains in White, Western civilization a sufficient spark of self-sacrificing, creative vigor to permit, perhaps, another thousand years or so of survival for the White man. This infinitely precious spark will remain just that, however, and quickly fade into darkness, so long as the tiny elite minority of humanity with the wit to see what Hitler did is too selfish, cowardly, and short-sighted to apply the lessons of history before it is too late forever, and fan the spark Hitler gave us into the roaring flame of creative civilization founded by our courageous ancestors.
So far, the fearful punishment meted out to Adolf Hitler’s fighting heroes of civilization by Jewish forces of decay and destruction has so unnerved and terrified the world that even those able to see and understand the peril to humanity, and the way to salvation as shown by Adolf Hitler, are so pitifully attached to their lives and liberties and comforts that they dare not pick up the sacred spark of White survival and fan it with their own life’s breath, which it must soon have-or go out forever.
Aryan, White humanity is on the precipice of darkness and oblivion. Strewn on the crags in the eternal blackness below are the bones of other know-it-all, pompous civilizations which were doubtless unable to imagine their own demise at the very time when they were surrounded by the outward power and magnificence of empire. They were unable to realize or face up to the TOTAL threat of a growing weakness and „humanitarianism“, unable to muster the TOTAL will necessary to reverse the historical march to death and oblivion. They were too lazy and selfish, greedy and cowardly to heed the tiny few who have been burned, crucified, stoned, fed to the lions or handed the cup of hemlock.
If there is any history a thousand years hence, and any people able to study it, they will marvel in disbelief most of all at the stubborn refusal of the White man to use his overwhelming strength, his knowledge and the providential gift of Adolf Hitler’s leadership to save himself from the most incredible and cringing slavery at the hands of a relatively tiny gang of disgusting, pathologically unbalanced, physically weak and cowardly, arrogant, tyrannical Jews.
Our problems today are not „American“ problems, „British“ problems, „French“, „German“ or „European“ or „African“ problems—they are problems of SURVIVAL FOR ALL WHITE MEN.
What, in the name of the most elementary reason, is the difference between whether Bartholomew Buckingham is born near the Thames, Hans Schmidt on the Rhine, Pierre Dubois on the Seine, Per Olafson in Stockholm, Eric Erasmus in Durban, Joe Doaks in Podunk, Ohio or John Smith in Auckland, New Zealand compared to the question of „Shall there BE any more Bartholomews, Hanses, Pierres, Pers, Erics, Joes or Johns?“
Our planet swarms with colored creatures who outnumber us by more than FOUR TO ONE—and in all of our nations these inferior beings, we are told, are our „equals“, able to vote away our money, our liberties, our lives and our honor. By the old-fashioned notions of nationalism and democracy I, Lincoln Rockwell, am supposed to treasure and care for and be loyal to some of the lowest spawn of the jungle, providing only that their Black dam gave them to the world in some American ditch or filthy crib—because then, of course, they are „Americans“, and aren’t we all out for „America“?
Or am I to be loyal and die for these miserable and pitiable half-animals, my „fellow Americans“, by slaughtering millions upon millions of the finest biological specimens of my own race, because a gang of Hollywood Jews teaches us that Americans must hate Germans?
Or again, is it a certain piece of geography to which I am to be loyal, and for which I must kill my own people and perhaps die myself? Does my loyalty to this hunk of geography stop at the Canadian border?
But perhaps it is „Americanism“ to which I am to be loyal and for which I must make war upon German men, women and children. When I examine what they tell me is „Americanism“, however, I find that it consists primarily in being willing to submit meekly to Jewish direction of my culture, government, religion, entertainment, and even my sex life.
No, all this is nonsense.
The only thing to which I can be loyal with any deep conviction — the only loyalty which makes any sense — is my RACIAL, and therefore cultural, brotherhood with my own people, no matter where they happen to have been born! When that loyalty is challenged, and my people are in danger, it is monstrous to pretend that we must be suspicious of each other just because we live across imaginary geographical lines, and that, upon proper preparation and agitation by a gang of international Jews, we White men must march forth to kill each other and bomb each other to ashes and everlastingly hate each other because we are „trade rivals“ or for „American democracy“ or the „British Empire“ or for anything else in the world.
I am a WHITE MAN, and a brother to all other White men, and I mean to stand with all of them and, if necessary, lead them in battle to survive against the unspeakable menace of the colored populations of the earth rising to slaughter and rapine against the White men — and led by the scheming Jew!
But like the first man in the analogy of the walk through the snake-infested jungle, too many of our White „leaders“ fail to perceive the cosmic proportions of the problem and imagine it is something which can be solved in „their“ country, and by half measures.
The tiny few who do see the dreadful and total urgency of the White man’s situation have, until our arrival on the scene, attempted to fight with less than the total weapons required in a total fight for survival. Most of the best leaders have imagined that small groups of beleaguered White men, gathered into little geographical huddles behind imaginary lines and waving different colored bits of cloth bravely in the breezes, can survive by themselves, and the hell with the other White men who have different bits of colored cloth.
The Jews have NEVER made the mistake of seriously dividing themselves into these phony geographical „teams“. On the contrary, the Jews — with their Bolshevism, Zionism, and mongrelism — are attacking ALL White men, EVERYWHERE and ALL THE TIME. They are sending their black armies into all of our nations in an all-out attack against the White elite of the world, with absolutely no considerations of „national“ boundaries or flags or languages or cultures. In the face of this total international threat of annihilation by RACE, millions of those who already see the danger are to be found babbling darkly of „Yankee imperialism“, „British Empire“, „dirty Catholics“, „immoral atheists“, „Republicans“, „Laborites“, „damned Yankees“, „Germany first“, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
Like little boys besieged by a mob of kidnappers and murderers, they cannot resist squabbling about who has the most marbles in the face of deadly danger they temporarily forget. The battle of our times — if there is to be any battle — is for the SURVIVAL OF THE WHITE RACE!
And to survive, the White man will have to RE-CONQUER the earth once conquered and civilized at the cost of so much blood by his ancestors. Under the banners of international Jewry, the colored masses are threatening to return civilization to savagery. Under the Swastika banner of Adolf Hitler, White men around the world will master the planet to save civilization.
The Jewish war against civilization has actually been a world-wide, gigantic REVOLUTION, in the course of which they got millions of us to murder each other shouting „Democracy!“ „Gott mit uns!“, „Free the slaves!“, „Liberty, equality, fraternity!“ And now they are preparing for the final bloodbath during which we will shout „Capitalism!“ and „Communism!“ respectively, as the two teams of White men slaughter each other with Jew-financed H-bombs.
In the course of these fratricidal and suicidal wars, the Jews have not been afraid to sacrifice thousands of their brethren in their devilish cause, as they did in the last monstrous slaughter in the 1940s. The Jews realize what WE must realize: that they are playing for the highest stakes in the knowledge of mankind—mastery of the whole earth—and they do not shrink from the inescapable conclusions of strategy and tactics dictated by knowledge of such stakes. If we are to survive then we too must have the wit and the strength of mind to face up to the deadly facts of the situation and act RUTHLESSLY, RAPIDLY, and EFFECTIVELY.
The Jews have almost won the final step in their 4,000-year revolution—OPEN world power. They now have total secret power to manipulate and control all world activities, and lack only a little more brainwashing and breaking of the will of the masses to make their world domination an acknowledged and formal power. They have fought and won their way to this incredible power by unsurpassed determination and iron will over forty centuries, and only a miracle can prevent the final victory of such fanatical warriors, tragically and viciously wrong as such a victory would be for humanity.
Even the atheist Jews—which is most of them—have an inexplicable belief in the ancient Jewish prophecies that when „the law comes forth from the hills of Zion“ and Jerusalem, it will be the millennium for the Jews and they will own and rule the earth. THEY ARE IN JERUSALEM NOW, and lack only a few blocks of it for total possession! *[NB. – Commander Rockwell was writing before the 1967 war wherein the Jews seized the rest of the city. – WS]* They are experiencing a worldwide frenzy as they can already sense the total victory we are about to give them, and they are even now preparing their sacrificial orgy of victory in Tel Aviv!
In the face of this unspeakable threat, that the whole world and all of us will fall to the tyranny of a gang of criminal paranoiacs, the narrow chauvinism, conservatism, and regionalism of most right-wing leaders is the utmost stupidity! With the masters of mongrels, the Jews, leading MILLIONS of savages in a worldwide attack against the White-elite bearers of civilization, and with the end only moments away in terms of history, only the most short-sighted leaders can continue to keep our children divided and helpless into „teams“ of Americans, Dixiecrats, Catholics, Germans, Yankees, atheists, Dutchmen, conservatives, Irishmen, etc. down through the whole pitiful, heartbreaking list. The Jew may be all of these things—but FIRST HE IS A JEW!
It is the first task of him who would save civilization—which requires saving the White man—to make White men supremely and totally conscious of RACE above all other allegiances. Our people can be Democrats or Germans or Catholics or Englishmen if they want to and if it suits their purposes, but FIRST THEY MUST BE WHITE MEN! Otherwise, the Jew will keep us divided and helpless and unconscious of our racial unity and strength, while they fanatically fight as Jews, no matter where they are, until it is all over.
The world of TV, rockets and jet transportation has become too small to permit any group of White men anywhere to enjoy the suicidal luxury of fighting each other on behalf of the Jew ever again, no matter what the reason which may be advanced in the propaganda. We simply cannot afford to fight each other when we are under such overwhelming and deadly attack by such endless hordes led by such a fanatical and devilish enemy as the Marxist, Zionist Jew. The reason that the White man has been losing for so long in the first place is that he has failed or refused to see the enormity and the pressing urgency of his problem. He has permitted himself to be distracted into a million little squabbles over trifles, while his race has been driven almost to extinction.
Like the first man in the analogy, we haven’t understood the path, the nature of the obstacles and, worst of all, we haven’t even realized the goal we must win–or die. That goal is and must be MASTERY OF THE EARTH BY THE WHITE MAN, since civilization depends solely on such White mastery. Any lesser goal is utterly worthless, just as it would be worthless for a man scheduled to hang to take vitamins and attain perfect health.
And such a fantastically difficult and cosmic goal as world mastery cannot be won by luck, sneaking, half-measures, prayers, hopes, fine speeches, pamphlets, or sporadic violence. What we must aim at and achieve is a WORLD COUNTER REVOLUTION against the Jewish Marxist-Zionist revolution. And revolutions are never, never, NEVER the result of spontaneous and fortuitous uprisings, but ALWAYS the product of ruthless, scientific planning and fighting, based on the immutable laws of great social upheavals. Behind the pitchforks and the barricades there is always the story of the candle-lit conspiracies by the planners—otherwise the revolution would be over in a trice.
Not only have our handful of leaders so far failed to realize the unheard-of proportions of the goal at which we must aim, but they have singularly failed to face up to their terrifying responsibilities in planning. Time after time, would-be leaders have arisen and led us in pitiful efforts to nip the end of the tiger’s tail, only to waste our substance and blood and heroism in a fruitless struggle which always ends in being crushed by a single, smashing blow from the paw of the beast.
The Jewish world revolution can only be broken and beaten by a counter world revolution.
Any revolution must be planned with care and precision in accordance with the iron laws governing human conduct in the mass. A world revolution, in the face of the international and staggering power of Jewry, must be planned and executed with a brilliance and ruthlessness unmatched in the history of the world.
The most fundamental rule of such a cataclysmic social upheaval as a revolution is: „The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church!“ Perhaps it sounds cruel and brutal, but it is nevertheless true, that the greater the proportion of human upheaval aimed at, the greater quantity of blood and torrents of tears which must be poured out in vast quantities to gain the goal. The kind of unprecedented, colossal movement which can alone reverse the suicidal trend of the Western world, and usher in even another thousand years of survival for the White man, can never be launched–let alone won–in any safe, painless, or easy way. Even ordinary sufferings and martyrdom are too minscule for the kind of movement we must set aflame to survive. Everything about the current deadly battle for world mastery is and must be Olympian, and we cannot shrink from Olympian AGONIES if we are to hope to win.
Mighty movements always require millions of people to immolate themselves in a passion of self-sacrificing devotion to the cause. And these enormous masses of people can never be moved to fling themselves into the flames of revolution with shouts of „Favorable trade balance!“ or „States’ rights!“ etc. Only the FUNDAMENTAL drives from deep inside the human psyche can lift the slow-moving masses from their ignorant apathy to the wild pitch of emotion which carries them entirely away in the tidal wave of revolution. Nothing so affects these fundamental emotions of the masses as HEROISM, and only the utmost heroism can now save the White man from his lethargy and paralyzing fear of the Jews.
And there is no symbol other than the Swastika and no name other than Adolf Hitler which is so beautifully calculated to produce the persecution and consequent heroism which alone can unite and inflame the White man into an irresistable wave of anti-Jewish Marxist-Zionist revolution. Until the advent of Adolf Hitler, the White men of the world had nothing, absolutely NOTHING in the way of a common cause, common heroes, common martyrs, sacred shrines, names and symbols. But now, after millions of young German White men heroically flung their precious lives away in the first real fight in history for the White elite, we finally have the blood-soaked shrines, symbols, and martyrs which are the most elementary stuff of revolution.
Millions of equally precious young White men on the opposing side, fighting for the devilish Communist-Zionist Jews, will have lost their lives for absolutely nothing unless we accept this stupendous blood-sacrifice, and use it to ensure that never again will precious White blood be spilled fighting for Jews and negroes.
Nevertheless, and unbelievably, the lucky heirs of all this self-sacrifice and heroism—the recipients of these precious bloodstained banners and sacred names—reject their heritage as „impractical“.
„We can never win with open adherence to National Socialism and the Swastika,“ these gentlemen explain feebly. „The Jews have taught people to hate them too much,“ they add. „If we use the Swastika and praise Hitler too openly, they will throw us in prison or kill us!“ And did they not throw ALL makers of revolutions, including the Jew makers of the Red revolution, in jail—and even kill some of them? Are we National Socialists to be more fearful and cowardly than a gang of Jews? The very persecution and bloodshed such irresolute characters seek to avoid is the *sine qua non* of our victory!
These are not empty words. I have personally proved their truth here in America, the power center of world Jewry, by being beaten, by going to jail and the insane asylum, losing my dear family, and living like an animal. Twelve days from today, as I write this, I face jail again. These things are unpleasant and even heartbreaking—but they MUST BE!
I have risen in two years to a commanding position in the worldwide fight for the White man, starting as a penniless, unknown and unaided single individual like millions upon millions of others—simply and solely because I have gratefully and lovingly used the precious names and symbols which have been bathed and soaked in such oceans of blood and tears—the Swastika and the name of the Leader, Adolf Hitler.
Temporary and flashy political successes are always easy. It is always simpler and quicker to put pads in one’s jacket that to build the human muscles to fill the coat by months or years of work and sweat. For fifty years now, there has been a steady rise and fall of „right-wing“ or White movements built entirely of pads.
By endorsing motherhood and virtue and patriotism, etc., and by avoiding brutal statements of the real purpose of such organizations—which must necessarily be the extermination of the Communist-Zionist enemies of humanity—great flocks of skittish „patriots“, „conservatives“, and even a few „tough“ anti-Semites could be corraled. But these people are not attracted to such a movement because they are so inflamed with revolutionary zeal that they can hardly be restrained from attacking their tormentors in the streets. Rather they join the „patriot“ society to relieve their guilty consciences by pretending to fight the Jews and their treason and terror by what they call „clever underground methods“. They relieve themelves of their pent-up frustration at the tyranny of the Jews and negroes once a week at a „Rally“ (private, of course) and then hurry home happily for another week of profits, parties and TV.
Such Mighty Mouses are horrified when it is suggested that perhaps they should hand out pamphlets in the street, or picket some outrageous example of Jewish-Communist arrogance. And if one exposes not only the Jews for what they are, but also exposes these political loafers who siphon off the support and energy for a real battle, these heroes reply by howling that one is an agent provocateur working to get them all crucified as a bunch of Nazis–which, except for their disgusting cowardice, they might otherwise be.
It is not the task of the world anti-Jewish revolution to attract and organize these contemptible sneaks, but to drive them out of the way and out of business, where they will be unable to milk the Movement of the tiny bit of available support for useless „projects“, as they have been doing for years. Nothing accomplishes that task like the Swastika. The political drones, profiteers, prostitutes and cowards scoot with their tails between their legs from this hooked cross, as the devil does from holy water.
On the other hand, the Swastika has an irresistable attraction for the kind of daring, bold, devil-may-care fighting YOUNG men we need. In America, most of them are simply nigger-haters because of their pure White man’s instinct. When they learn the Jews’ part in the disgraceful negro situation they become Nazis in minutes. Then it is the work of only months until they also understand the deeper significnce, the idealism, and the true aims of the Movement.
But even more important than these advantages, the blood-soaked Swastika has a supernatural effect on Jews. It is after all only a few black lines—but it drives the Jews out of their usual sly and calculating frame of mind and makes them hysterical and foolish. To them, it is not just the lines, but the awful threat of ruthless exposure, swift justice, and terrible vengeance which their guilty consciences tell them they richly deserve. It is like a picture of the electric chair to a hunted murderer.
A calm, calculating Jew is the most dangerous beast on the face of the earth. By the exercise of his devilish, perverted but brilliant reason, the Jew has almost mastered all the rest of us. But a hysterical, screaming Jew, out of his mind with hate and fear of punishment for his crimes, is helpless putty in the hands of a calculating National Socialist.
We have proved this time and again—when Jewish councils have spent millions of dollars to spread the word among the Jews to ignore us. But the hordes of guilty little sinners can’t do it! When they see that Swastika and hear us praising Adolf Hitler and describing the gas chambers for traitors, they become screaming, wild ghetto Jews who have eternally blown up their victories at the last moment by their insane passions of hate and revenge.
The result is the lifeblood of a political movement: PUBLICITY! In spite of the Jewish domination of all the media of public information, the parading of Swastikas and National Socialists in public streets cannot be hidden or ignored without giving the game away. They can suppress the news, to be sure. But then too many people realize their press power and censorship. And when the young Movement is able to force publication of its existence on the giant national TV networks, in magazines, the press, etc.—it serves as a clarion call to the frustrated millions who are looking for such a movement. It is only thus that we have been able to contact thousands of people all over the world who have never before been in any „patriot“ outfit but couldn’t resist the American Nazi Party and the World Union of National Socialists.
The Swastika and Hitler, far from being millstones, are actually the answer to the eternal problem of the right wing—money! When you don’t have money for paper, meeting halls, etc.—as our side never does—you can go into the streets and march and distribute homemade handbills and picket—for nothing. The Jews go wild, attack—and you then have free use of millions of dollars worth of Jewish TV, newspapers, magazines, etc. Of course, you may get bloodied and have to sit in jail a while recuperating. But this is a small price to pay for the astonishing results.
In addition to the free publicity attendant on open operation as a Nazi, you also find that the very audacity of the thing will attract the young fighting men you need, even though they know nothing and care less about the politics of the business. They admire raw courage and daring. Later, when they have come to know the facts a little better, they will fight for ideals and the White man. But until then, these valuable protectors of your free speech will fight just for fun.
Above all, the Swastika will save you from the fundamental error of the right wing—that sweet reason will change the world and save us from the Jewish tyrants.
Reason is still an infant in human affairs, a precious and rare development found in the mutational brains of an infinitestimal minority of homo sapiens. And even the few geniuses able to exercise genuine, independent reason are almost entirely incapable of acting in accordance with the dictates of that reason—which is one of the reasons so many of them end up as failures in a world which does not appreciate them or their reason.
It is FORCE, POWER, STRENGTH which rules the world, from the ebb and flow of the tides to the decision of your neighbor to join the Rotary. Only a negligible fringe of oddball humans change their mind as a result of being convinced by a superior argument. The overwhelming masses, including the mass of today’s „intellectuals“, change their minds only in order to CONFORM. In other words, the minds of the vast majority ALWAYS bow to the strongest opinion—the opinion which brings rewards and avoids punishment.
The right wing examines its reasons and arguments and facts and finds them true and good—as they may be. They then become outraged which the slobs next door cannot see and appreciate this rightness and, very probably, throw them out of the house for preaching „hate.“ But this is only as things are. The slobs will hold whatever opinion seems to show the most strength and WILL TO POWER. They are completely, hopelessly female in their approach to reason and always, ALWAYS prefer strength to „rightness“.
When they say „no“ to our Swastika and National Socialism, they are only the eternal female saying „no“ but meaning, „If you accept my no, then you are a weakling and have no right to my favors. Let us see if you have the manhood and the strength to MAKE me say yes!“
They hate us now because we are weak and powerless. All the reason in the world will never make them love us or our ideas in ANY guise, no matter how we try to sugar-coat them, until we COMMAND THEIR RESPECT AND ADMIRATION FOR OUR WILL, our guts, our force! As stupid as they are, their instincts in smelling force and strength are still pure, and the attempt to SNEAK National Socialist ideas in the guise of „patriot leagues“ and other nice, safe groups very properly repulses them as being the actions of cowards and sneaks.
To HELL with the sneaky, safer approaches! They get us persecuted every bit as much as the direct, open approach, and they doom us to miserable, sneaking failure every time. If we are to be the last of the White men who conquered the world; if we are finally to be overwhelmed by a pack of rats, let us at least face the death of our race as our ancestors faced their death—like MEN. Let us not crawl down amongst the rats begging for mercy or trying to out-sneak them and pretend to be rats ourselves!
Let us stand on the scaffold of history—if hang we must—like the martyrs of Nuremberg, tall and proud! Is life so sweet, is comfort so precious and a job in a Jewish counting house so sacred that we are AFRAID to grasp the mighty hand of ADOLF HITLER reaching down to us our of our glorious past? Again, to HELL with sneaking and safety!
It is part of the Jews to be sneaky and sly. The genius of our people has ever been joyous strength, robust forcefulness, directness, manly courage, and flaming heroism. When the Jews, with their economic terrorism, jails, bullies and hangmen, scare the White man into laying down his cudgel and goad him into trying to out-sneak Jewish tyranny, the Jews have completely emasculated the once-strong White man, and doomed him to dishonor and defeat. The White man can NEVER win by sneaking!
In the dawn of Nordic civilization, lesser races used to cringe in their rude huts and pray, „Lord, save us from the fury of the men of the North!“ It was THAT kind of man who built Western civilization. If civilization is now to be saved from the swarms of degenerate Jews, their cannibal accomplices and their unspeakably depraved liberal friends, it will be THAT kind of man who saves it, NEVER sneaks!
WHITE MAN! The same iron blood of your mighty ancestors flows in your veins! The towering figure of ADOLF HITLER reaches out a giant hand to lift you up to world-conquering POWER! You have cringed long enough before pygmies! Now RISE! Defy the rats and vermin at your feet! Let them feel the toe and heel of your boot! Stamp them out!
You have been sleeping. When you rise and stand up, and the masses once more see what a man of FORCE looks like, they will love you as they now imagine they hate you. With the spark of National Socialism, struck by Adolf Hitler, burning in your breast, you are unconquerable! IN HOC SIGNO VINCES! In the sign of the Swastika, YOU will conquer!
Join hands with the heroes in America, Britain, Iceland, Denmark and other White countries who have raised the holy Swastika banner and defended it with their blood. It has risen from the ashes of Berlin, and never shall it be hauled down again. Stand with us before the altar of Adolf Hitler and the world-conquering White race, and pledge your life as we have, to bring the order and justice of Western, White civilization once more into the world. Let us teach the traitors and rats and pygmies once more to cringe in terror in their huts and pray, „Lord save us from the FURY OF THE MEN OF THE NORTH!“
-Lincoln RockwellYet when VICE News asked the DfE which organizations and companies were consulted about the website's content during its development, the list that was eventually provided was entirely absent of any group representing Britain's Muslim community. The DfE later claimed to have shown the finished website to representatives of the Association of Muslim Schools before it went live — but the association's chairman told us no such consultation had taken place.
Designed to protect children from the " spell of twisted ideologies," the Educate Against Hate website provides a list of warning signs that can indicate radicalization, from "possessing or accessing other forms of extremist literature" and "being in contact with extremist recruiters," to exhibiting "argumentativeness or aggression" and "excessive time spent online." It overtly states that today's greatest challenge comes in the form of the "rise of Islamist extremism."
The website, which provides advice to parents, teachers, and school leaders on protecting children from radicalization was launched by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan in January 2016 at Bethnal Green Academy in east London — a secondary school which has seen four of its students leave for Syria to join the Islamic State. The FOI request revealed more than £41,000 ($59,000) was spent promoting it, as an online portal for the government's counter-terrorism strategy Prevent.
A Freedom of Information (FOI) response shows that the government consulted 29 organizations including government departments, faith-based groups, various teaching associations, and charities over the content of the Educate Against Hate website — but none representing Britain's Muslim community.
The UK's Department for Education (DfE) failed to consult a single Muslim organization during its development of the government's flagship anti-radicalization website, VICE News has learned.
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The UK's Department for Education (DfE) failed to consult a single Muslim organization during its development of the government's flagship anti-radicalization website, VICE News has learned.
A Freedom of Information (FOI) response shows that the government consulted 29 organizations including government departments, faith-based groups, various teaching associations, and charities over the content of the Educate Against Hate website — but none representing Britain's Muslim community.
The website, which provides advice to parents, teachers, and school leaders on protecting children from radicalization was launched by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan in January 2016 at Bethnal Green Academy in east London — a secondary school which has seen four of its students leave for Syria to join the Islamic State. The FOI request revealed more than £41,000 ($59,000) was spent promoting it, as an online portal for the government's counter-terrorism strategy Prevent.
Designed to protect children from the "spell of twisted ideologies," the Educate Against Hate website provides a list of warning signs that can indicate radicalization, from "possessing or accessing other forms of extremist literature" and "being in contact with extremist recruiters," to exhibiting "argumentativeness or aggression" and "excessive time spent online." It overtly states that today's greatest challenge comes in the form of the "rise of Islamist extremism."
Yet when VICE News asked the DfE which organizations and companies were consulted about the website's content during its development, the list that was eventually provided was entirely absent of any group representing Britain's Muslim community. The DfE later claimed to have shown the finished website to representatives of the Association of Muslim Schools before it went live — but the association's chairman told us no such consultation had taken place.
Related: UK Will Ask Preschool Teachers to Spy on Children in Latest Counter-Terror Proposals
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella body with other 500 affiliated organizations, mosques, charities, and schools, said it was concerned by the fact there was no representation from Muslim communities on the list, "especially given a significant proportion of those children referred to Prevent teams [formed of police and local officials] in schools are Muslim." In order to tackle radicalization, it was important that all communities were engaged, the MCB spokesman said.
Dr. Rizwaan Sabir, a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University who specializes in counter-terrorism and insurgency, said the website consultation appeared to have taken place in an "echo chamber."
"The organizations that have been consulted seem to overwhelmingly comprise of government institutions, charities, and not-for-profit organizations who have accepted the government's line around 'radicalization' and 'extremism' and are already proactively involved in implementing Prevent in educational settings, especially schools," he said.
The lack of discussion with any families directly impacted by relatives travelling to Iraq and Syria was "a significant oversight that brings the foundation of the initiative into question" he added.
The government's Prevent strategy was launched in the aftermath of the suicide bombings on London transport that killed 52 people in July 2005, with the aim of stopping people being drawn into terrorism in the UK and overseas. Since its inception the initiative has been much criticized, accused of being counter-productive, discriminatory and ineffective — especially as stories have emerged of children being questioned by police alone for misdemeanors such as misspelling "terraced house" as "terrorist house," and wearing Free Palestine badges at school.
Related: Is Your Child A Terrorist? UK Primary School Children Asked to Complete Radicalization Survey
Under the act, schools must have "due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism" — otherwise known as the Prevent duty. The Educate Against Hate website hosts a variety of resources for teachers and school leaders aimed at helping them fulfil the obligation.
Hundreds of academics, activists, and representatives of teaching and student unions wrote an open letter to the government last year warning that Prevent stoked Islamophobia and would have a "chilling effect" on free speech and political dissent. "Prevent reinforces an 'us' and 'them' view of the world, divides communities, and sows mistrust of Muslims.... it makes us less safe," they wrote.
Last month the National Union of Teachers (NUT) — which also does not feature on the list of consultants for the Educate Against Hate website — called for the Prevent strategy to be removed from schools, warning it shut down open debate and created "suspicion and confusion." The government independent reviewer of terrorism laws, David Anderson QC, also recently called for a review of the strategy, warning its "lack of transparency... encourages rumor and mistrust to spread and to fester."
The DfE did ask various religious organizations about the website's content — the list includes the Church of England and the Catholic Education Service, which represents over 2,000 schools and academies in England on national education policies — but no consultations with Muslim ones are in the records provided to VICE News.
The closest the DfE came to Britain's Muslim community as it designed this anti-radicalization content, according to the FOI response, was its consultation with one interfaith organization — the Maimonides Interfaith Foundation, which says it promotes dialogue between the world's major religions.
The list did not contain "a single organization on that list has any traction with the Muslim community," said Tasnime Akunjee, a lawyer for the families of three of the Bethnal Green Academy schoolgirls that fled to Syria, who added his clients had also not been consulted by the DfE for the website.
"Despite all the families of the four girls involved having sought support and advice from the East London Mosque, our government has chosen once again to consult anyone other than those with relevant, credible, and current knowledge," he said.
Related: Left in the Dark: The Story Behind the Families of Three Girls Groomed by the Islamic State
Shadow education secretary Lucy Powell MP told VICE News that failing to consult any Muslim organizations was an "own goal" by Morgan.
"Rather than taking strong action to give communities confidence to tackle this issue her department has failed to consult with Muslim organizations," she |
the Pixel, including official collections based on Stranger Things and Star Wars, among other franchises. The company says its Pixel 2 phones’ cameras are specifically optimized and calibrated for high-quality augmented reality, and it showed this off at today’s event with a variety of AR apps. One lets you watch League of Legends in augmented reality, and another lets you play with augmented reality Legos, similar to an app that already exists for Google’s Daydream VR platform.
Related Exclusive first look at the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL
In AR Stickers, character stickers can interact with each other — if you put Stranger Things heroine Eleven in a scene with her nemesis the Demogorgon, for example, she’ll quickly vanquish it. You can record these little scenes and send them to friends, in addition to watching them in real time.
ARCore was announced in late August, and it’s similar to Apple’s ARKit: a software platform that makes it easier for developers to build their own augmented reality apps. A preview version is available on the Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, and Google intends to support 100 million Android devices at a later, official launch date.
For an exclusive look at all the new Google devices announced, check out our interview with CEO Sundar Pichai.People in the neighborhood said selling nutcrackers had become more prevalent in the dismal economy, a means some have used to supplement their incomes with quick and easy money. Some who remember the crack boom of the mid-1980s and early 1990s, and the destruction it heaped upon the community, justify the sales, seeing them as akin to marijuana dealing or numbers gambling.
But others in Harlem, including parents and pastors, say they are worried, particularly because of the drink’s potency, popularity with teenagers and easy availability.
“I think adults and young adults are being very selfish and using greed to raise money,” said the Rev. Vernon Williams, an antiviolence activist who sees a correlation between nutcracker sales and youth violence. “And they are taking this toxic combination of multiple high-level alcohols and selling it indiscriminately to anyone who has the $5.”
Police officials said they were aware of the nutcracker sales and had done what they could to address the issue. They said the department had used both plainclothes and uniformed officers to issue summonses to stores and individuals caught selling it. People found buying the drinks were issued summonses for having an open container of alcohol, the police said.
Sellers include young and older women, blue-collar workers, street hustlers and the underemployed. To give themselves an edge, some sellers even make home deliveries.
Their customers are teenagers, men and women arriving home after a day at work, and young adults who have made it a staple of the party scene. The drinks can also be found in neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens but have been ubiquitous this summer in Harlem and Washington Heights.
“It’s definitely a summer drink, and I try to serve them as cold as possible,” said a regular nutcracker seller, a man in his early 30s who goes by the name of Kool-Aid and asked that his full name not be published. “It’s a fruity drink, so you don’t have to sip it with your face all scrunched up; you feel really nice without getting totally bombed out.”
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The man said he made six gallons at a time in a big plastic water cooler jug, mixing 160-proof Devil’s Springs vodka, 151-proof Bacardi 151 rum, Amaretto, whatever sweet liqueur he had on hand and a variety of juices depending on the desired flavor, including cranberry, mango, pineapple and peach nectar.
The juice and liquor typically cost him about $300, he said. He also spends about $85 on plastic bottles and sealable caps.
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For each $200 or $300 he spends, he said, he makes about $700 in profit.
To distinguish their drinks from others, some nutcracker sellers use various colored caps and infuse the drink with fruit or Jolly Ranchers. Kool-Aid said he added liquor-soaked fruit salad.
People in the neighborhood said they had no idea how nutcracker caught on. But local legend has it that the original nutcracker was created 10 or so years ago at a Chinese restaurant on the border of the Upper West Side and Harlem, where bartenders hid their hands below the counter as they mixed the drink. When people asked what was in it, the bartenders refused to say. The story goes that at some point the bartenders started allowing customers to leave with their drinks, and soon people started dissecting the recipe and making their own.
For some the drink’s presence in Harlem conjures up an era 80 years in its past, when selling and consuming home-concocted alcohol was an illegal, dangerous pastime.
“As a phenomenon it evokes both the romantic and repugnant concoctions of Jazz Age Harlem, the illicit elixir of bathtub gin on the one hand, the toxic tonic of wood-alcohol-based wild whiskey on the other,” said Eric K. Washington, a Harlem historian and author of “Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem.”
Kool-Aid, who has a couple years of college under his belt and lives in the West 140s, says nutcracker helps him pay the bills. He said he had not been able to find full-time work, only occasional maintenance or data entry work through an agency.
But, he said, business had become more risky lately. After a series of articles in The Daily News that raised alarms about sales to minors, police and community leaders began to rein in the sales. A year ago there were as many as six people selling nutcracker on his block, he said, until the police cracked down, emptying bottles on sidewalks and handing out summonses for $250 to $500 to dealers and customers.
He says he abides by a few self-made rules of self-preservation: Don’t sell to teenagers. Never sell to strangers. And never sell it openly in the street, always by phone call or text message and always delivered in the kind of black plastic bags that bodegas use.
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“It comes with risks,” he said. “I don’t have a criminal record, so I don’t want to get one for selling drinks.”
Most sellers are not checking buyers for an ID. But because of its sweetness, it is liquor candy to teenagers.
“Alcohol is unquestionably the drug that is most abused by kids; there’s nothing close,” said Joseph Califano, president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. “We read about marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth. The reality is that alcohol is the entrance of kids into that world, and to sell that stuff to young kids, I think it’s child abuse.”
Mr. Califano said that studies had shown that 80 percent of the people in prison had substance abuse issues, and that there was scientific evidence that alcohol could stunt the adolescent brain.
Kool-Aid said most nutcracker sellers were not thinking about the impact on their buyers. “Hustlers just think it’s all about the buck,” he said. “They don’t care about the families or the parent who’s looking for their child at 1 in the morning, and they’re passed out drunk on somebody’s stoop from too many nutcrackers.”Here at phil&teds we’re parents too so we understand the challenges of the parenting day
Today we’re tackling an age old topic that has special significance and is extremely topical – a disposable or cloth diaper?
Before we get into the reasons why you should get cloth diapers, let’s learn about them.
What is a cloth diaper?
A cloth diaper is a re-usable diaper for your little one. Gone are the days of diapers with big safety pins holding together an arbitrary piece of cloth. Remember Tommy Pickles from Rugrats? That type of nappy is not even a thing anymore. A cloth diaper comes in two pieces, an inner and an outer.
The outer
The outer comes with a great patterns and easy to use buttons or Velcro. They’re as simple to use as their disposable counterparts and much easier on the planet. Because they’re washable, a cloth diaper outer is durable and will hold its colour well, disguising any stains from baby.
The inner
A cloth diaper inner is shaped specially for the named outer. It is easily removed and the best part about it is that it’s washable!
Why would I get a disposable diaper?
It’s an undeniable fact that a disposable diaper is convenient. When baby decides it’s the right time at your friend’s birthday party, it’s easy to pull a fresh diaper out of the bag and dispose of the dirty one. Change her and chuck it out. No need to store it for later on.
Cost per year of disposable diapers vs. cloth diapers
Brace yourself for this one: your child is going to use about 7500 diapers before they become toilet trained. At a cost of.72c per change, this equates to $5400NZD. When you’ve finally had a child 50% of all of your household rubbish will become disposable diapers. When you do the hardcore accounting, you’ll find that the $5400 does not include garbage disposable or bags. That’s a lot of mess going to the landfill.
The initial outlay for a cloth diaper is the biggest hurdle
To give yourself a good cloth diaper setup, there is an initial outlay. Once you’ve got that out of the way, over the course of a year it works out to be about.28c per change. Then the only cost is water and detergent.
The relative cost of a cloth diaper goes down over time
Because of the initial outlay, you don’t have to purchase any extras during year 2 or 3. This keeps the price down and the relative cost of you cloth diaper will keep diminishing.
Here it is, the information you’ve been waiting for!
5 reasons why you should use a cloth diaper:
They cost significantly less! They’re much better suited for sensitive skin They have better, more flexible sizes They’re environmentally friendly! They look much better!
Cons of using a cloth diaper
Extra laundry
Pros of using disposable diapers
Easier to travel with child
Cons of disposable diapers
Much more expensive
Can be harsh on babys skin
More prone to leakage
Huge environmental impact
Disposable diapers make up about 4-5% of all landfill mass!
What scientists are learning is that landfills are filling up with exorbitant amounts of disposable diapers. It is estimated that landfill waste across Australia is 4-5% disposable diapers*. That’s a big stinky pile of trash and it’s not known how long disposable diapers take to decompose. There are estimates of 250-500 years, which is much longer than your great, great, great, great grand children will live.
As children we all went for a field trip to the landfill. The landfill manager taught us about reusing and recycling and was passionate about the environment. There may have even been a few great artistic sculptures made out of daily trash. Our landfill manager was Mr Trask. He was a passionate environmental crusader way before climate change became a public concern. Even back then I remember he was an advocate of the use of a simple cloth diaper.
Our conclusion
Your choice of diaper is up to you. There is no right nor wrong because every parents situation is unique. Each form of diaper has its pros and cons and will give you the ability to adapt&survive any situation.
Enjoy being a parent.
*Sources:
http://www.australianscience.com.au/environmental-science/disposable-nappies-are-they-stinking-up-our-planet/Turkish police used water canon and tear gas on Thursday to disperse thousands of protesters who tried to defy a Labour Day ban on demonstrations on Istanbul's Taksim Square, the scene of protests that have dogged the government for months.
After giving a final warning, hundreds of riot police backed by water cannon moved in on the protesters in the Besiktas district as they tried to breach the barricades leading up to the symbolic square, according to an AFP reporter. They then fired tear gas and water cannon at the protesters, with smoke rising above the district that is home to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office.
A reported 40,000 police officers as well as dozens of water cannon trucks and armoured vehicles were deployed throughout Istanbul, with roughly half that number drafted into the centre to cordon off all the avenues, streets and alleys around the square.
A protester takes aim at riot police with a slingshot during a May Day demonstration in Istanbul, Turkey, on Thursday, May 1, 2014. Image credit: AFP
The TURK-IS labour confederation was however allowed access to the square to lay wreaths in memory of 34 people killed during a 1977 May Day protest, when unknown demonstrators fired shots into the air, sparking panic. The union organised another May Day rally in Istanbul, in Kadikoy Square on the Asian side of the city.
Public transport was paralysed in the sprawling city of more than 13 million as the authorities blocked roads, cancelled ferry services and closed metro stations in a bid to cope with two crowds of demonstrators on either side of the Bosphorus.
Erdogan warned protesters last week to "give up hopes" of meeting on Taksim, but activists and leftist unions had long vowed to ignore the ban.
And Istanbul Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu said Wednesday that the ban was based on intelligence reports indicating "illegal terrorist groups" were planning unrest at Taksim.
Violent protests between police and protesters on May Day last year, triggered after a similar ban, were followed weeks later by protests that snowballed into one of the biggest challenges to Erdogan's 11-year rule.Good morning backers!
Randy here, and we’ve got one heck of an update today! Add-ons! Backerkit! Soundtrack details! Visual Fanbook details!
We’re working around the clock getting more stuff ready for the Kickstarter, so any help you guys can bring raising awareness will be a great help!
Let’s get to the updates:
Add-ons and Backerkit support!
You’ve asked us and we heard you! We’re opening up most of the physical goods for add-ons. Just add on the extra funds to your pledge and when it comes time to process orders, we’ll ask you to indicate which items you’d like. Multiples are OK too.
$35: All 4 games on one disc
$30: Physical Soundtrack
$40: Physical Visual Fanbook
$40: T-shirt
To try to keep shipping simple and reasonable cost to everyone,
Backers of the $1, $20, $30, and $60 reward tiers, add in a $15 shipping fee, this applies to both US and International backers.
US and International backers. Backers of the $100 tier or higher rewards, no additional feed needed, the reward tier already includes shipping costs.
The physical tiers ($100+) still represent a better value, include all the digital items, as well access to exclusives like the mini-novel and tapestry.
Backerkit support
These same physical items can be added to backerkit later. This means that you can add on extra physical items for a period of time after the kickstarter campaign ends. We expect to close out backerkit once we’re ready to start producing goods, which would be very early in 2016. There’s no plans for providing digital goods via backerkit at this time.
Soundtrack details have been decided!
Narcissu has always been known for its beautiful use of music, and we’re doing our best to bring this to you in CD format!
After working out the budget, we’re going to make the soundtrack 2 discs. To go with the fact that this is an anthology project, we’ll be making it as complete we can -- covering all the games from 1+2 to the new chapter Sumire.
And if there’s a little too much music to fit onto the discs, we’ll be prioritizing tracks that were previously unavailable in other releases, or maybe squeezing in a third disc if possible.
Digital soundtracks will be mastered around when all the games are finished releasing. This gives us time to focus on the games first. Physical disks will be pressed and shipped together with all the other physical rewards to save on shipping costs.
Visual fanbook details!
We’ve been in discussions w/ Stage-Nana for a while about this fanbook, and we’re happy to be able announce some details about it.
It will be an approximately 48 page color book (page count might change slightly in the future). The contents will be dual language Japanese/English, and will cover the entire Narcissu series, from 1+2 all the way to the new chapter. Expect to see things like commentary and extra details about the games, and maybe even some guest artwork.
The actual design and production of the books will be done after the games are out, so I sadly don’t have any roughs to present just yet, but you’ll start to see more updates about it around Jan/Feb-ish. Physical books will of course be delivered together with all other physical rewards.
Thanks to all of you backers! We couldn't make these physical goodies without everyone's support.Canada's Competition Bureau is suing the country's largest real estate board for anti-competitive behaviour that the bureau says keeps the costs of buying and selling homes artificially high.
The bureau has launched an application with the Competition Tribunal against the Toronto Real Estate Board, or TREB, which represents 31,000 realtors in the Greater Toronto Area and controls access to the Multiple Listings Service system.
The bureau says TREB's anti-competitive practices "are denying consumer choice and the ability of real estate agents to introduce innovative real estate brokerage services through the internet," which could result in lower prices for consumers.
The tribunal is a quasi-judicial body that makes binding decisions on issues brought forth by the bureau.
"Consumers are demanding a greater selection of service and pricing options when buying or selling their homes, and many agents are eager to accommodate them," said Melanie Aitken, the commissioner of competition. "Yet TREB's leadership continues to impose anti-competitive restrictions on its members that deny consumer choice and stifle innovation."
Restricted access
The bureau says TREB restricts how its member agents can provide information from the MLS system to their customers, thereby denying member agents the ability to offer a wider range of services and prices.
The system that realtors have access to is much more detailed than the one publicly viewable on realtor.ca.
The Toronto MLS system, for example, contains data about previous listing and sale prices, historical prices for comparable properties in the area, and the amount of time a property has been on the market.
It also sometimes contains demographic information on crime and traffic statistics, and even local hospitals and schools — detailed information agents already have access to and sometimes give out via fax or email, the bureau says.
Restricting access means realtors can't set up what are known as "virtual office websites," which would allow customers to search a full inventory of up-to-date listings before going to an open house or touring a home.
That, in turn, would allow customers to be more selective and focused, and agents to spend less time trying to find an appropriate property for a specific customer, the bureau said in a release.
That stifles competition which keeps prices higher, the bureau says.
"We think it could result in substantial rebates," an official with the bureau said.
"As general rule, more competition leads to greater choice and lower prices. We are hearing from realtors who would like to offer this service," the official said.
TREB disagrees with the bureau's view, and adds that their hands are somewhat tied when it comes to releasing information on homes for sale.
"There are consumers on both ends of a real estate transaction where contractual and private information are involved which TREB is legally and morally required to respect," the agency said in a release.
The agency has taken numerous steps to empower realtors in their use of the internet in assisting clients, TREB president Bill Johnson said. The board says it "unfortunate" that the bureau chose the tribunal route to settle the dispute — but they had no other choice, Aitken said.
When the bureau identifies anti-competitive behaviour, our first preference is always to reach an agreement that fully resolves our concerns," Aitken said. "Consistent with the bureau's practice, we shared our concerns with TREB, as well as what would be necessary to address them."
Latest dispute
"Ultimately, it was necessary for us to seek a legally binding order from the tribunal to ensure greater competition and increased innovation in the market for real estate services in Toronto and the surrounding area," she said.
The dispute is the latest salvo in a long-running dispute between the competition watchdog and the real estate industry. Last year, the consumer watchdog complained that realtors were restricting access to the MLS system, the source of more than 90 per cent of all home sales.
Buyers and some realtors wanted the ability to opt out of certain realtor services, and simply pay to have their home listed on MLS. That dispute eventually ended before it reached the tribunal phase, the result of which was that sellers can now list on the proprietary MLS system for a flat rate fee.Consumers are always looking for ways to minimize their cancer risk, which is one reason why many turn to over-the-counter vitamin and mineral supplements. But new research finds that while companies promote dietary supplements for their cancer-prevention benefit, some may end up doing more harm than good.
Dr. Tim Byers, director for cancer prevention and control at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, conducted a meta-analysis of two decades worth of research -- 12 trials that involved more than 300,000 people -- and found a number of supplements actually made a person much more likely to develop certain types of cancer.
Byers began his investigation on the association between supplements and cancer risk 20 years ago. He and many other researchers observed that people who ate more fruits and vegetables cut their risk for cancer. Byers and his colleagues wondered if taking supplements that provide the same vitamins and minerals as fruits and vegetables could offer similar protection.
But his findings suggested just the opposite -- rather than warding off cancer, taking lots of supplements may raise a person's risk.
"There's enough evidence along these lines that we should really consider better regulation of these nutritional supplements," Byers told CBS News. "I think it's time to step back and say there's probably a safety issue."
Byers presented his research Monday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, in Philadelphia.
Through his analysis, Byers found that people who took high doses beta carotene supplements had an increased risk for lung cancer. Selenium supplements were associated with skin cancer. Men who took vitamin E had an elevated risk for prostate cancer. Folic acid, a B vitamin, taken in excess could lead to an increased risk for colon cancer.
Byers says it's still unclear why supplements could have this adverse effect, but he and other researchers hope to learn more about the association.
Other studies Byers reviewed indicated that many other supplements had no apparent impact on cancer risk -- neither increasing nor decreasing it. Recent research has shown that for the most part, vitamin supplements have little impact on a person's long-term health. Some research has even gone as far as to say that they are a waste of money.
An analysis of 24 studies and two trials published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2013 looked at the role of vitamin supplements for the prevention of chronic diseases. That study involved more than 350,000 people and it found little evidence that vitamin and mineral supplementation impacted the risk for a number of chronic health conditions, including cancer.
Byers says consumers should be cautious about using supplements. However, this doesn't mean you have to avoid them altogether. "I think when people take supplements they shouldn't take them at levels higher than what you can get in your diet," he said. Byers and other experts urge people to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into their diet, rather than relying on supplements.
A person who has a known deficiency of a certain vitamin or mineral -- either due to diet or health condition that prevents proper absorption -- can take a supplement, preferably a multivitamin that provides levels in line with recommended daily allowances. But in every case, Byers cautions consumers to acknowledge that there may be "harm in excess."Local authorities on Okinawa sued the central government of Japan on Friday in an attempt to stop the relocation of a U.S. air base, deepening their decades-long row over the heavy American troop presence on the southern Japanese island.
The Okinawa government says the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism illegally suspended the prefectural governor's cancellation of approval for reclamation work needed to relocate U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to a less-populated part of the island called Henoko.
"We will do whatever it takes to stop the new Henoko base," Okinawa Gov. Takeshi Onaga told a news conference in the prefectural capital of Naha. "Okinawa's argument is legitimate, and I believe that it will be certainly understood."
The central government filed its own lawsuit against Onaga last month, after he rejected an order from the Land Ministry to reinstate approval, issued by his predecessor, for the land reclamation. The ministry went ahead with the reclamation work.
"We'll proceed with the construction to achieve the planned relocation as soon as possible," Defense Minister Gen Nakatani said in Tokyo.
The legal battle is the latest chapter in a long-running dispute between the central government and Okinawa, formerly a tiny kingdom that was annexed by Japan in the 16th century.
Many residents want the U.S. base moved out of Okinawa entirely, and have held protests against its relocation. They have been long frustrated by heavy U.S. troop presence on the tiny island and have complained about noise, pollution and crime associated with the foreign bases.
Under a Japan-U.S. security treaty, about 50,000 American troops are stationed in Japan, more than half of them on Okinawa.
Onaga said Okinawa's burden is out of proportion, and hoped the legal battle will help raise awareness of the problem.
"Democracy and local self-determination in Japan are in severe condition," Onaga said. "We want the rest of the world to know how the Japan-U.S. security treaty is affecting us." Okinawa was under U.S. occupation for 27 years after Japan's World War II defeat, and today it is the Japanese government that is forcing the unwanted relocation, he said.
Tokyo says the current relocation site is the only possibility.
Onaga was elected last year, widely supported by voters who feel Okinawa bears an unfair burden of the U.S. military presence. His anti-base stance has also made residents of Okinawa, an island with a distinct culture, more aware of their identity.
Some critics of the landfill plan also object to potential environmental damage to the previously undeveloped Henoko shore.
The Associated PressIf you like the look of the overall look of the Adwaita theme that the GNOME uses with but don’t like the size of its title bars, here’s a theme that may be of interest.
It’s called Minwaita and it’s a fairly straight-forward fork of GNOME’s default Adwaita theme fixing the theme’s biggest issue: the generously padded buttons, switches, header bars and titles bars.
You can see the difference between the stock Adwaita theme and the fork in this graphic:
Tidier, right?
The developer of Minwaita describes it as a “tweaked, more compact version of Adwaita with new window control buttons for a sleeker, more vanilla GNOME look”, a description that is fairly on the nose.
The rest of Minwaita (and it’s variants, which we’ll get to) is basically the stock Adwaita on a diet, e.g., buttons, sliders, progress bars, gradients, highlight accent colour, etc, all appear as they should.
And, like the regular version, there’s a dark version available too:
Download Minwaita Theme
Minwaita is an open-source GTK theme designed to work with GNOME 3.22 and later. The latest version is available to download from Github or GNOME-Look.org:
Download Minwaita Theme
You’ll notice there are three versions available. The difference between them is in the style of window control buttons. “Minwaita” uses window controls from the Vertex theme; “Minwaita Vanilla” uses window controls from the standard Adwaita theme, and “Minwaita OS X“uses traffic light coloured window pips.
To install the theme once you have downloaded it, just right click on and extract the archive. Inside the extracted folder you’ll find a number of directories. Move these to ~/.themes.
Finally, to change GTK theme, use the GNOME Tweak Tool.
If you’re using GNOME Shell you can also apply the optional Minwaita GNOME Shell theme(s)Colin Perkel, The Canadian Press
LONDON, Ont. -- Canadian soldiers will take part in military exercises in Poland as part of NATO reassurance measures in response to the Ukraine crisis, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Friday.
"The (Vladimir) Putin regime's persistent military aggression and its ongoing illegal occupation of Crimea and other parts of Ukraine threaten the stability and security of central and eastern Europe," he said in London, Ont.
The NATO exercises will run in Swidwin, Poland from May 5 to 9 and will include about 50 soldiers from the 3rd Canadian Division based in Edmonton, comprised of a platoon from 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry and support staff. They were set to leave Friday, Harper's office said in a news release.
"They will conduct training in parachuting, airborne operations and infantry skills alongside Polish and American counterparts in this United States-led exercise with a view to enhancing Alliance interoperability and readiness," the prime minister's office said in the statement.
Canada has also diverted frigate HMCS Regina, which is currently on counter-terrorism and anti-piracy patrols in the Arabian Sea, to help NATO's efforts to send a message of resolve to Russia.
Harper did not say where the ship is headed, but NATO announced earlier this month it was beefing up maritime patrols in both the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean.
Six Canadian CF-18 fighter jets left their base in Bagotville, Que., this week, headed for an air base in Romania, and eventual patrols along that country's border with Ukraine -- and possibly over the Black Sea.
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said Canada's actions are meant to send a "very loud, clear and tangible message" to Russia.
"Until Russia clearly demonstrates its respect for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity we will continue to work with our allies and our partners to further isolate Russia economically and politically," Baird said at a news conference in Ottawa.
There has been a "concerning" increase in the last day or two in violent actions in eastern Ukraine, Baird said, calling Putin a hypocrite for asking Ukraine to remove troops from parts of the country.
"Just imagine if a foreign power massed troops outside this department building, sent in thugs to start smashing the windows, then told us to withdraw our security guards," Baird said. "This kind of behaviour is completely unacceptable in the 21st century."
The federal government also said this week that a Canadian military officer is heading an international arms-control verification team investigating "unusual military activity" in Ukraine, but the inspections won't include the disputed Crimea region, which was annexed by Russia.
National Defence has also announced that a team of navy clearance divers would deploy next month for an exercise in Latvia, one of the Baltic states under threat.
Harper's announcement Friday came as U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a joint news conference that further sanctions against Russia would be unavoidable if it disrupts a presidential election in Ukraine scheduled for May 25.
Both leaders made it clear that the next step would be to order sanctions on separate parts of the Russian economy or military -- on energy or arms for example -- but neither leader specified precisely what was being considered.
Pro-Russia forces shot down two Ukrainian helicopters Friday and Ukraine reported many rebels dead and wounded as the interim government in Kyiv launched its first major offensive against an insurgency that has seized government buildings across the east.British households are wasting hundreds of pounds a year on television, phone and broadband packages that they don't use.
Figures from the Post Office and Freeview show that families who buy bundle deals for television, internet and landline use are paying for television channels that they don't watch, broadband speeds far beyond their needs and free calls that they are not using.
"While bundles can be tempting, this report shows they provide far more than the average person needs and millions of people are clearly paying for services they never use," said Hugh Stacey, head of HomePhone for the Post Office. "Consumers need to carefully align what they need to what suppliers are offering as part of their bundles."
The research found that despite 13.7 million homes paying for extra TV channels, three quarters (75 per cent) of their viewing hours are spent watching free-to-air channels.
The study also reveals that consumers are signed up to broadband speeds far beyond their needs.
The majority reported that they mainly used their connection for surfing the web, emailing and social networking – activities that only require speeds of 5 Mbps (mega-bytes per second) – yet the average speed people are paying for is over five times higher. Over two-thirds don't use all the broadband capacity they're paying for.
Older generations are getting some of the poorest value for money on bundled products.
The average bill for over 65s is £51 per month yet they watch just one hour of TV per day on paid-for channels and use the least amount of data per month (12 Gb). In comparison, deal savvy 18-24 year-olds spend £41 per month but use 24 Gb data.
Bundle packages have been at the centre of a battle between the major players Sky and Virgin and BT, although all three have increased prices in recent months.
Analysts have the ability of the industry to retain and even rapidly grow its customer numbers during the receesion, with consumers treating their home entertainment as a necessity rather than discretionary spending.
Advice from Telegraph Money:
To ensure that you get the best out of your phone, television and broadband package, you should look at how you use your media and communications tools. When it comes to data downloads, your broadband bill should show you how much you are using. According to comparison site Broadbandchoices.co.uk, downloading a film would use 1.5GB of data. Watching a three-minute music video on YouTube uses 12MB, while even uploading a photo could consume 2MB of data.
You should use a comparison tool (see below) to compare prices - it may be cheaper to buy separately rather than as a bundle. And also threaten to quit your existing service and see what improved deal they offer.
>> Calculate which package will save you moneyThe Metropolitan Police have issued the following statement:
Police officers have evacuated and are searching a residential address in Sunbury, Surrey.
The evacuation is a precautionary measure following the arrest of a man in Dover, Kent, at approximately 07:50hrs this morning in connection with the investigation into the terrorist attack at Parsons Green Underground Station on Friday, 16 September.
Officers began evacuating the address at approximately 13:40hrs today.
Residents in the buildings immediately surrounding the address are also being evacuated as a precautionary measure.
Cordons are being put in place at a 100 metre radius to facilitate the Metropolitan Police Service’s operation, which is being supported by colleagues from Surrey police.
A search of the address is ongoing and the cordons will remain in place until the operation is complete.
Police would like to thank the local residents directly affected for their cooperation and patience. Local officers are on duty in the immediate area to talk to the community and address any concerns that they may have.
No further arrests have been made.Bitcoin News for the week of 12/7/15
Welcome to our weekly bitcoin news recap, where we cover top headlines and stories in the world of bitcoin each week. This week we saw some breaking news stories including another attempt to identify Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, but as it turns out, the truth is stranger than the fiction; and the mystery remains intact. We saw the price and transaction break records this week, but as the year comes to an end, does 2016 hold even more excitement and opportunity for us? Read about that and more in this week’s news recap.
It’s not the person, it’s the idea
[‘Who is Satoshi?’ is the Most Irrelevant Question in Bitcoin](https://news.bitcoin.com/satoshi-irrelevant-question-bitcoin/)
In the most recent attempt to uncover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, both Wired and Gizmodo released information this week that they claim points to Australian entrepreneur Dr. Craig Steven Wright. Their accounts have already been disputed, and many questions linger. But the most relevant question is: does it matter who Satoshi is?
Fortunately, Motherboard did a great write-up debunking the latest attempt to identify Satoshi, stating that the PGP keys are probably backdated and point to a hoax. Cornell University professor Emin Gün Sirer also penned a great article on how to spot Satoshi, stating the latest claim is false citing irresponsible journalism; by the way Wired has already printed a follow up to their original article saying also that this may be a hoax after all.
Bitcoin price takes a leap
[Bitcoin Price Rockets To One-Year High on Record Volumes](http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-price-at-one-year-high-on-record-volumes/)
The price of bitcoin has hit its highest closing price in the last year. Bitcoin has gained an astonishing $115 or 36% over the last two weeks. It was changing hands for $320 a coin on 25th November. The price briefly touched $500 on some exchanges on 4th November before dropping under $400 in the following days. Blockchain wallets also hit a record number of daily transactions earlier this week, which is another great example of the growing bitcoin ecosystem.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the bitcoin rally was |
, stand with the truth. Stand with God. That is the one thing that they cannot fight. That is your only weapon is God. And he wields it, not you. You just stand behind him and just let him be your shield. It's the one thing that they don't have on their side. Now that's a pretty wild comment to make unless you go back to Saul Alinsky. Do you know what the dedication says? Do you know what the front page says of this book? Put it up here, "Lest we forget at least one over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical from all of our legends, mythology and history and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins, or which is which, the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom." You put this together with collective salvation. May I quote the pope? Put the pope, Pope Benedict, here is what he said about collective salvation: "Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine but demonic." Stand with God, America. Stand with God. He will be our shield. These are not enemies of ours. They are not enemies of ours. They're enemies of God and enemies of man's freedom. He'll work it out. You just stand where you're supposed to stand and be peaceful. [Fox News' Glenn Beck, 7/14/10, via Nexis]
Comparing Progressives To Satan, Beck Says They "Have Replaced" God. From the January 12, 2010, broadcast of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program:
BECK: If you believe in the, you know, the war in Heaven where a third of the angels were cast out and all of that stuff, it was about man's choice. CALLER: Yes. BECK: And he would provide a savior and Satan's plan was hey, I'll save everybody. Give me the credit. Give me the credit, I'll save everybody. I'll make sure that everybody returns home. It's going to be fantastic. I'll -- just take away their choice and give me the credit. Well, gee, I think that plan was rejected, and that's because God knew that failure was important for growth. He knew that we would fail and he would provide the failure so when we hit the bottom we would have a chance -- we would know there was hope for the only thing that really matters and that is redemption. Eternal redemption. But the progressives have so cut out God. And I showed you yesterday on television and last week on the radio that they have replaced God. They're taking -- rights are now created by Congress. Rights are not given to us by our Creator. They're created by Congress. They are taking the role of God. And so they're taking away our suffering. They're taking away all of our pain, all of the opportunity to fail. People look at failure in exactly the wrong way. Failure is the starting point of real, true success. If you don't fail you really don't have a lot of wisdom. [Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program, 1/12/10]
Beck To Guest: "Any Doubt In Your Mind That The Progressive Left Is Coming For The Kill On Religion?" During the October 15, 2010, edition of his Fox News show, Beck said of the Tides Foundation and George Soros:
BECK: I just wish we were a government-funded entity so we wouldn't have all these commercials because you just missed a fabulous conversation. We are talking about the "Story of Stuff Project." This comes from the Tides Foundation. Spooky dude George Soros. One world government. Yes. He's now going into your churches. Ask your pastor or your priest or your rabbi. If you see anything like this going to your kids, run for your life. You are in the wrong church. I mean, unless you're environmentalist that worships, you know, Gaia or whoever it is now. "Let There Be Stuff," a spirit-filled response to a consumer-crazed world. I want you to know that we do consume an awful lot. We consume -- we are worshipping a different god. Many of us, we are worshipping the god of stuff, the god of a logo or a label. We don't need it. We don't need it. You know a society is screwed up when people will stand in line for the new cell phone that they -- they already have a cell phone. They just want that one. We are a little screwed up as a society. Cal Beisner is here and David Barton, also with me. And we're talking about this upside-down world where we're now being taught in, not just schools, but now, in churches and synagogues. Any doubt in your mind that the progressive left is coming for the kill on religion? CALVIN BEISNER, FOUNDER, CORNWALL ALLIANCE: Absolutely. Absolutely. And part of the reason is because traditional Christian faith and biblical faith in America has been the most resistant to the whole progressive agenda. BECK: Yes. BEISNER: Poll after poll has shown the people who have been most skeptical about things like, oh, catastrophic, man-made global warming, or about other environmental hypes and scares have been those people who assert the greatest belief in the Bible. [Fox News' Glenn Beck, 10/15/10, via Nexis]
Beck On Van Jones: God Said "I Shall Rebuke The Devourer For Your Sake." From the April 20, 2010, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' Glenn Beck Program:
BECK: I was telling you about Van Jones, and I said, do we run with this? Do we run with this because we don't know for sure, but all evidence -- and I don't know if we can verify this, this, this, but look at the connection here. Most of it we did verify. Some of it we couldn't and we never put on. But I believe them to be true but I don't say them because I couldn't nail them down. What stopped me from saying "I can't prove these things but"? I said to Pat -- I said something's wrong. What do we do? We both prayed. And we went home and both of us prayed again and then we both opened up our scriptures unbeknownst to each other until the next morning. And I couldn't wait to see Pat because I had an answer. I said, you won't believe what I found. And he said, wait, wait, wait, me first about our conversation yesterday. I looked in Malachai. Look it up. Malachai 3:11. I'm paraphrasing -- I'll shall rebuke the devourer for your sake. To me this message was clear: "He's not an enemy of yours. How dare you think he's an enemy of yours. Freedom comes from me, God. Freedom, your rights, belong to me, not you. I will rebuke anyone who tries to devour them." [...] BECK: Read Ephesians 6:11 to 17, Ephesians 6:11 to 17. It's what we have to do. It's where we have to go. And it's what will save us. Use faith as your shield and put on the armor of God, and he will rebuke the devourer for our sakes. [Premiere Radio Networks' Glenn Beck Program, 4/20/10]
Beck Alleges 95-Year Progressive Plan To "Put A Poison Into Our Church." From the May 18, 2010, edition of Fox News' Glenn Beck:
BECK: No, no, no, no. We're going to correct its meaning tonight. If you have a pencil and paper, get it out, because you're going to need to write stuff down tonight. You're going to learn stuff that you probably have never even really noticed. Then you are going to start noticing all kinds of stuff. You have a priest, a pastor, a bishop, a rabbi -- you get them on the phone and tell them right now: Turn on the Glenn Beck program. Progressives knew about 1915. They knew that they couldn't get their agenda through, because of three things: people knew the Constitution. Americans talked about it in 1915. People loved the founders. We knew who they really were. And the third one, people went to church. They had to put a poison into our church. Well, they've done it. I expose it tonight, and I give you the cure as well. [Fox News' Glenn Beck, 5/18/10]
Beck Attacks Obama And Progressives: "When You Pervert The Gospel Of Jesus Christ, You Are Evil." From the August 23, 2010, edition of Fox News' Glenn Beck:
BECK: We're being pitted against each other on religion. And I want you to know this is -- this is part of the strategy. This is why we brought up Sojourners and Jim Wallis and Reverend Wright and I told you about social justice. I told you that our religions are being hijacked. Religion plays a huge role in the progressive movement. You must have religion. If you can beat down religion -- why do you think that they've chased God out of the public square? And now Nancy Pelosi is talking about God all the time. That you have the president talking -- bashing the Bible. Who's Bible are we going to listen to now? And then talking about faith and religion. Why do you think this is all happening? It's critical, it's critical. And these people -- and let me just -- let me say this. When you pervert the founding documents I think you're a pretty bad dude. But when you pervert the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you are evil. And when you know you intentionally are doing it for power and control and money and a hidden agenda, and you lie, cheat, and steal every step of the way to do it, you are evil. Now let me show you Jim Wallis. Jim Wallis is a guy from Sojourners who has led a campaign against me. They are trying to pit our religions against each other. They are trying to -- I stood at the feet of Abraham Lincoln yesterday. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." They must have us at each other's throats. I've told you before that this is George Soros money, that this is nothing but a hidden progressive agenda, that social justice as understood by Jim Wallis and Jeremiah Wright and people like him, it is evil. He claims that there is no money coming from Soros. If I saw my name smeared on the Internet one more time on this, I mean it became laughable, because people actually believe George Soros isn't involved in this. [Fox News' Glenn Beck, 8/23/10]
Beck: "You Need To Get Behind Him Because They Are Enemies Of Him." From the July 15, 2010, broadcast of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program:
CALLER: Hello Glenn. I just want to thank you for your letting all of us know and bringing light to the fact that, you know, these people with this particular ideology are not our enemies. They are our Heavenly Father's. BECK: Yes they are. [...] BECK: So what was it that woke you up this? Or have you just been - CALLER: Well, I'm a man of your faith. And, you know, I've been thinking that and, you know, I've talked to people, but when you said it it was just like a relief to me that this, you know, I need to do what I need to do, you know. BECK: Yeah. And you don't need to fight; you need to get behind him. You need to get behind him because they are enemies of him. [Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program, 7/15/10]
Beck Suggests Environmentalism "Replacing God" With The Earth. From the May 12, 2010, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program:
BECK: They're now looking at absolutely everything, and the environment is the key. The environment will control -- because remember, what we're talking about is the Earth replacing God. Earth is the most important thing. So it's more important to save the Earth than it is even to save people. The Earth makes the decisions for us. [Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program, 5/12/10]
Beck: Progressives Have "Almost-Complete Plan" To "Destroy Our Faith." On the May 24, 2010, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program, Beck said, "freedom is on the run," and attacked progressives by saying they have an "almost-complete plan," through social justice, to "destroy the Constitution, destroy the Founders, and destroy our faith." From the broadcast:
BECK: Back to what I taught you on the 1915 progressives. They figured it out. They knew they couldn't do everything they wanted to do in 1915 because we were too tied to the Constitution. We were too tied to the Founders. And we were too tied to our churches. And so they changed history. They went in and all these progressives in the universities, they started to change the history books. They went into our faith with something called social justice. That is from the progressive movement. Now you may not interpret it that way in your church, but you've got to understand the roots because that's what it is. It's redistribution of wealth. It cannot be found in the Bible, it cannot be found -- do you have the audio of what Bill Clinton said over the weekend? That everything is unsustainable and unequal. Excuse me? When were we -- at what point did we all decide that we're going to make the world equal? All men are created equal. It's what you do with your freedom, and right now freedom is on the run. It's -- it is a almost complete plan: Destroy the Constitution, destroy the Founders, and destroy our faith. What part haven't they done? What more do you need? [Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program, 5/24/10]
Beck: "The Policies That Are Being Enacted In Washington" Are "Enemies Of God." From the July 19, 2010, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program:
BECK: If you were at the American Revival on Saturday, that ain't nothing -- that is nothing compared to what you're going to see on 8-28. Make sure you join us. Forty days and 40 nights. It is not about politics, because quite honestly, we are not dealing with politicians. These are not -- the policies that are being enacted in Washington -- they are not enemies of ours. They are enemies of God because God is about freedom. God is about equal justice, not equal stuff in our homes. [Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program, 7/19/10]North Korea issued a new threat against the United States late Sunday and accused President Barack Obama of "recklessly" spreading rumors that Pyongyang is behind last month's devastating cyberattack on Sony Pictures.
The long statement from the powerful National Defense Commission warned of strikes against the White House, Pentagon and "the whole U.S. mainland, that cesspool of terrorism."
Such rhetoric is routine from North Korea's massive propaganda machine during times of high tension with Washington. But the statement also underscores Pyongyang's sensitivity at a movie whose plot focuses on the assassination of its leader Kim Jong Un, who is the beneficiary of a decades-long cult of personality built around his family dynasty.
The North Korean statement offered no details of a possible response, but warned that the country's 1.2 million-member army is ready to use all types of warfare against the U.S.
"Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland... by far surpassing the'symmetric counteraction' declared by Obama," said the commission's Policy Department in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The latest threat came hours after President Obama confirmed that he was considering returning North Korea to the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. Obama, who previously promised in his year-end press conference on Friday to respond "proportionately" to the attack, has termed the breach as an act of "cybervandalism that was very costly, very expensive" as opposed to an act of war.
"We're going to review those through a process that's already in place," Obama told CNN's "State of the Union" in an interview broadcast Sunday. "I'll wait to review what the findings are."
North Korea spent two decades on the list until the Bush administration removed it in 2008 during nuclear negotiations. Only Iran, Sudan, Syria and Cuba remain on the list, which triggers sanctions that limit U.S. aid, defense exports and certain financial transactions.
But adding North Korea back could be difficult. To meet the criteria, the State Department must determine that a country has repeatedly supported acts of international terrorism, a definition that traditionally has referred to violent, physical attacks rather than hacking.
Obama's other options, which include sanctions targeting high-level North Korean officials and retaliatory cyberattacks, are limited. The U.S. already has trade penalties in place and there is no appetite for military action.
Also Sunday, Sony lawyer David Boies told NBC's "Meet The Press" that the studio would distribute "The Interview," a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco as bumbling journalists tapped by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong Un. Sony scrapped a planned Christmas Day release of the film after receiving terror threats targeting movie theaters from the hackers, who refer to themselves as the Guardians of Peace.
"What Sony has been trying to do is to get the picture out to the public," while protecting the rights of company employers and moviegoers, Boies said. He added that theaters "quite understandably" decided not to show the film as scheduled because of the threats. "You can't release a movie unless you have a distribution channel," he said.
In the CNN interview, Obama renewed his criticism of Sony's decision to shelve "The Interview," despite the company's insistence that its hand was forced by the theaters' refusal to show it.
Obama suggested he might have been able to help address the problem if given the chance. "You know, had they talked to me directly about this decision, I might have called the movie theater chains and distributors and asked them what that story was," he said.
Sony's CEO has disputed that the company never reached out, saying he spoke to a senior White House adviser about the situation before Sony announced the decision. White House officials said Sony did discuss cybersecurity with the federal government, but that the White House was never consulted on the decision not to distribute the film.
"I think we've got to recognize that this is not a Sony security problem," Boies said. "This is a national security problem."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Story highlights Last month Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan called abortion "murder"
He has said Turkish women should bear at least three children
Protesters carried signs including "Murder is outlawing abortion"
Hundreds of women gathered on Sunday in Istanbul in the latest demonstration against the religiously conservative ruling party's plans to restrict access to abortion.
Last month Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan catapulted the issue to forefront of public debate in Turkey when he called abortion "murder."
A day later, he amplified the controversy by equating a botched military operation in Uludere with abortion. The Uludere massacre claimed the lives of 34 Kurds in southeastern Turkey when faulty intelligence led to an airstrike on a group of smugglers crossing the Turkish- Iraqi border.
After Erdogan's comment, Turkish Health Minister Recep Akdag issued a statement indicating that he would be submitting a proposal to lawmakers in the upcoming month, raising fears that the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, was preparing to introduce legislation to curb, if not fully block, access to abortion.
The protesters who convened Sunday marched to Istanbul's busy Taksim Square, carrying signs that read "AKP: Get your hands off my body," "Murder is outlawing abortion," and "Abortion is a right. Uludere is a massacre."
Many protesters believe that Erdogan is playing to his base of culturally conservative voters, a strategy in line with his views as a pious Muslim as well as one that protestors see as an attempt to divert attention from the operation in Uludere.
"The prime minster is conservative. He does have Islamist sensibilities as well as his party, obviously, so he is trying to impose his understanding of faith and what Islam demands and so on to the rest of the population," said Binnaz Toprak, an opposition party Parliamentarian attending Sunday's march. "But at the same time I also feel that this is a cover-up for the Uludere massacre."
Abortion up until the 10th week of pregnancy was legalized in Turkey in 1983 and has rarely, if ever, inspired much public debate in the three decades since. Public support today also seems to remain high, with a poll commissioned by Turkish newspaper Haberturk indicating that 55.5% of Turks do not support a ban on abortion.
Experts warn that restricted access does not decrease the abortion rate but drives the procedure underground, creating a black market that threatens maternal health and more adversely affects poorer women who do not have access to safe abortions abroad. Turkey has a 14.8% abortion rate compared to 18.9% in the United States, according to a 2011 United Nations Population Division study.
Erdogan is seeking to restrict not only abortion but also births by caesarean section, a procedure whose growing popularity he has attributed to secret foreign plots to stall Turkey's economic growth.
Turkey's incidence of births by caesarean section -- more than 45% in 2011, according to the Turkish Health Ministry -- is much higher than the World Health Organization's recommended rate.
Erdogan's worries about declining birth rates may be unfounded. Turkey, in comparison to its European neighbors, does not face population decline, with a projected population growth rate of 1.14% compared with Europe's 0.11%, according to the United Nations.
"It is about having more people in Turkey. To have more workers to work and then during war, they need more soldiers," said Nacide Berber, a member of the Feminist Collective at Sunday's protest.
Erdogan, a social and religious conservative, has outraged feminists in Turkey in the past by insisting that women bear at least three children to ensure a young population to keep Turkey's economy strong. Then, while on a trip to Kazakhstan, he urged women to have five children.
"Actually, you know, it's not a shock for us, for women. One year ago Erdogan told us to raise three babies and then five babies and now he wants us to have babies all the time," said Berber.Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A HOUSEWIFE opened a packet of broccoli – and a gecko crawled out.
Margaret Perthen, 62, screamed at the sight of the four-inch lizard in her Tesco veg. She managed to put it in a box and then gave it to vets specialising in exotic pets.
She said “I don’t know who was the most frightened – me or the gecko. I felt sorry for him, especially as he had lost his tail. I called it Gordon.”
The stowaway survived being heat-sealed in plastic and a 1,000-mile trip from Spain to the shop in Lydney, Glos. Tesco has apologised.Things are grim for the Toronto Raptors in the Eastern Conference finals. Not only are they struggling to even be within striking distance of the Cleveland Cavaliers, but we don't even know if their center Jonas Valanciunas will even get to participate in the series. He's been out since the middle of Game 3 of Toronto's second-round series against the Miami Heat, and has already been in a suit for the first two games of the ECF.
During the broadcast of Game 2 Thursday night, ESPN play-by-play announcer Mike Breen informed us Raptors coach Dwane Casey said Valanciunas "definitely won't play" Game 3 in Toronto on Saturday. And Game 4 doesn't sound like a great bet either.
"Jonas Valanciunas. He will definitely not play in Game 3, according to Dwane Casey. He's still not close. They're hoping maybe Game 4, but you get the feeling that's wishful thinking."
After the Cavs destroyed the Raptors 108-89 to take a 2-0 lead in the series, Raptors coach Dwane Casey was asked directly about Valanciunas' availability. "We'll see," Casey said.
None of this sounds good for the Raptors because they could really use Valanciunas in this series. Tristan Thompson is destroying the Raptors on the boards, and Valanciunas has been the best and most consistent Raptors player in the postseason -- even with the missed games. In the 10 playoff games he's played in this postseason, the Raptors' big man is averaging 15 points and 12.1 rebounds while shooting 55 percent from the field.
The Raptors were just a minus-0.3 points per 100 possessions with him on the floor in the postseason, but are a minus-6.6 with him not in the game. The offense hasn't changed much and has struggled with pretty much anybody on the court. But the defense is 5.6 points per 100 possessions better with him on the floor. It doesn't change the fact that this is the most accomplished Raptors team in franchise history, but it's a sour end to their season if he can't get back on the floor and they end up getting swept.A megalodon tooth is about 5 in (13 cm) long, around the size of a human hand. This is several times larger than a tooth from a great white shark, which usually only measures about an inch (2.5 cm). The fossilized teeth of megalodon are black, though they would have been white during life. Some of these fossils are prized collectors items, and considered among the best investment fossils.
Megalodon is a terrifying huge shark that lived in shallow continental seas from about 18 to 1.5 million years ago. Like other fossil sharks, megalodon, whose name means "big tooth" in Greek, is primarily known from fossilized teeth. These teeth are so hard that they barely deteriorated during the life of the shark, leaving behind fossil teeth so sharp that some amateurs have taken them as evidence that they were left behind relatively recently. Only a few non-dental megalodon fossils have been found, in the form of several vertebra. The megalodon is one of the most interesting and popular fossil fishes, both among the public and the paleontology community.
Although early reconstructions of the megalodon based on its teeth led to size estimates in the range of 25 m (82 ft), these were subsequently found to be based on an inaccurate reconstruction of the jaw. Modern size estimates are in the range of 12 m (39 ft) to 18.2 m (60 ft), about two to three times the size of a great white shark. This is more than enough to qualify it as the largest predatory fish of all time, by extension the largest shark, and one of the largest fishes ever to have lived. Some might say it is the most terrifying predator to exist since Tyrannosaurus rex.
Initially, it was thought that the megalodon and the great white shark were closely related, but today most scientists believe that it parted evolutionary ways with the great white longer ago than previously thought, deserving classification under an extinct genus, Carcharocles, rather than the great white's genus Carcharodon. The "Carcharocles vs. Carcharodon" debate is one of the most contentious in marine paleontology.
Megalodon is thought to have preyed on the early whales, which tended to be smaller and slower than today's whales. This has been supported by fossil evidence of whale bones with gigantic teeth marks. With a gaping maw 7 ft (2.1 m) in size, megalodon could have swallowed small whales whole, and dealt fatal bites to even the largest whales of the time. It would have needed to consume a huge amount of food to sustain its tremendous bulk, estimated at approximately 50 tons.
One and a half million years ago, for an unknown reason, this sea monster went extinct. A variety of hypotheses have been proposed, including climate change and the extinction of key prey animals.It’s been two years since scientists discovered evidence of gravitational waves. Now, they’re figuring out what we can do with them. Recently, they found a huge, early contender: Using them to unveil the knotted-up extra dimensions hiding, undetected, in spacetime.
A paper published Wednesday by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics explains two ways gravitational waves could be used to confirm the existence of hidden dimensions: By identifying unusually large numbers of high-frequency waves, or by detecting a “breathing” effect in the shape of the waves.
So far, extra dimensions beyond our common four are only theoretical; we’ve yet to uncover experimental evidence that they exist. And yet, while we all walk through the basic three spatial dimensions and move inexorably forward through the fourth — time — the best evidence of theoretical physics suggests there must be more than just four dimensions for the universe to work.
An image shows how a hyper-dimensional object might "project' into, and be perceived in, the classical universe.
While they’ve served humanity extremely well, the two theories established by physicists like Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in the early 20th century to describe the mechanics of the universe are incomplete. Einstein’s general relativity theory is very good at explaining big things, like the ebbs and flows of time, the expansion of the universe, and gravity. Bohr’s quantum mechanics theory is better at explaining small things, like particles and electromagnetism. These theories, perhaps unsurprisingly, don’t work well together. Ask them to explain phenomena that impinge on the border between macro and micro worlds — like black holes — and they start to fall apart.
That’s why modern physicists have probed deeper, suggesting even more complex universal models that require more than just the bland four dimensions our species observes. In string theory, one of the most promising attempts to unify physics, the tiniest particles are in fact vibrating strings twisted into impossible higher-dimensional shapes. String theory suggests that there are way more dimensions than our usual four.
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If these higher dimensions exist, then gravity — which moves through anything — would move through them. (This might explain why gravity is so weak compared to other forces — it’s getting lost in other dimensions.) In the paper, the researchers explain that the gravitational waves would be reshaped by these tiny, hidden extra dimensions in a manner that would cause them to resonate more at higher frequencies. The waves would also cause a more complex, multi-dimensional expansion and contraction resembling breathing.
Most gravitational wave detectors that are planned or already exist are tuned to detect powerful, low-frequency waves, which rules out detecting high-frequency waves for the time being. But the scientists propose that getting multiple detectors to work together could help them spot a powerful enough breathing effect.
Unfortunately, breathing waves wouldn’t confirm extra dimensions on their own. There are at least a few other possible explanations for the effect. But, if scientists do spot them, it would likely mean humanity’s first peek into higher dimensions.by Chet Sellers
Jason Spezza's range of looks, from "Nashville" to "St. Louis".
"I can take a glamour shot too. Don't get it twisted."
@CaMoDuff haha yes I can I fact do one. But no more.
— Bobby Ryan (@b_ryan9) June 12, 2014
Folks, I could waste your time with an an introduction to this month's power rankings. I could tell you that, as we enter July, the Senators are teetering on the edge of fundamental roster change, with old faces on their way out () and new free agents on their way in (ha!). Or I could tell you that, as we enter July, we've finally reached peak season for the kind of tank top selfies that really allow these power rankings to shine. But you know both of those things already. So let's go!Jason! You're still here! So... this is awkward.Spezza has to be number one in this month's rankings because, until he can be traded to a city he wants to go to, he's going to be Ottawa's most-watched man. I have two, relatively obvious points to make about Jason Spezza's recent appearance on Dateline'sa) Nashville is an awesome city.b) Jason Spezza doesn't have to go anywhere he doesn't want to go. As others have skillfully pointed out, a no-trade clause is one of the terms a GM and player agree on as part of the give and take of contract negotiations. The player is given some degree of employment certainty, and the GM gets to sign the player for less money or a more favourable term. As a result, a GM should never turn around and get angry at that player for exercising his contractually-negotiated right, nor is it a good look to leak the details of allegedly-scuttled trades in an effort to denigrate that player or pressure him into going somewhere he doesn't want to go. No means no, GMs. It doesn't mean maybe, it doesn't mean later, it doesn't mean buy him another drink; it means no, and you always need to remember that.I did want to get to the bottom of why Spezza vetoed the Nashville trade, though, so I gave him a call. I'm a serious blogger, you know. Here's the transcript:CHET: Spezz.SPEZZA: Hey man.CHET: A lot of people are saying you're fancy, huh?SPEZZA: I'm kinda used to it at this point.CHET: Real talk, though, what's wrong with Smashville? Good bars, good barbecue, Fish can get you backstage at any show you want... what's the problem?SPEZZA: Yeah, but St. Louis has good barbecue too, and a better hockey team. Plus I've never really been a country music guy, I'm more into Nelly. His last one is actually not that bad.CHET: I just don't really think he's a ballads guy.SPEZZA: That's fair.CHET: What about Dallas? Good brisket, good mixtape scene-SPEZZA: I really only like Nelly.CHET: Well, you could mentor Tyler Seguin.SPEZZA: Eh. I already have three kids.CHET: Cold.SPEZZA: And I look stupid in a cowboy hat.CHET: That's fair. Miami?SPEZZA: I just don't think Lebron is sticking around.CHET: What about western Canada?SPEZZA: No. Other than Vancouver, it's all cities that are even smaller, colder, and darker than Ottawa.CHET: Okay, then the Canucks?SPEZZA: Come on.CHET: Thought I'd ask. But at some point people are going to say you're being picky.SPEZZA: I'm not being picky. I'm willing to go to St. Louis and 19 other teams that aren't that interested in trading for me. Bryan can get it done whenever he's ready.CHET: This sounds like it's going to be a long summer.SPEZZA: It's going to be asummer.The second most-watched man in Ottawa this summer. Is it true that Ottawa has a habit of throwing players under the bus on their way out of town? After talking to Spezza, I had to follow up with GMBM in the interests of equal time.MURRAY: Bryan Murray's office.CHET: Bryan Murray, please.MURRAY: This is he.CHET: Then why did you answer the phone like that?MURRAY: Well, we had to lay off the girl who used to answer the phone.CHET: Right. What's up with Spezza?MURRAY: Jason is a very talented player, and it breaks my heart to trade him. It really does. But I respect Jason, and I'm going to honour his request for a trade, even though I know I won't get as good a player in return.CHET: Some people are saying you brought up the Nashville stuff to turn the fan base against Spezza for exercising the no-trade clause that you gave him.MURRAY: Who's saying that?CHET: People.MURRAY: Twitter?CHET: Certain people.MURRAY: Look, you only win on the ice, not in the papers. I'm just trying to make the best deal I can in a tough situation.CHET: So you're not trying to make him look bad.MURRAY: By doing what? Telling you what he gave out to kids last Hallowe'en? I would never do that.CHET: He... wait, what did he give out to-MURRAY: Circus peanuts.CHET: I... damn. But still, you can't expect the fans are going to buy into a negative PR campaign again. Not after Alfredsson.MURRAY: Even if I knew what you were referring to, that kind of aggressive approach just isn't our style in Ottawa. Not like a certain franchise centre who regularly slaps waiters in the face.CHET: Okay, you're obviously talking about Spezza.MURRAY: You said it, not me.CHET: Right. I should go.MURRAY: Let me ask you this, first: how much do you really know about Jason Spezza's affiliation with Joseph Kony?CHET: I have to go.MURRAY: Have a great summer. I know I will.Okay, enough business. This is the section of the power rankings where we make you feel better by showing you that stars are just like us! For example, just like, Erik Karlsson – yes, that Erik Karlsson - sometimes wears the same shirt twice! He's doing more interesting things with better-looking people than you, but still. We're all human sometimes.Another way stars are like us? They hate exercise! Who really needs to know how to do a pull-up, anyway? That's just one of those things they teach |
Firefox option to the File menu. This is quite handy, especially when you have a lot of extensions and it may take Firefox 30 seconds to shut down.
The only downside of this is that it seems to lose the protected and locked tab properties set by Tab Mix Plus. Shutting down Firefox and starting it manually does not lose such properties. This is no longer a problem in the latest Tab Mix Plus version.
Ever seen a comment box this big and got annoyed by the idiot who designed it?
Fear not, as Resizeable Textarea adds resize capabilities to any text area. Move the cursor to the bottom or right borders, or the bottom-right corner, and drag all you want:
TryAgain is a great and very simple extension. It retries loading a failed page up to 5 times instead of just sitting there. This screenshot explains everything:
View Cookies is a simple extension that adds a Cookies tab to the VIew Page Info box. The tab allows viewing, removing, and copying cookie info for the site you’re currently visiting. There is a number of extensions that do similar things, like Firebug and Remove Cookie(s) for Site, but I install View Cookies anyway because its functionality makes sense.
Google Gears is a very useful extension, and it’s a shame that a lot of people don’t seem to understand what it does. Think of it as simply a secure local cache (developed by Google). Quite a few popular websites support Gears, and I think it is best to just give a few examples of actual usage.
One limitation of Gears that I am not sure can be overcome yet is you have to open a Gears-enabled site while you still have Internet connection. Once it is open, you are free to lose your Internet connection, and Gears will kick in. This is why I always keep a page with Google Calendar and rememberthemilk open.
gmail.com – gmail rolled out offline email support quite recently, which is the most useful implementation of Gears to date.
wordpress – if you host a wordpress blog, you can opt in to cache a few hundred files in Gears that will speed up the wordpress admin interface. WordPress calls this Turbo mode.
rememberthemilk.com – RTM, the most advanced and functional TODO list site, offers an excellent implementation of Gears. If you lose your connection, you are free to create, modify, and delete any tasks you want – all the changes will be synchronized when you go back online.
google reader – the reader can download feed items for offline viewing but the implementation is not very good – you have to explicitly go offline by clicking a button, at which point Gears will download 2000 items.
Installing Gears on its own will technically not do anything for you. You will need to enable support for each site individually. For example, Offline gmail is available from the gmail Labs by clicking on in the top right corner.
From a technical standpoint, Gears uses a local SQLite database for storage. The Gears security model is described here.
GTranslate translates selected text into a language of your choice. It can be set to autodetect the source language or forced to a specific one. I must say so far it worked very well and detected the source language automatically without flaw.
Once the translation is received, gTranslate shows it and links to the google translate page:
Additionally, if the selected text is in an editable field, gTranslate will offer an option to replace the selection with its translation:
SearchStatus is a useful and relatively simple SEO extension. It shows a quick roundup of page rankings for the current page from Google (PageRank), Alexa, and Compete. This lets me quickly check how popular [or lame] the site I’m on is and keep tabs on my own online properties. Right clicking each metric grants access to a few useful shortcuts and for the lazy pragmatic, right clicking the little symbol has such links as Show Whois, Show robots.txt, Show sitemap.xml, and others.
Another not so obvious but useful feature of this extension is the ability to mark rel=’nofollow’ links. You rightfully obsessed SEO junkies can quickly see which parts of your site leak the valuable link juice and which ones don’t. Take a look at these nofollow links that SearchStatus marked with light red background:
This toolbar is probably going to be useful for relatively hardcore SEO fiends as most people would do just fine with the above SearchStatus extension. The toolbar seems a bit bulky and slow but has a ton of SEO related functionality. It is, of course, free. It shows Google PageRank, Yahoo linkdomain, Yahoo page links, DMOZ directory, Yahoo directory, Best of the web directory, Archive.org, Compete uniques, and SEMRush traffic value:
It also links to a bunch of tools, like quantcast analysis, google trends, and alexa:
For a quick, more in-depth, exportable overview, press the info button :
However, the 2 most useful to me features are probably the Rank Checker :
and Compare Sites :
I customized the toolbar and removed the useless search box and a few pointless buttons by dragging them out:
End of Part 2
This marks the end of part 2 in the series. I expect this page to update pretty often, whenever I find new extensions, so bookmark it using your favorite method by clicking the button below.
The next part in the series (available soon) will describe a number of useful web development extensions.The November/December issue of acmqueue is out now
Subscribers and ACM Professional members login here
PDF
April 2, 2013
Volume 11, issue 3
Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery
Google ads, black names and white names, racial discrimination, and click advertising
Latanya Sweeney
Do online ads suggestive of arrest records appear more often with searches of black-sounding names than white-sounding names? What is a black-sounding name or white-sounding name, anyway? How many more times would an ad have to appear adversely affecting one racial group for it to be considered discrimination? Is online activity so ubiquitous that computer scientists have to think about societal consequences such as structural racism in technology design? If so, how is this technology to be built? Let's take a scientific dive into online ad delivery to find answers.
"Have you ever been arrested?" Imagine this question appearing whenever someone enters your name in a search engine. Perhaps you are in competition for an award, a scholarship, an appointment, a promotion, or a new job, or maybe you are in a position of trust, such as a professor, a physician, a banker, a judge, a manager, or a volunteer. Perhaps you are completing a rental application, selling goods, applying for a loan, joining a social club, making new friends, dating, or engaged in any one of hundreds of circumstances for which someone wants to learn more about you online. Appearing alongside your list of accomplishments is an advertisement implying you may have a criminal record, whether you actually have one or not. Worse, the ads may not appear for your competitors.
Job applications frequently include questions such as: Have you ever been arrested? Have you ever been charged with a crime? Other than a traffic ticket, have you been convicted of a crime? Employers ask these questions to establish trustworthiness. Because others often equate a criminal record with not being reliable or honest, protections exist for those having criminal records.
If an employer disqualifies a job applicant based solely upon information indicating an arrest record, the company may face legal consequences. The U.S. EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) is the federal agency charged with enforcing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law that applies to most employers, prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Guidance issued in 1973 extended protections to people with criminal records.5,11 Title VII does not prohibit employers from obtaining criminal background information. Certain uses of criminal information, however, such as a blanket policy or practice of excluding applicants or disqualifying employees based solely upon information indicating an arrest record, can result in a charge of discrimination.
To make a determination, the EEOC uses an adverse impact test that measures whether certain practices, intentional or not, have a disproportionate effect on a group of people whose defining characteristics are covered by Title VII. To decide, you calculate the percentage of people affected in each group and then divide the smaller value by the larger to get the ratio and compare the result to 80. For example, suppose a company laid off comparable black and white workers at the same rate—25 percent of blacks and 25 percent of whites—then the ratio, 25 divided by 25, would be 100 percent. If the ratio is less than 80 percent, then the EEOC considers the effect disproportionate and may hold the employer responsible for discrimination.6
What about online ads suggesting someone with your name has an arrest record, even when no one with your name has been arrested? Title VII does not apply unless you have an arrest record and can prove the potential employer routinely uses ads or information from the company sponsoring the ads, and the result has an inappropriate chilling effect on hiring applicants with criminal records.
The advertiser may argue the ads are commercial free speech—a constitutional right to display the ad associated with your name. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects advertising. In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court set out a test for assessing government restrictions on commercial speech, which begins by determining whether the speech is misleading.3 Are online ads suggesting the existence of an arrest record misleading if no one by that name has an arrest record?
Assume the ads are free speech: what happens when these ads appear more often for one racial group than another? Not everyone is being equally affected by the free speech. Is that free speech or racial discrimination?
Racism, as defined by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, is "any attitude, action, or institutional structure which subordinates a person or group because of their color... Racism is not just a matter of attitudes; actions and institutional structures can also be a form of racism."16 Racial discrimination results when a person or group of people is treated differently based on their racial origins, according to the Panel on Methods for Assessing Discrimination of the National Research Council.12 Power is a necessary precondition, because discrimination depends on the ability to give or withhold benefits, facilities, services, opportunities, etc., from someone who should be entitled to them and is denied on the basis of race. Institutional or structural racism, as defined in The Social Work Dictionary, is a system of procedures/patterns whose effect is to foster discriminatory outcomes or give preferences to members of one group over another.1
Racism can result, even if not intentional, and online activity now may be so ubiquitous that computer scientists have to think about societal consequences such as structural racism in the technology they design. These considerations frame the big picture, the relevant legal, societal, and technical landscape in which this exploration resides. Now we turn to the exploration itself: whether online ads suggestive of arrest records appear more often for one racial group than another among a sample of racially associated names. Then, we examine the role technology might play in combating this problem if evidence of the pattern exists.
The Pattern
What is the suspected pattern of ad delivery? Here is an overview of the issue with some real-world examples.
This study begins with the assumption that personalized ads suggestive of arrest records do not differ by race. We did this by carefully constructing the scientifically best instance of the pattern—one with names shown to be racially identifying and pseudo-randomly selected.
Earlier this year, a Google search for Latanya Farrell, Latanya Sweeney, and Latanya Lockett yielded the ads and criminal reports shown in figure 1. The ads appeared on Google.com (figure 1a,1c,1e) and on a news Web site, Reuters.com, to which Google supplies ads (figure 1c, bottom), All the ads in question linked to instantcheckmate.com (figure 1b,1d,1f). The first ad implied Latanya Farrell may have been arrested. Was she? Clicking on the link and paying the requisite subscription fee revealed that the company had no arrest record for her (figure 1b). There is no arrest record for Latanya Sweeney either, but there is for Latanya Lockett.
In comparison, searches for Kristen Haring, Kristen Sparrow, and Kristen Lindquist did not yield any instantcheckmate.com ads (figure 2a, 2c, and 2e), even though the company's database reported having records for all three names and arrest records for Kristen Sparrow and Kristen Lindquist (figure 2d and 2f).
Searches for Jill Foley, Jill Schneider, and Jill James displayed instantcheckmate.com ads with neutral copy; the word arrest did not appear in the ads even though arrest records for all three names appeared in the company's database. Figure 3 shows the ads and criminal reports for these three names appearing on Google.com (figure 1c, 1e) and Reuters.com (figure 1a). Criminal reports came from instantcheckmate.com (figure 1b, 1d, 1f).
Finally, we considered a proxy for race associated with these names. Figure 4 shows a racial distinction in the Google images that appear for image searches of Latanya, Latisha, Kristen, and Jill, respectively. The faces associated with Latanya and Latisha tend to be black, while white faces dominate the images of Kristen and Jill.
Together, these handpicked examples describe the suspected pattern: ads suggesting arrest tend to appear with names associated with blacks, and neutral ads or no ads appear with names associated with whites, regardless of whether the company placing the ad reveals an arrest record associated with the name.
Google AdSense
Who generates the ad's text? Who decides when and where an ad will appear? What is the relationship among Google, a news Web site such as Reuters, and Instant Checkmate in the previous examples? An overview of Google AdSense, the program that delivered the ads, explains the links between these companies.
In printed newspapers and magazines, ad space and ad content are fixed. Traditionally, everyone who reads the publication sees the same ad in the same space. Web sites are different. Online ad space, not bound by the same physical limitations, can be dynamic, with ads tailored to the reader's search criteria, interests, geographical location, and so on. Any two readers (or even the same reader returning to the same Web site) might view different ads.
Google AdSense is the largest provider of dynamic online advertisements, placing ads for millions of sponsors on millions of Web sites.9 In the first quarter of 2011, Google earned US$2.43 billion ($9.71 billion annualized), or 28 percent of its total revenue, through Google AdSense.10 Several different advertising arrangements exist, but for simplicity this article describes only those features of Google AdSense specific to the Instant Checkmate ads in question.
When a reader enters search criteria on an enrolled Web site, Google AdSense embeds into the page of results ads that are believed to be relevant to the search. Figures 1, 2, and 3 show ads delivered by Google AdSense in response to various firstname lastname searches.
An advertiser provides Google with search criteria, copies of possible ads to deliver once a match occurs, and a bid of how much the sponsor is willing to pay if a reader clicks the delivered ad. (This article conflates two interacting Google programs: Google AdWords allows advertisers to specify search criteria, ad text, and bids; and Google AdSense delivers the ads to host sites.) Google operates a realtime auction across bids for the same search criteria, computing an overall "quality score" to use as the basis for the auction. The quality score includes many factors such as the past performance of the ad and characteristics of the company's Web site.10 The ad with the highest quality score appears first, the second-highest second, and so on, and Google may elect not to show any ad if it considers the bid too low or if showing the ad exceeds a threshold (e.g., a maximum account total for the sponsor). The Instant Checkmate ads in figures 1, 2, and 3 often appeared first among ads, implying Instant Checkmate had the highest quality score.
A Web-site owner that wants to "host" online ads enrolls in AdSense and modifies the Web site to include special software that sends information about the current reader (e.g., search criteria) to Google; in exchange, the Web site receives corresponding ads from Google. The displayed ads have the banner "Ads by Google" when they appear on sites other than Google.com. For example, Reuters.com is an AdSense host, and entering Latanya Sweeney in the search bar generated a new Web page with ads delivered by Google, bearing the banner "Ads by Google" (figure 1c).
There is no cost associated with displaying an ad, but if the user actually clicks the ad, the sponsor pays the bid price. This may be as little as a few pennies, and the amount is split between Google and the host. Clicking the Latanya Sweeney ad on Reuters.com (figure 1c) would cause Instant Checkmate to pay its bid to Google, and Google would split the payment with Reuters.
Search Criteria
What search criteria did Instant Checkmate specify? Are ads randomly delivered? Do ads rely only on the first name? Will ads be delivered for made-up names? Google AdSense provides answers to these questions. Ads displayed on Google.com allow users to learn why a specific ad appeared. Clicking the circled "i" in the ad banner (e.g., figure 1c) leads to a Web page explaining the ads. Doing so for ads in figures 1 and 3 reveals that the ads appeared because the search criteria associated with the bid matched the exact first- and last-name combination searched. Because a company presumably bids on records it sells, the names would likely be the first and last names of real people.
This means that the search criteria associated with these ads have to consist of both first and last names, and the names should belong to real people.
The next steps describe the systematic construction of a list of racially associated first and last names for real people to use as search criteria. Instant Checkmate is not presumed to have used such a list in placing bids, nor Google in delivering ads. Rather, the list provides a qualified sample of racially associated names to use in testing ad-delivery systems.
Black- and White-Identifying Names
Black-identifying and white-identifying first names occur with sufficiently higher frequency in one race than the other.
In 2003 Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan of the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) did a field experiment in which they provided resumes to job ads that were virtually identical, except that some of the resumes had black-identifying names and others had white-identifying names.2 Their job discrimination study showed significant discrimination against black names: white names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews, even though the resumes otherwise had identical qualifications.
The study used a correlation of names given to black and white babies in Massachusetts between 1974 and 1979, defining black-identifying and white-identifying names as those that have the highest ratio of frequency in one racial group to frequency in the other racial group.
In the popular book Freakonomics (William Morrow, 2006), Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner report the top 20 whitest- and blackest-identifying girls' and boys' names. The list comes from earlier work by Levitt and Roland Fryer, which shows a pattern change in the way blacks named their children starting in the 1970s, which they correlate with the Black Power Movement.7 They postulate that the movement influenced how blacks perceived their identities, and they give as evidence that before the movement, names given to black and white children were not distinctly different, but after the movement distinctly black names emerged.
Similar to the job discrimination study, the list used by Fryer and Levitt was compiled from names given to black and white children recorded in California birth records from 1961-2000 (more than 16 million births).
To test methods of ad delivery, we combined the lists from these prior studies and added two black female names, Latanya and Latisha. Table 1 lists the names used here, consisting of eight for each of the categories: white female, black female, white male, and black male from the Bertrand and Mullainathan job discrimination study (first row in table 1); and the first eight names for each category from the Fryer and Levitt work (second row in table 1). Emily, a white female name, Ebony, a black female name, and Darnell, a black male name, appear in both rows. The third row includes the observation shown in figure 4. Removing duplicates leaves a total of 63 distinct first names.
Full Names of Real People
Having a list of racially associated first names is a start, but testing ad delivery requires a real person's first and last name (full name). Web searches provide a means of locating and harvesting full names by: (1) sampling names of professionals appearing on the Web; and (2) sampling names of people active on social media sites and blogs (netizens).
Professionals often have their own Web sites or have biographical information appearing on institutional Web sites, listing titles and positions and describing prior accomplishments and current activities. Several professions, such as research, medicine, law, and business, often have degree designations (e.g., PhD, MD, JD, or MBA) associated with people in that profession. A Google search for a first name and a degree designation can yield lists of people having that first name and degree. These kinds of searches can harvest a sample of full names of professionals with racially associated first names.
The next step is to visit the Web page associated with each full name, and if an image is discernible, record whether the person appears black, white, or other. Each Web page visited should be archived to preserve images and content.
Here are two examples from my ad-delivery test. A Google search for Ebony PhD revealed links for real people having Ebony as a first name—specifically, Ebony Bookman, Ebony Glover, Ebony Baylor, and Ebony Utley. I harvested the full names appearing on the first three pages of search results, using searches with other professional endings such as JD, MD, or MBA as needed to find at least 10 full names for Ebony. Clicking on the link associated with Ebony Glover provided more information about her, including an image.8 The Ebony Glover in this study appeared black.
Similarly, search results for Jill PhD listed professionals whose first name is Jill. Visiting links yielded Web pages with more information about each person. For example, Jill Schneider's Web page had an image showing that she is white.14
Harvesting names of netizens is similar but simpler than harvesting names of professionals. PeekYou searches were used to harvest a sample of full names of netizens who have racially associated first names. The Web site peekyou.com compiles online and offline information on individuals—thereby connecting residential information with Facebook and Twitter users, bloggers, and others—and assigns its own rating for the size of each person's online footprint. Search results from peekyou.com list people with the highest score first, and include an image of the person. Celebrities and public figures tend to be listed first, having the highest PeekYou scores, followed by bloggers, tweeters, and the rest.
A PeekYou search for Ebony found Ebony Small, Ebony Cams, Ebony King, Ebony Springer, and Ebony Tan. A PeekYou search for Jill found Jill Christopher, Jill Spivack, Jill English, Jill Pantozzi, and Jill Dobson. After harvesting these and other full names, I reported the race of the person if discernible.
Using the approach just described, I harvested 2,184 racially associated full names of people with an online presence from September 24 through October 22, 2012. Using the images associated with those names, I was able to confirm that the racially associated first names were predictive of race.15 Most images associated with black-identifying names were of black people (88 percent), and an even greater percentage of images associated with white-identifying names were of white people (96 percent).
Black names and white names were examined separately as predictors of race. The results showed that 490 images of blacks had black-associated first names, and 68 did not; 18 images of blacks had white first names; 852 had neither black first names nor images of blacks. Similarly, 831 images of whites had white first names, 50 images of whites did not have white first names; 39 had white first names but nonwhite images, and 508 had neither white first names nor images of whites.
Google searches of first names and degree designations were not as productive as first name lookups on PeekYou. On Google, the white male names Cody, Connor, Tanner, and Wyatt retrieved results with those as last names rather than first names; the black male name Kenya was confused with the country; and the black names Aaliyah, Deja, Diamond, Hakim, Malik, Marquis, Nia, Precious, and Rasheed retrieved fewer than 10 full names. Only Diamond posed a problem with PeekYou searches, seemingly confused with other online entities. Diamond was therefore excluded from further consideration.
Some black first names had perfect predictions (100 percent): Aaliyah, DeAndre, Imani, Jermaine, Lakisha, Latoya, Malik, Tamika, and Trevon. The worst predictors of blacks were Jamal (48 percent) and Leroy (50 percent). Among white first names, 12 of 31 names made perfect predictions: Brad, Brett, Cody, Dustin, Greg, Jill, Katelyn, Katie, Kristen, Matthew, Tanner, and Wyatt; the worst predictors of whites were Jay (78 percent) and Brendan (83 percent). These findings strongly support the use of these names as racial indicators in this study.
Sixty-two full names appeared in the list twice even though the people were not necessarily the same. No name appeared more than twice. Overall, Google and PeekYou searches tended to yield different names.
Ad Delivery
With this list of names suggestive of race, I was ready to test which ads appear when these names are searched. To do this, I examined ads delivered on two sites, Google.com and Reuters.com, in response to searches of each full name, once at each site. The browser's cache and cookies were cleared before each search, and copies of Web pages received were preserved. Figures 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7 provide examples.
From September 24 through October 23, 2012, I searched 2,184 full names on Google.com and Reuters.com. The searches took place at different times of day, on different days of the week, with different IP and machine addresses operating in different parts of the United States using different browsers. I manually searched 1,373 of the names and used automated means17 for the remaining 812 names. Here are 10 observations.
1. The ads were respectfully displayed, without clutter. We have all seen Web pages where ads get in the way, dominating the page or being so closely woven into the page that you cannot distinguish the ads from the content. That's not the case here. No more than three ads ever appeared for a search on either Google.com or Reuters.com. No company's ad was listed more than once on a page, and the ads appeared in a single set within a rectangular area in the margins. Google and Reuters are respected sources of information, and displayed in this manner, the ads did nothing to take away from the Web sites; conversely, the sites and respectful placement of ads may even exalt the ads.
2. Far fewer ads appeared on Google.com than Reuters.com—about five times fewer, even when examining up to three pages of search results on Google.com. When ads did appear on Google.com, typically only one ad showed, compared with three ads routinely appearing on Reuters.com. This suggests Google may be sensitive to the number of ads appearing on Google.com.
3. Of 5,337 ads captured, 78 percent were for government-collected information (public records) about the person whose name was searched. Public records in the United States often include a person's address, phone number, criminal history, and professional and business licenses, though specifics vary among states. Of the more than 2,000 names searched, 78 percent had at least one ad for public records about the person being searched. Ads to buy a person's public record appeared for almost any name searched, but they came up on Reuters.com much more often than on Google.com.
4. Four companies had more than half of all the ads captured. These companies were Instant Checkmate, PublicRecords (which is owned by Intelius), PeopleSmart, and PeopleFinders, and all their ads were selling public records. Instant Checkmate ads appeared more than any other: 29 percent of all ads. Ad distribution was different on Google's site; Instant Checkmate still had the most ads (50 percent), but Intelius.com, while not in the top four overall, had the second most ads on Google.com. These companies dominate the advertising space for online ads selling public records.
5. Instant Checkmate ads dominated the topmost ad position. They occupied that spot in almost half of all searches on Reuters.com. The next closest, PublicRecords.com, rarely had the topmost spot, but most frequently appeared in the second and third positions. Appearing as the first ad so often suggests that, in general, Instant Checkmate offers Google more money or has higher quality scores than do its competitors.
6. Ads for public records on a person appeared more often for those with black-associated names than white-associated names, regardless of company. PeopleSmart ads appeared disproportionately higher for black-identifying names—41 percent as opposed to 29 percent for white names. PublicRecords ads appeared 10 percent more often for black first names than for white. Instant Checkmate ads displayed only slightly more often for black-associated names (2 percent difference). This is one of those interesting findings that spawn the question: Public records contain information on everyone, so why more ads for black-associated names?
7. Instant Checkmate had the largest percentage of ads in virtually every first-name category, except for Kristen, Connor, and Tremayne. For those names, Instant Checkmate had uncharacteristically fewer ads (less than 25 percent). PublicRecords had ads for 80 percent of names beginning with Tremayne, compared with only 23 percent for Instant Checkmate. Similarly, for Connor, PublicRecords had 80 percent compared with 20 percent for Instant Checkmate, and for Kristen it was 58 percent PublicRecords versus 16 percent Instant Checkmate. Why the underrepresentation in these first names? Did Instant Checkmate avoid these names for some reason? Do these undercounts show a glitch? During a conference call with company's representatives, they asserted that Instant Checkmate gave the same ad text to Google for groups of last names (not first names).
8. Almost all ads for public records included the name of the person, making each ad virtually unique, but beyond personalization, the ad templates showed little variability. The only exception was Instant Checkmate. For example, almost all PeopleFinder ads appearing on Reuters.com used the same personalized template ("We found fullname. Current Address, Phone and Age. Find fullname, Anywhere," where the person's first and last name replaces fullname). PublicRecords used five templates and PeopleSmart seven, but Instant Checkmate used 18 different ad templates on Reuters.com. Figure 5 enumerates ad texts and frequencies for all four companies (replace fullname with the person's first and last name).
Only Instant Checkmate ads used the word arrest, which appeared in eight of its 18 ad templates found on Reuters.com. While Instant Checkmate's competitors—PeopleSmart, PublicRecords, and PeopleFinders—also sell criminal history information, none of their ads included the word arrest or arrested.
9. A greater percentage of Instant Checkmate ads using the word arrest appeared for black-identifying first names than for white first names. More than 1,100 Instant Checkmate ads appeared on Reuters.com, with 488 having black-identifying first names; of these, 60 percent used arrest in the ad text. Of the 638 ads displayed with white-identifying names, 48 percent used arrest. This difference is statistically significant, with less than a 0.1 percent probability that the data can be explained by chance (chi-square test: χ2(1)=14.32, p < 0.001). The EEOC's and U.S. Department of Labor's adverse impact test for measuring discrimination is 77 in this case, so if this were an employment situation, a charge of discrimination might result. (The adverse impact test uses the ratio of neutral ads, or 100 minus the percentages given, to compute disparity: 100-60=40 and 100-48=52; dividing 40 by 52 equals 77.)
The highest percentage of neutral ads (where the word arrest does not appear in the ad text) on Reuters.com were those for Jill (77 percent) and Emma (75 percent), both white-identifying names. Names receiving the highest percentage of ads with arrest in the text were Darnell (84 percent), Jermaine (81 percent), and DeShawn (86 percent), all black-identifying first names. Some names appeared counter to this pattern: Dustin, a white-identifying name, generated arrest ads in 81 percent of searches; and Imani, a black-identifying name, resulted in neutral ads in 75 percent of searches.
10. Discrimination results on Google's site were similar, but, interestingly, ad text and distributions were different. Instant Checkmate ads appearing on Google.com often used different ad text than those on Reuters.com. While the same neutral and arrest ads that were dominant on Reuters.com also appeared frequently on Google.com, Instant Checkmate ads on Google included an additional 10 templates, all using the word criminal or arrest. These new templates appeared in about 20 percent of the Instant Checkmate ads on Google.
More than 400 Instant Checkmate ads appeared on Google, and 90 percent of these were suggestive of arrest, regardless of race. Together, these last two findings underscore other differences between ads appearing on Google's own site and those delivered by Google AdSense to Reuters. Ad text was different. Ads with the word criminal and not arrest appeared only on Google's site, and ads using either arrest or criminal appeared much more often for both races on Google.com.
Still, on Google's own site, a greater percentage of Instant Checkmate ads suggestive of arrest displayed for black-associated first names than for white-associated names. Of the 366 ads that appeared for black-identifying names, 92 percent were suggestive of arrest. Far fewer ads displayed for white-identifying names (66 total), but 80 percent were suggestive of arrest. This difference in the ratios 92 and 80 is statistically significant, with less than a 1 percent probability that the data can be explained by chance (chi-square test: χ2 (1)=7.71, p < 0.01). The EEOC's adverse impact test for measuring discrimination is 40 percent, so in an employment situation, a charge of discrimination might result. (The adverse impact test gives 100-92=8 and 100-80=20; dividing 8 by 20 gives 40 percent.)
A greater percentage of Instant Checkmate ads with the word arrest in ad text appeared for black-identifying first names than for white-identifying first names within professional and netizen subsets, too.
This study started with the hypothesis that no difference exists in the delivery of ads suggestive of an arrest record based on searches of racially associated names. The findings reject this. A greater percentage of ads using arrest in their text appeared for black-identifying first names than for white-identifying first names in searches on Reuters.com, Google.com, and in subsets of the sample. On Reuters.com, which hosts Google AdSense ads, a black-identifying name was 25 percent more likely to generate an ad suggestive of an arrest record.
Three Additional Observations
The people behind the names used in this study are diverse. Political figures included State Representatives Aisha Braveboy (arrest ad) and Jay Jacobs (neutral ad) of Maryland; Jill Biden (neutral ad), wife of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden; and Claire McCaskill, whose campaign ad for the U.S. Senate in Missouri appeared alongside an Instant Checkmate ad using the word arrest (figure 6). Names mined from academic Web sites included graduate students, researchers, administrators, staff, and accomplished academics, such as Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Dustin Hoffman (arrest ad) was among the celebrity names used. A smorgasbord of athletes appeared, from local to national fame (assorted neutral and arrest ads). The youngest person whose name was used in the study was a missing 11-year-old black girl.
More than 1,100 of the names harvested for this study were from PeekYou, with scores estimating the name's overall presence on the Web. As expected, celebrities get the highest scores of 10s and 9s. Only four names used here had a PeekYou score of 10, and 12 had a score of 9, including Dustin Hoffman. Only two ads appeared for these high-scoring names; an abundance of ads appeared across the remaining spectrum of PeekYou scores. It seems likely that the bid price needed to get an ad placed first is greater for more well-known and popular names with higher PeekYou scores. Knowing that very few high-scoring people were in the study and that ads appeared across the full spectrum of PeekYou scores reduces concern about variations in bid prices.
Different Instant Checkmate ads sometimes appeared for the same person. About 200 names had Instant Checkmate ads on both Reuters.com and Google.com, but only 42 of these names received the same ad. The other 82 percent of names received different ads across the two sites. Search results on Reuters.com for the 62 duplicate names that appeared in the study showed different ads for 37 of them, the same ad for seven, and no ad for 18. At most, three distinct ads appeared across Reuters.com and Google.com for the same name. Figure 7 shows the assortment of ads appearing for Latonya Evans and Latisha Smith. Having different possible ad texts for a name reminds us that while Instant Checkmate provided the ad texts, Google's technology selected among the possible texts in deciding which to display. In Figure 7, each name had ads both suggestive of arrest and not, though they both had more ads suggestive of arrest than not.
More about the Problem
Why is this discrimination occurring? Is Instant Checkmate, Google, or society to blame? We don't yet know, but navigating the terrain requires further information about the inner workings of Google AdSense. Google understands that an advertiser may not know which ad copy will work best, so the advertiser may provide multiple templates for the same search string, and the "Google algorithm" learns over time which ad text gets the most |
- as you will have guessed - involves the rare earths.
In his laboratory in University College London, Prof Andrea Sella's face lights up when I ask him about them. Clearly this family of elements is particularly close to the chemist's heart.
"The first thing you need to know is they are neither rare nor earths," he tells me.
They are known as "rare" because it is very unusual to find them in a pure form, but it turns out there are deposits of some of them all over the world - cerium, for example, is the 25th most common element on the planet. The term "earth" is simply an archaic term for something you can dissolve in acid.
They are grouped together as a family because of their incredible chemical similarities - the reason it took a century of chemical investigation to finally isolate them all.
But the rare earths' chemical similarity belies all sorts of fascinating and often very useful electro-magnetic and optical differences.
To demonstrate, Andrea produces a rack of test tubes containing a selection of the rare-earth elements, each one a different pastel shade - there are gentle pinks, purples, blues and greens.
Image copyright Andrea Sella Image caption Nitrate salts of 15 of the rare earth elements, known collectively as lanthanides
The radioactive element promethium, is missing from his collection. Andrea calls it the "cuckoo in the nest".
Promethium isn't found naturally on earth, but is formed in nuclear reactors. You may be carrying a tiny trace of promethium now because it has been used in the luminous paint on some watches.
Andrea Sella "They tarnish easily in air, they react quite violently, they burn like crazy... But the flipside of that is that once they've burnt and you've made an oxide, that oxide is incredibly robust and stable." Watch Sella's 2013 Royal Institution lecture
Andrea waves an ultraviolet light over his collection. Some suddenly light up in vivid fluorescent colours.
"One of the incredible properties of the rare-earth elements is that they produce different wavelengths of light - specific colours - exactly on demand," he explains.
It turns out this property forms part of the anti-counterfeiting system used in euro notes.
Andrea takes a 50-euro note from his wallet and places this under the UV light. Bright green and blue stripes and shapes appear together with a constellation of beautiful blue and pinky-purple stars.
"Those stars contain europium," he says, grinning broadly. "This tells me that there is someone with a sense of humour at the beating heart of the European Union."
But the optical properties of the rare earths do more than just deter forgers. The distinctive green light in a television or computer screen is generated using terbium, while the red colour is produced by a combination of europium and yttrium (which is often treated as an honorary member of the rare earths).
But the most useful rare earth - in optical terms - is probably erbium.
The light produced by erbium is out in the near-infrared spectrum and is invisible to the human eye.
But it can send signals down optical fibres for many kilometres, which is why most of the optical fibre applications around the world use signal amplifiers made with erbium.
Rare earths are also essential for the catalytic converters that scrub the exhaust gases of cars clean and in glass polishing.
But it is the incredible magnetic properties of some of the rare earths that most of us - unwittingly - exploit most often.
Andrea passes me a rectangular lump of dark grey metal a few centimetres long.
"Hold this," he orders. I clutch it in my fist.
He produces a two pence coin and places it on the back of my hand.
Even through the thickness of my hand I can feel the magnet tugging at the disk of metal.
"That is a magnet made with neodymium," he explains. "It is 10 times as powerful as a normal iron magnet and can hold 1,000 times its own weight."
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Pacemakers sometimes use nuclear batteries containing promethium
It is no exaggeration to say that the miniaturisation of technology would not be possible without these incredible magnets.
They are a surprisingly recent breakthrough. The first magnets using the rare earths neodymium and scandium were developed only in 1982, but their discovery has revolutionised all sorts of technologies.
The tiny motors that power computer hard drives and the miniature speakers on mobile phones and laptops depend on rare-earth magnets.
Neodymium magnets are used in electric guitar pickups, MRI scanners and microwave ovens. You can even buy cufflinks that link up with neodymium magnets.
And they also hold the key to Mr Stiesdal's challenge - getting rid of the huge gear mechanism in wind turbines.
The stronger the magnets, the easier it is to generate power at lower speeds.
An electric current is generated by induction - the electrons are driven as a magnet moves past a coil of wire. The stronger the magnet, the more the electrons move.
Down in one of Siemens' huge engineering sheds below Stiesdal's office, I was shown one of the company's new gearless turbines.
Image copyright Other
It is much more compact than its forebears. The core is a ring about five metres in diameter, like a giant doughnut, which encloses the axle.
This ring is packed with 648 22cm-long neodymium magnets laced with another rare-earth element, dysprosium, which makes them much less liable to become demagnetised.
It means, Henrik Stiesdal tells me with evident pride, that the same power can be generated without any gear system at all.
The problem is getting hold of the rare earths that make this possible. More than 85% of the world's supply of rare-earth metals comes from China.
And practically 100% of the "heavy" rare earths - at the farther end of the periodic table - come from China, including Stiesdal's dysprosium.
China has some very rich deposits of rare earths in Inner Mongolia. And, until recently, China has not been very squeamish about the consequences of rare-earth extraction.
It is a very dirty business. Rare earths are often found with radioactive elements like thorium and uranium, and separating them out requires a lot of toxic chemicals.
Jack Lifton, founder of Technology Metals Research and an expert on rare earths, describes how, in China, the process of extraction involves leaching out the elements. They flood the high ground with chemicals, he says, and then precipitate out the metals, leaving behind a lake of carcinogenic waste fluids.
In recent years China has been trying to clean the industry up. But it can't actually stop production, because many of the hi-tech industries at the heart of the Chinese economy rely on rare-earth supplies.
Just how dependent the entire world is on Chinese rare earths became very clear at the end of 2010 when China threatened to restrict supplies. The spike in rare-earth prices was very dramatic - up to 3,000% for some of them.
Prices have since fallen back, but the shock was enough to prompt companies to begin to explore producing and refining rare earths elsewhere in the world.
And how did Stiesdal respond to this shock?
"The neodymium exists in large abundance outside China. There are a couple of companies outside China that could keep us running for thousands of years."
And the dysprosium?
"It turns out you can tweak the way you deal with your alloy so you need less. In today's magnets we have 0.7% dysprosium, and in a few years it will be all gone."
Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on FacebookUpdated August 20, 2014
If there's one theme that has been (almost) universally accepted by the fantasy football community over the past few seasons, it's that the quarterback position is extremely deep. The NFL has become a passing league and there is no shortage of quality throwers even when we get into the #15-#20 range in the rankings.
As a result, the prevailing recommendation is to wait as long as possible to draft a QB, either by targeting one of the last few fantasy starters off the board or by ignoring the position until the later rounds and either stream the position (plucking QBs with good matchups on a weekly basis) or play Quarterback By Committee (i.e. drafting 2-3 QBs late in the draft with the idea that you'll play the best matchup each week).
Those owners in multiple leagues may want to consider drafting one of the top 12 in the middle rounds in order to minimize their weekly waiver wire work. I typically fall into this category due to the sheer number of leagues I'm in (along with my weekly duties here at 4for4). Going QBBC will also work, but owners will still have to decide which quarterback to start, adding another decision they have to make every week.
However, owners who don’t mind the work (or are only in 1-2 leagues) will find that streaming quarterbacks or playing QBBC can result in solid QB1-type output without having to spend an early- or middle-round pick on the position on draft day. This means that owners can draft another mid-round RB/WR/TE who just might be the difference between winning a championship. For example, Josh Gordon, Antonio Brown, Pierre Garcon, Ryan Mathews, Jordy Nelson, DeSean Jackson, Vernon Davis, Eric Decker, T.Y. Hilton, LeVeon Bell, Anquan Boldin and Jordan Cameron were all drafted in the 5th to 8th rounds last year and they were all difference-makers at their respective positions.
Meanwhile, Russell Wilson (8.01, QB8), Andy Dalton (10.12, QB4), Philip Rivers (14.04, QB5), Ben Roethlisberger (11.12, QB10) and Alex Smith (13.12, QB13) were all drafted in the 8th round or later and offered up starting-caliber fantasy numbers. Moreover, Nick Foles, Carson Palmer, Jay Cutler/Josh McCown, Sam Bradford and Ryan Tannehill were drafted late (or not at all) and each had nice stretches of play throughout the season; that means that they were useful as part of a streaming strategy. In the case of Foles, once he won the starting job in Week 6, he was the #4 QB the rest of the way.
Owners who draft a QB in the early or middle rounds may miss out on the next Josh Gordon or Antonio Brown. With this in mind, here are several Values (being drafted in the 8th-10th) and Sleepers (11th round or later) who should be useful-to-good in 2014.
Values
Russell Wilson, Seahawks (11.01)
I recently outlined The Case for Wilson, but suffice it to say, he’s going to be one of my favorite targets this season if his 9th/10th round ADP holds. His detractors say that the Seahawks don’t throw the ball enough and point to his poor performance in the 2013 fantasy playoffs, specifically in divisional matchups against the 49ers and the Cardinals. But he has finished top 9 in each of his first two seasons in the league, and I’d like to remind everyone that he dropped 23.7 points on the 49ers in Week 16 of the 2012 season (after laying 39.4 on the Bills in Week 15), so we shouldn’t let recency bias scare us off. Yes, owners may need to stream another QB in weeks when he has very tough matchups, but if that’s the cost of getting a probable top 10 QB in the other 12-13 games, I’ll take it. Depending on what ADP data we’re looking at, he’s going in the QB11 to QB15 range. If he’s still around after all the other teams have drafted a QB, he could slip into the 10th round or later. Adding him to a team that is stacked at the other key positions is simply unfair.
Jay Cutler, Bears (9.09)
Cutler was the #6 QB through the first six weeks, but finished with the #22 PPG on the year. His early season play is more representative of his potential in Marc Trestman’s offense, assuming he can stay injury-free. Like Romo, injuries are key for Cutler, who has missed 12 games in the last three seasons after not missing a single game from 2007 to 2009. In Brandon Marshall, Alshon Jeffery, Matt Forte and Martellus Bennett, Cutler has a ton of receiving talent around him and Trestman loves to throw. But will he hold up physically?
Tony Romo, Cowboys (9.11)
Much has been written about how Romo will thrive under new “Passing Game Coordinator” Scott Linehan. Under Linehan, the Lions threw the ball 62.2% of the time in the last two seasons. Over the same span, the Cowboys threw it 64.3% of the time, so the Cowboys may not be that much more "pass happy" under Linehan, though the total number of plays they run may increase, helping the offense as a whole. The Lions have averaged 1,105 plays in the last two seasons, while the Cowboys averaged just 968 plays, so Detroit ran 14% more plays than Dallas over that span. In other words, the offensive pie has been bigger in Detroit. This bodes well for Romo and Co. if Linehan’s system translates. The key with Romo is his surgically repaired back. If he holds up, a top 12 season seems likely.
Philip Rivers, Chargers (11.02)
Rivers was written off by many after a substandard 2012 campaign, but he bounced back in a big way with a #5 finish in 2013. In fact, he has finished in the top 10 in five of his last six seasons, so why is he the 14th or 15th QB off the board? Malcom Floyd has been cleared to play and Ladarius Green is coming on, so the receiving corps should get a boost. The only real concern is the loss of OC Ken Whisenhunt, who guided Rivers to his bounce back season. New OC Frank Reich was Rivers’ QB coach in 2013, and he should be able to carry the baton.
Ben Roethlisberger, Steelers (12.01)
Despite losing Mike Wallace to free agency, Big Ben finished as the #10 QB in 2013. It was his eighth straight top 17 finish, so Roethlisberger might be one of the safest picks on draft day. The arrival of Martavis Bryant and Lance Moore should offset the loss of Emmanuel Sanders and Jerricho Cotchery, though it looks like the Steelers are expecting Markus Wheaton (who posted just 6-64 in 12 games as a rookie) to start in Sanders’ place. The Steelers do plan to use more no-huddle in 2014; Roethlisberger played well in no-huddle last year, posting a better YPA (7.5 vs. 7.2) and TD% (6.1% vs. 4.3%) in the hurry-up. Roethlisberger was the #4 QB from Week 9 on, so there is reason to be optimistic about his upside under third-year OC Todd Haley.
Andy Dalton, Bengals (12.02)
For a guy who has finished progressively higher (#17, #12 and #4) in his first three seasons, Dalton doesn’t get a whole lot of respect. He’d be ranked higher this year if not for new OC Hue Jackson’s propensity to run the ball. However, Jackson’s 2011 Raiders threw the ball 52.9% of the time with Carson Palmer under center, which isn’t too far off the Bengals’ 55.0% pass rate in 2013. While we’re expecting fewer pass attempts, Dalton should still be a quality option once the rounds hit double-digits.COLLIN COUNTY, Texas -- Looking out from the back porch, Susan Stauffer says the view from her dream home is almost perfect, except that it is not finished and the home really is just a dream.
“This was going to be the place where we basically wrapped up life and enjoyed ducks landing on the pond and the fish jumping, and now you see nothing but weeds growing,” groaned her husband Harlan Stauffer. “We moved tons and tons of dirt to regrade this and build the berm for the house,” he said.
The couple has put in a lot of work and money to start building a modest home, a barn that Stauffer calls, “My man cave.” The project was halted months ago. “The barn is all in crates here,” he says because he and his wife were told they weren’t allowed to build on land that they have owned for three decades. “Dream of a lifetime has just been put to sunder by politicians, Stauffer said.
The Stauffer’s say they got all the required building permits from Collin County and they started construction. Before they could pour the foundation, they say they had to stop because they didn’t have an additional permit from the City of McKinney -- something they didn’t feel like they needed since their property is outside the city limits.
“This is bullying by the city. There is no doubt about it,” said Collin County Judge Keith Self. He says the county rightly permitted the construction project because it falls in the city of McKinney’s ETJ -- or extra territorial jurisdiction. That’s a land bubble around McKinney that the city could annex someday, but hasn’t yet, so it’s still in the county.
Judge Self says the law is clear on this. “Cities have no authorities under state law to regulate buildings in the ETJ," Self said.
While McKinney officials wouldn’t talk to WFAA about this on camera, they did tell WFAA that the city has a right to regulate planned subdivisions in its ETJ.
Judge Self points out this is not a big developer building a big subdivision. “This case is the most egregious case I have seen. Because there is no subdivision of the land. This is a single couple trying to build a house," Self said.
The City did offer a way to settle the impasse, but the deal they proposed was galling to the county and the Stauffer’s. Harlan Stauffer says the city asked him to set aside about three acres of his land for their future plans including new infrastructure and roads, just in case McKinney annexes the property at a later date.
The Stauffer’s builder, Alan Hoffmann, was stunned that the couple was asked to give the city those three acres for free. “And the current market value of that exceeds $200,000," Hoffman said.
The Stauffer’s rejected the deal, as they should have, says the county judge. “This is simple extortion because there is no reason for them to give that land,” Self said.
As this battle raged, another ETJ court ruling went against McKinney. After that, the city admitted it is “studying alternatives” for how to deal with people like the Stauffer’s who just want to build a single house in that bubble just outside the city limits.
The larger question about who has authority in these buffer zones is still a hot legal dispute. Judge Self is ready for a long fight. “We are going to protect private property rights,” Self said.
Some believe this will go all the way to the state Supreme Court. But until it’s definitively settled, Harlan Stauffer worries about what he’s up against. “They can obviously out-wait us and outspend us,” Stauffer said.
Out in the middle of nowhere, a retired couple is caught in the middle, between a city and a county, and between their dream home and their reality. Susan Stauffer laments. “Being in our 70’s we cannot wait 20 years to continue this project obviously. We may be long gone before somebody steps up to the plate on this," Susan said.
McKinney recently offered the Stauffer’s a deal that would allow them to build their home as long as they agree to make concessions to the city if they ever decide to subdivide or construct more than just one home on their 48 acres. The couples’ builder says they had decided not to accept the proposal as of this writing.
The best hope for the Stauffer’s might be elections.
This has become an issue in a McKinney City Council runoff that’ll be decided in June.
Also, George Fuller, the newly elected mayor, now says he will try to find an “immediate resolution for this couple and other similar pending cases,” when he’s sworn in in the first week of June. Mayor-elect Fuller says he will also work with city council and the city’s legal advisors to undertake a comprehensive review of the city’s stance regarding construction in its ETJ.
Copyright 2016 WFAAStar Citizen – the newest and spacest thing from mighty commander of all wings, Chris Roberts – sounds impossibly good. And I do mean that, but with more emphasis on the “impossible” part than I’d like. No doubt, Roberts is completely brilliant, but he’s proposing a project of utterly mad ambition. Naturally, it’s made me a bit skeptical. That said, an hour-long chat during GDC Online (the full results of which you’ll see very soon) definitely put a few of my fears at ease. Roberts is dreaming bigger than just about any other designer out there, but his pie-in-the-stars ambitions are actually pretty well-grounded in reality. And also Demon’s Souls, surprisingly enough.
Star Citizen’s scope and scale may sound completely bonkers, but there are limits. Very specific limits, actually. In short, don’t go in expecting EVE-Online-style thousand-ship-battle shenanigans. This simply isn’t that sort of game.
“The largest amount of people that can be in one area in space is decided by the number of people we can have in combat at once,” Roberts told RPS. “It’s not 100 percent fully determined, but it’s going to be between 60 and 100-some-odd people. So if there were 10,000 people in orbit around Earth, that’d be 100 different instances of 100 different people, basically.”
“Essentially, the persistent universe is doing the matchmaking. It keeps track of where you are in the galaxy, how much money you’ve got, what ship you’ve got – and obviously, that’s not completely real-time. If we wanted to, the persistent universe could be handled by some sort of boring web interface. But that’s not the sort of stuff I like to do. So the persistent universe detects that you and another player are moving one way, and he’s a pirate and you’re a merchant, and you’re going to intersect. So it basically creates an instance that’s dynamic and puts you two into it until you resolve your conflict. It will allow other players to drop into it. There’ll be slots saved for your friends, so you’ll be able to message them and say, ‘Hey, I’m under attack! If anyone’s close by, come help me out.’”
“It’s a different level of scope [than EVE]. That’s why it’s called ‘Star Citizen’ and not ‘Earth and Empire’ or something. It’s more about that personal view than some big political campaign.”
He noted, then, that Squadron 42 – Star Citizen’s non-persistent spin-off – will be a lot like World of Tanks, but with an overarching narrative. Further, in response to one of Richard’s concerns, he explained that Squadron 42 is actually first on the list of priorities, as Star Citizen’s persistent world technology will eventually be layered on top of it to create a separate game. “Actually, if someone were to ask me, ‘Chris, can you really get this all done?’ it wouldn’t be about getting the Squadron 42 stuff done. It’d be whether or not I can get the full vision of the world going. That’s the biggest challenge,” he said.
Roberts assured me, however, that his ultimate goal is still to simulate a living, breathing galaxy as accurately as possible. And that goal manifests everywhere: in economics, upholding the law, and, er, insurance.
“I’m actually sort of bummed by the current design philosophy where there’s no penalty for not doing particularly well,” Roberts lamented. “In a lot of games I play – especially the console ones – I don’t play particularly smart, because when I respawn, I’m like a second away from where I died. So I go in guns blazing and basically bully my way through the story. I really like [console-only Dark Souls predecessor] Demon’s Souls, though. It was a combination of the most frustrating and rewarding game I’ve played in a long time.”
“So in this, I don’t think we’re gonna be quite as tough as Demon’s Souls, but there needs to be some penalty. You won’t be able to just blast away and then respawn again. So if you go out in space and your ship gets destroyed, you’ve lost it. But basically, we’re trying to do a lot of things like the real world, so we’re trying to simulate an economy and you can buy ship insurance and cargo insurance. So, if you’re smart, you’ll pay a little money for insurance. Normally, if you get blasted, you’ll lose your cargo, but you’ll end up on the same planet to get a replacement ship. If you don’t have ship insurance, you’ll lose it all. I mean, insurance is not going to be that expensive, but it certainly shouldn’t be easy.”
He added that insurance costs will be higher at the edge of the galaxy, because “it’s just like if you’re living in a really bad neighborhood.” So you’ll definitely want insurance in that sort of no-man’s-land, but you might be able to get by without it if you decide to cling to Earth like it’s a gigantic, eons-old safety blanket. That said, Earth will also impose higher tariffs and trade taxes, whereas the lawless frontier keeps things quick, loose, and sans paper trail. But, just putting it out there, you’ll probably die. Roberts’ hope, then, is that a system of trade princes, space crime lords, bounty hunters, and everything in between will arise from that. So yeah, there may be some smoke-and-mirrors involved, but it still all sounds totally mad. Not that you’ll hear Roberts complaining if you tell him as much.
“Well,” he grinned, “no one ever accused me of being unambitious.”
Check back later this week for the full, extremely lengthy interview. It will finally set to rest your overwhelming fears that Roberts might suddenly cease developing games to pursue a life of organized space crime. And also, it might answer a few more of your burning questions about Star Citizen. Maybe. If it feels like it.Best of the Bottom Shelf – Technotise: Edit & I (U.K. DVD)(Out Now)
Guest writer Andrew Watton-Davies checks out the U.K. DVD release of this 2009 Serbian cyberpunk digital animation.
Pitching itself as a “Serbian cyberpunk anime hybrid”, and claiming (in the U.K. PR at least) to be “filled with sex, drugs, fast cars and hover boards”, Technotise: Edit & I is the first animated offering (released originally in 2009) to come from label Simply Media and is an off-shot of the graphic novel Technotise. Directed and Written by Aleksa Gajic, it’s focuses on the story of Edit, a psychology student at a university in Belgrade in the year 2074 who is failing her course. Being 60 years in the future, and a world where every vehicle is hoverbased and VR is a recreational activity, she takes the obvious decision of getting a black-market military grade memory enhancement chip implanted into her arm, rather than studying a bit harder. All is good with the plan – and her mimetic memory – until she sees a maths formula that can predict the future. This turns a portion of her body into a sentient AI (called “I) which a bunch of government spook-types want, thus leading to flipping out like a ninja with extra hover-board chase scenes.
If you thought this setup would result in something overridden with heart-pounding mayhem, then you will be rather disappointed. Whilst the hype tries to make out that the movie is the new Blade Runner, it’s a lot more like a sci-fi Persepolis. The bulk of the film is an exploration of a likable but softly spoken group of characters bimbling their way through a highly imaginative (and relatively pleasant for a major city), futuristic Belgrade, whilst facing relatable inconveniences of life and meeting a range of realistic characters. This is not a bad thing, as characters are depicted with a style and a charm that makes it immensely watchable. Their world also has a distinct air to it as the chances are that unless you are up to speed with Serbian cultural reference you’ll miss half the nods in the script and background, but that also gave it a newness that made it all the more intriguing and interesting to watch; said references are, in that sense, far from being a detraction.
The problems happen when the action starts, as things don’t really shift up a gear into anything all that exciting. There is a future-sports sequence, with suitably incomprehensible goals and flashy camera work, which feels a bit tacked on and underdeveloped; a brief nightclub scene, featuring some good, thumping music, which doesn’t appear to achieve much; and a couple of fights and chase sequences that are over before they begin.
The scenes between Edit and I are slow, talking moments – more in line with earlier discussions with her friends that don’t really hit on any ‘big topics’ that the scenario could bring up for discussion. They also lead to the most unsexy of sex scenes, Edit literally doing power-parkour as a means to escape the voice in her head, and that overall bit of the story ends with a squib rather than either a kinetic or emotive thud. If a decision had been made to either beef up the chip plot or present nothing but vignettes of the coterie of characters, getting through a quirky future world littered with ideas and potential, then it could have been magical. Instead it sits awkwardly between both, with each holding the other back.
Throw in inconsistent animation, a problematic handling of profound autism (pro tip: it’s not a magic power), and an art style that can’t make up its mind what it’s trying to do, and you have something that doesn’t deliver half as much as it promises or shows the potential of having had. However, despite all this, it’s still worth a watch as there as some lovely, warm human moments in it. If another film in the setting was made, then we would jump at the chance to watch it.
The DVD comes with a menu page, featuring footage and sound from the movie, and a scene selection option. The U.K. Region 2 DVD supplied came with DTS 5.1 audio in Serbian; the audio is crisp and well mixed, with the music heavy sequences sounding particularly good. Subtitles are in English only, and whilst they were clear and easy to read the grammar was inconsistent with various words appearing to be missing completely. A German Blu-Ray version is available, with DTS-HD 5.1 Serbian and 2.0 German audio plus German subtitles. The original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 is 16:9-compatible in either version, and on the U.K. DVD the visuals were high quality and clear all the way through the running time of 86 minutes.Individuals, not states, should be charged for the CO2 they emit. This idea is central to the system proposed by French economist Thomas Piketty, which would place more responsibility for climate change at Europe’s door. EURACTIV France reports.
The issue of climate justice, a potential bone of contention between the countries of the global North and South, is largely being glossed over ahead of COP21. But it was at the heart of a meeting on Tuesday (3 November) organised by the Paris-based Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) on inequality and the climate.
“We must put an end to environmental colonialism. Individuals have a right to development, wherever they are,” the said Sunita Narain, the director of the Indian Centre for Science and Environment.
India is distrustful of any agreement which is made between the big polluters and leaves the least developed countries out of the process.
“The problem is that the United States will manage to get their total lack of ambition accepted in the Paris agreement, which means Africa and India will have no room for development,” the expert warned: the earth has a limited carbon budget if the global temperature rise is to be kept below +2°C.
>>Read: COP21 agreement set to miss CO2 reduction target by 10 gigatons
A lack of ambition from some countries will thus necessarily limit the development potential of others, and undermine the basic principle of fairness. Many researchers fear that the current high-carbon American lifestyle may simply not be negotiable, as the country’s political difficulties, like the Senate’s refusal to act on climate change, may prove insurmountable.
Faced with this dilemma, France’s star economist Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling book Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, launched a collaborative project with the Paris School of Economics and the IDDRI. He teamed up with with Lucas Chancel, a researcher at the IDDRI, to present a new approach that takes CO2 emissions into account on an individual basis, rather than by country.
Carbon and inequality
Piketty proposes a method of calculation based on the amount of CO2 produced, but also consumed by each individual, which would radically change our idea of each person’s responsibilities. Under this system, the carbon balance sheet of European citizens, who are normally considered as relatively ‘light’ emitters of CO2 per individual, would be significantly altered, as the greenhouse gases associated with consumer products would be taken into account.
According to Piketty, “income inequality is more and more closely linked to inequalities in CO2 emissions”: it is the rich Europeans, Americans and Chinese that emit the most CO2, while the emissions from the world’s poorest citizens are falling.
The richest 1% of Americans, Luxembourgers, Singaporeans and Saudis emit more than 200 tonnes of CO2 per person per year; 2,000 times more than the poorest in Honduras, Rwanda or Malawi.
Financing adaptation by taxing the rich
As a result of this analysis, Piketty believes “the countries of the North should be convinced to finance more adaptation. Climate change adaptation funds currently stand at $10 billion, while the United Nations Environment Programme estimates the need at 200 times this amount”.
Piketty recalled the fact that the media always present the United States and China as the biggest emitters, responsible for 42% of global CO2 emissions, with Europe far behind at only 10%.
“But if you factor in the emissions of products consumed, Europe’s CO2 emissions are closer to those of the US and China,” the economist insisted. Under this calculation, the EU emits 16% of the global total, compared to 21% for both China and the United States.
The economists propose two solutions: either to implement an effective carbon tax to finance climate change adaptation and protect those on the smallest incomes, or to increase the tax on air tickets. This would be “easier to implement but less well targeted at top emitters”, the economists admitted.
A costly solution for Europe
Karl Friedrich Falkenberg, the former Director-General of the European Commission’s DG Environment and an advisor to the Commission’s think tank on sustainable development, has ruled out this possibility. “Changing from the principle of producer/payer to consumer/payer would absolve producers of responsibility for their CO2 emissions,” he said.
If Chinese emissions were recorded in the US or the EU, China would never be encouraged to clean up its production methods. The country continues to consume enormous quantities of coal, despite possessing the technology to produce clean energy. For Karl Friedrich Falkenberg, this paradox is even less acceptable than climate injustice.Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple fields questions during a press briefing on the bison search Friday afternoon April 24, 2015 in Bethlehem, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple fields questions during a press briefing on the bison search Friday afternoon April 24, 2015 in Bethlehem, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy photo Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Albany sheriff pulls TSA airport check-point proposal 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Albany
A contentious local law proposal that would have made it a crime for passengers to refuse screening at Albany International Airport has been taken off the table.
Sheriff Craig Apple said he requested Local Law E be withdrawn during the Albany County Legislature's Public Safety Committee meeting on Aug. 24 because of the lack of documentation needed to move the proposal for the Colonie airport forward and the mounting opposition against it.
Several groups — from Muslim advocacy organizations to the New York Civil Liberties Union — came out against the law, which was proposed in April with bipartisan support. Opponents say the law could lead to confusion, unwarranted arrests and racial and religious profiling.
"After conferring with members of the legislature, we figured the people have spoken, they've indicated what they want to do, so let's pull it," Apple said.
The law aimed to cover a weak spot in the current system that allows passengers to walk away without boarding their flights if security staff flags them for additional scrutiny, according to Apple, who has said his deputies don't have legal grounds to question such a person.
The Transportation Security Administration has no police power of its own and currently can only levy a fine.
As the proposed law was written, passengers could be in violation of the law should they leave the line even prior to going through metal detectors and having luggage scanned. Those people could have been further charged with a misdemeanor.
Apple has said the TSA approached the sheriff's office with the proposal, shortly after TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger told Congress and travelers to expect more visible airport security in the wake of bombings at an airport and train station in Brussels, Belgium, including more random searches even after passengers have cleared security checkpoints.
On Monday a TSA representative in Albany, when asked about the withdrawl of the proposal by the legislature, would say only that it was the county's decision.
Legislature Majority Leader Frank Commisso, a Democrat, was a sponsor of the proposal.
He said pulling the proposal was the right thing to do.
"This situation was rather unique in the way it came about, and I feel the sheriff felt very strongly in walking away from it," Commisso said. "I have no problem with his decision."
Legislator Frank Mauriello, R-Colonie, said he was in favor of the measure, but thought it would've been helpful if TSA representatives |
92 93 94 95 96 97 98 In the IPD-Work datasets, job insecurity and health risk behaviours (smoking [current, ex-smoker, or never smoker], physical activity [sedentary, active, or other], alcohol use [non-drinkers, moderate, intermediate, or heavy drinkers], and body mass index [underweight, normal, overweight, and obesity classes 1 to 3], were predefined and harmonised across the studies. 20 99 In the IPD-Work cohorts, socioeconomic status was based on the participant’s highest occupational grade or educational qualification, and classified as low, intermediate, and high.
CHD cases were recorded according to criteria from the MONICA (Multinational monitoring of trends and determinants in cardiovascular disease) project, or codes from ICD-9 or ICD-10 (international classification of diseases, 9th or 10th revisions). We included all non-fatal myocardial infarctions that were recorded as I21-I22 (ICD-10) or 410 (ICD-9) and coronary deaths recorded as I20-I25 (ICD-10) or 410-414 (ICD-9) as the main diagnosis. Participants were followed from baseline to the earliest of the following dates: incident CHD event, death, or end of the registry follow-up. In two published studies (Nurses’ Health Study, 16 Women’s Health Study 18 ), self reported CHD events or those reported by next of kin were verified by medical records.
CHD diagnosis was ascertained from hospital records or national death registers in all unpublished and published studies except in two IPD-Work studies (table 1). In the Belstress study, 98 disease events were registered by the human resources department and occupational health service. In the Heinz-Nixdorf Recall study, 96 possible cases were first identified by annual surveys and, in case of any suspicion of a cardiac event or in case of death, medical records were retrieved and the case validated by an expert panel at the local university hospital. In the remaining IPD-Work Consortium studies, date of diagnosis, hospital admission due to myocardial infarction, or date of death from CHD was used to define incident disease, as done previously. 20
Table 2 ⇓ presents the assessment of job insecurity across studies. Job insecurity was measured using a global single item question on the level of insecurity in the present job, 15 16 18 91 97 or by questions on a fear of lay-off or unemployment, 94 98 86 95 87 92 88 89 93 96 90 all dichotomised as high versus low job insecurity. In one published study, 17 a four item multidimensional dichotomised scale was used with questions on fear of job loss, a transfer to another job, new technology, and re-employment prospects. Prevalence of job insecurity varied between 9.6% in the Blue Collar Study 15 and 40.6% in the Whitehall II study. 97
The number of participants in the four published studies and 13 IPD-Work studies was up to 174 438 (table 1 ⇓ ), with 1892 events of incident CHD occurring during the mean follow-up period of 9.7 years (range 3.2-21.2). Although two studies were initiated in the 1980s, the baseline assessment for the remaining prospective studies was between 1992 and 2004. Six studies were from Denmark, 17 86 87 88 89 90 three from Finland, 91 92 93 two from the US, 16 18 two each from Sweden 94 95 and Germany, 15 96 and one each from the UK 97 and Belgium. 98
From a manual search of the references of the retrieved relevant publications (including reviews) and the cited reference search of the articles that were selected for meta-analysis, we found 47 potentially relevant new articles and books. These new articles included 25 narrative or systematic reviews, 11 12 13 14 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 two meta-analyses, 3 67 seven editorials or commentaries, 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 and five books and book chapters. 21 75 76 77 78 Self reported job insecurity and health was the main topic of five narrative or systematic reviews, 79 80 81 82 83 one meta-analysis, 7 one editorial, 84 and one study with a summary score of cardiovascular risk factors as an outcome instead of CHD. 85 In this search procedure, we found no new individual studies meeting the inclusion criteria.
The search strategy identified 362 unique citations of which 29 were selected for further review (fig 1 ⇓ ). Twenty five citations did not meet the inclusion criteria and were excluded. Of these, 17 were reviews 2 8 23 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 and one was a meta-analysis of the health consequences of self reported job insecurity in which CHD was not separately analysed. 9 The excluded papers also included two editorials, 4 40 one glossary, 41 one study based on ecological analysis, 42 one study where the outcome was total mortality, 43 and two cross sectional studies. 44 45 Thus, four published studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the present meta-analysis. 15 16 17 18
Discussion
We aggregated results from published and unpublished studies within the context of a meta-analysis. The findings from 17 cohorts show that self reported job insecurity is associated with a small elevated risk of incident CHD, which was partly attributable to lower socioeconomic status and established risk factors for CHD. We found no statistical evidence to suggest effect modification of the association between job insecurity and CHD by sex, age, study context, or the type of job insecurity assessed.
Strengths and limitations To our knowledge, with more than 170 000 participants and 1800 incident cases of CHD, this is the largest study of job insecurity and incident CHD and provides the most comprehensive synthesis of evidence on this issue so far. Unlike meta-analyses of published studies, we were able to include unpublished studies in our meta-analysis, although the meta-analysis on unpublished data was restricted to studies participating in the IPD-Work Consortium. Because our data were based on US and European working populations, the generalisability of the findings to other contexts such as Asia or Africa is unclear. Our measurement of job insecurity was obtained at a single point in time and did not include assessment of the severity or the expected consequences of a potential job loss. In addition, chronic exposure to a stressor is usually more harmful than a one-off exposure, and previous studies have shown that chronic or repeated exposure to job insecurity or unstable labour market status might be more harmful to health than exposure to job insecurity at one time point only.6 100 101 Thus, our findings might underestimate the job insecurity-CHD association. An important limitation, shared by all observational studies, is that we cannot make conclusions about causality. We are also unable to exclude residual confounding by imprecisely measured socioeconomic circumstances or CHD risk factors, or unmeasured confounding factors such as mental disorders—for example, depression—which might provide an alternative explanation for our findings. Depression could contribute to the job insecurity-CHD association in different ways. Depressed individuals may perceive their work environment, including their job security, more negatively; they may find it more difficult to obtain a secure job; job insecurity may also increase the risk of depression which, in turn, is a risk factor for developing CHD. Depression, negative mood, and perception of stress have been argued to represent the same underlying construct.102 However, it was not possible to investigate these processes in the present meta-analysis. The number and content of the covariates in the fully adjusted models differed between studies, which could have caused some imprecision in the effect estimates. Finally, our systematic review was limited to English language publications, and we did not attempt to include all unpublished studies.
Comparison with previous studies Earlier reviews and meta-analyses have found associations of self reported job insecurity with physical and psychological symptoms and self reported diseases,7 8 9 but our study is the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the prospective association between job insecurity and incident, clinically verified CHD. Four published studies—which are also included in our meta-analysis—suggest a higher risk of CHD among employees reporting high job insecurity,15 16 17 18 although three of them observed no statistically significant associations.15 16 18 In our meta-analysis, an association between job insecurity and CHD was found among employees aged 50 years or more, although the formal statistical test did not support the difference between the age groups. Our meta-analysis, which includes both published and unpublished data, adds to the two existing large scale studies16 18 because it includes non-US employees in a wide range of occupations and is not limited to health professionals. In our meta-analysis, the association was also more precisely estimated because of larger numbers in the analysis. Earlier evidence has suggested that long term job insecurity might be more devastating to health than a short term, transient exposure to job insecurity,6 100 101 although this effect was not possible to examine in the present study. However, not only the type of job contract but also other sources of insecurity—such as downsizing of personnel or a company closure—could have an adverse effect on employee health.28 Secondly, for an employee, the severity of a potential job loss may depend on the degree of dependence on the present job.7 21 If re-employment prospects are poor, job insecurity may be more stressful and more likely to actually lead to long term unemployment. These hypotheses should be examined in future studies.
Interpretation of the findings The exact mechanisms underlying the job insecurity-CHD association are unknown, although the adjustment for socioeconomic status and CHD risk factors attenuated the relation between job insecurity and CHD. This attenuation indicated that these factors might either confound or mediate the association. One hypothesised mechanism is health risk behaviours, characterised by smoking, heavy alcohol use, physical inactivity, and overweight,14 which are also associated with low socioeconomic status. However, apart from lower physical activity, our analyses provided limited evidence to support health risk behaviours as the primary explanation for the job insecurity-CHD association. One further underlying mechanism could involve biological risk factors—such as hypertension, dyslipidaemia, and type 2 diabetes—we found a slightly higher prevalence of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and hypercholesterolaemia among participants with job insecurity than among those who did not report job insecurity. Our analyses were based on self reported job insecurity. There is debate as to whether job insecurity reflects the objective situation or an individual’s subjective appraisal of that situation.9 80 81 82 Concordance between subjective job insecurity and insecurity measured in an objective manner—for example, by personnel downsizing103 or a temporary job contract104—has been reported, suggesting a degree of validity for self reported job insecurity.Today is National Beer Day, and to celebrate the rights given to you under the 21st Amendment, we’ve compiled a list of the best places to grab a pint in San Francisco. Now, get out and celebrate!
Biergarten
Outdoor beer garden with jugs of bier, pretzels & other German pub grub taken at communal tables. Open from 3-9 PM today, 424 Octavia St, San Francisco, CA 94102.
Mikkeller Bar
A famed brewer’s industrial-cool bar offers rare tap & bottled beers alongside upscale pub grub. Open today from 12 PM – 2 AM, 34 Mason St, San Francisco, CA 94102.
The Beer Hall
Equipped with 20 taps, this bar & shop pours craft beers in bottle-cap-adorned digs with many seats. Open today from 3 PM – 12 AM, 1 Polk St, San Francisco, CA 94102.
Brewcade
Playful bar & arcade for a variety of drinks & vintage video-game machines in a neon-decked space. Open today from 4 PM – 2 AM, 2200 Market St #102, San Francisco, CA 94114
The Monk’s Kettle
Lively locale for traditional pub fare & a long list of beers, including lots of Belgian varieties. Open today from 12 PM – 2 AM, 3141 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103.
The Yard at Mission Rock
Waterfront parking lot featuring picnic tables for open-air dining at food trucks & drinking stops. Open today from 11 AM – 11 PM, 100 Terry A Francois Blvd, San Francisco, CA 94158.
Social Kitchen & Brewery Beers freshly brewed on the premises inspire a menu of creative bar bites at this local brewery. Open today from 4 PM – 12 AM, 1326 9th Ave, San Francisco, CA 94122.
Black Sands
Contemporary brewery, gastropub & cafe serving California fare & local coffee in bright, hip digs. Open today from 8 AM – 12 AM, 701 Haight St, San Francisco, CA 94117.
Magnolia Brewery
Organic bar food & a long list of homebrews anchor the menu at this popular microbrewery. Open today from 11 AM – 12 AM, 1398 Haight St, San Francisco, CA 94117.
Sunset Reservoir Brewing Company
Airy, 2-story tavern for American menus & original beers in a modern space with booths & tables. Open today from 12 PM – 10 PM, 1735 Noriega St, San Francisco, CA 94122.
The Dark Horse Inn
This low-key watering hole features wine, an extensive list of local beers on tap & gourmet entrees. Open today from 5 – 10 PM, 942 Geneva Ave, San Francisco, CA 94112.Donna Brady stood behind the checkout counter at Virginia Originals and Chesapeake Grill, moving along the line quickly while answering questions about the future of the restaurant and gift shop. It’s been a regular occurrence for the hostess.
The Chesapeake Grill, a full-service restaurant, and Virginia Originals gift shop, which opened in 2010, is set to close for good Sept. 30.
With every question about the closing, Brady said she feels an indescribable sadness. At first, she said, the questions were hard to answer, but now they are so frequent, she knows her spiel thoroughly without even having to think.
“(Customers) think we’re coming back and we’re not. A lot of people don’t understand the reasoning why,” Brady said.
Brady has been watching the sunset at the bridge-tunnel travel stop for almost seven years. She joined the team when Chris and Kellson Savvides, two Virginia Beach restaurateurs, leased the space in 2010. The 14-year lease was voided after the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission, which includes members from Newport News and Hampton, decided last year to expand the bridge-tunnel.
The contract included a clause for a one-year termination notice if there was construction.
“It’s tough to say we’re done but we understand the mission of the bridge-tunnel is to provide a bridge-tunnel complex, not necessarily a venue for a restaurant,” Savvides said. “Customers come in and they’re upset but it’s the reality of what’s going on.”
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel opened April 15, 1964. The bridge-tunnel, which spans more than 17 miles, replaced the ferry service that formerly connected Southeastern Virginia to the Eastern Shore. The crossing was offficially named the Lucius J. Kellam Jr. Bridge-Tunnel in 1987. Although originally two lanes, the crossing opened to four-lane traffic in 1999.
According to the commission’s website, the new tunnel will be two, southbound traffic lanes built under the Thimble Shoal Channel. The current tunnel will carry two lanes of traffic northbound once the other is completed.
Construction is set to begin Oct. 1. The project is estimated to cost about $755 million and be completed in October 2022.
Virginia Originals and Chesapeake Grill have become a travel stop for many who cross over and under the bay’s open waters. The bridge-tunnel is a direct connection between southeastern Virginia and the Delmarva Peninsula along the Eastern Shore.
Prior to the Savvides’ taking over and renovating the restaurant, it was previously operated for almost 50 years as a smaller restaurant venture that included grab-and-go food and a gift shop.
Savvides developed the Chesapeake Grill into a tourist attraction by adding the gift shop. He said the main customer base includes travelers from across the country and world.
Virginia Originals & Chesapeake Grill located along the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel closes its doors this year. Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2017. (Aileen Devlin/Daily Press) (Aileen Devlin/Daily Press)
Lisa Stratton of Delaware said she has been stopping at the bridge-tunnel since around 1970 when she was a little girl. Her mother used to bring her while they visited her grandmother who lived in Virginia. Before the Savvides opened Chesapeake Grill, the Sea Gull, which served flounder sandwiches and snacks, was open for about 30 years.
Stratton stopped on an August afternoon with her son for a final visit before the restaurant closes. The pair picked up T-shirts from Virginia Originals as souvenirs.
“It’s just something, you know, that has always been here and you take it for granted, and then when you know it’s getting ready to close you’re like, they can do that. It’s upsetting,” Stratton said.
It also is a frequent stop for truck drivers and daily commuters.
Visitors can walk out to Sea Gull fishing pier located toward the back. Many people stop to grab a bite to eat and fish. The pier also will be shut down during construction.
Don Whitworth, an 18-wheeler truck driver, is considered a regular. He stops by the restaurant and pier once a month to eat, relax and fish before he continues along the Eastern Shore for work.
The 17.6-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel opened on April 15, 1964 after a 42-month-long construction process that resulted in what the American Society of Civil Engineers acclaimed as one of the "engineering wonders of the modern world." Built across the mouth of the bay on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, the $200 million crossing incorporated two 1-mile-long tunnels, four artificial islands and 12 miles of elevated trestle as well as two high-level steel bridges. It still ranks among the longest bridge-tunnel complexes in the world. Click here to find more Hampton Roads History photo galleries. -- Mark St. John Erickson
Whitworth, who was fishing on the pier in mid-August during his monthly stop, had no idea it was closing.
“It’s going to be a let down when it closes,” Whitworth said. “With them shutting down this pier, it’s going to overwhelm the rest of them. I like this one so that’s why I keep coming.”
Savvides, who also owns Black Angus Restaurant and Catering in Virginia Beach, said he is working on special events to give visitors one last chance to visit and eat. One idea he has is a reservation-only dinner sometime in September.
He also promised he will take care of his employees after the restaurant closes.
Savvides is working with the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission to try and set up a new Virginia Originals gift shop on the bridge-tunnel’s north end tourist center.
“One of the greatest things about working out here is that we see things that some people will never see in their lifetime,” Brady said. “We watch the battleships go out, we watch the aircraft carriers, submarines. I’ve been on this island for seven years and I don’t want to go back on land.”
Joseph can be reached by phone at 757-374-3134.ADVERTISEMENT
Today’s Republican Party is a comedy of incompetence and strife. Yet beneath the hijinks lurks a struggle to define the proper relationship of the individual to society and to the state. If we don’t dig too deep, the fight for the soul of the conservative movement looks something like this: In the rugged individualist corner is Fox News performance artist Glenn Beck—today’s most spirited and surreal public defender of the American tradition of flinty self-reliance. In the collectivist corner is heavyweight conservative columnist David Brooks, who has used his New York Times platform to wage a relentless “scientific” campaign against what he sees as the pernicious individualism of Goldwater conservatives like Beck and Rush Limbaugh.
“Your rights as an American are individual rights,” Beck reminds us. “I feel like I need to keep saying that word so it stays in the front of your and everybody’s mind—individual, individual, individual!” To add heft to his indignant free-associative musings, Beck turns regularly to semi-pro philosophers such as Ayn Rand Institute president Yaron Brook to decry the “ideology of altruism and collectivism” before his considerable television audience.
“The problem is, this individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong,” David Brooks contended in a column from last fall that was aimed directly at the heart of the Goldwaterite right. “Over the past 30 years, there has been a tide of research in many fields, all underlining one old truth—that we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion.” Brooks has even gone so far as to suggest that Western civilization may founder on the individualist “illusion” and that science confirms that “the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts.” The GOP is at risk, Brooks says, because its emphasis on individual freedom “is the main impediment to Republican modernization.”
Brooks is right that we humans are, as the biologists say, “hypersocial” animals. And it is true that many proponents of tough-minded individualism fail to grasp the profound importance of human sociality while falling for romantic myths of isolated genius. But Brooks goes wrong when he leaps from the biological facts of life to the “illusion” of individual agency and the desirability of a more communitarian culture. Beck and his friends from the Ayn Rand Institute do not defy science when they contend that real freedom is individual freedom. They do not flout Darwin when they argue that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are best ensured by an ethos of individualism and a government limited by its deference to individual rights.
Humans are unique among animals in our capacity to transmit cultural beliefs and customs from one generation to the next. The human mind is not a blank slate but a “fill-in-the-blanks slate,” outlined by nature and filled in by socialization. Yet the fact that we are thoroughly social creatures built to learn and inhabit culture does not tell us what the content of our culture should be. Our hands did not evolve to play the piano and our cultural capacity did not evolve to transmit ideals of individual liberty, but it is plainly fallacious to conclude that something is therefore “wrong” with Mozart or Madison.
Our cultural capacity is precisely what allows us to transform and transcend our mammalian limits. So, yes, an individualist ethos is unnatural. But so are other travesties of nature—such as equality under the law, monotheism, vaccination, and the wheel. Like these, the American tradition of individualism is a civilizing manifestation of human sociality, not a denial of it.
And individualism works. As Brooks himself notes, individualistic societies tend to be wealthier than collectivist ones. And studies show that individualistic societies, which emphasize choice and personal fulfillment, tend to produce happier people than do collectivist societies, which are anchored by conformity, honor, and inherited obligations. By almost any measure, individualism is a success.
So does Glenn Beck win this round by a knockout? That would be funny—but also a misreading of the Right’s populist persuaders.
Why? Because the “individualism” of latter-day disciples of Goldwater and Reagan has a strange way of disappearing as soon as they stop arguing about marginal tax rates. Glenn Beck is no different. Scratch him and you’ll find a vehement nationalist whose fiery cable gospel breathes populist life into David Brooks’ abstract collectivist theology.
Beck’s “9/12 Project,” meant to revive the fleeting American spirit of grieving, truculent solidarity that followed the 9/11 attacks, lays out nine principles and 11 values of “the greatest nation ever created.” The first principle is “America is good.” What is that if not a recklessly unconditional commitment to the national collective? With his fourth principle—“The family is sacred”—Beck simply ignores the fact that no force in human history has been more corrosive to family cohesion than the individualist ideal of self-realization that he champions.
Similarly, when it comes to the “War on Terror,” Beck’s embrace of the rights of individuals against the state just peters out. Beck’s nonchalance about warrantless wiretaps and waterboarding betrays a peculiar notion of individual liberty. And if you’re an individual from another country exercising your individual right to associate freely with a willing American employer, God forbid the state should belatedly recognize your individual rights by granting you “amnesty”! For too many conservatives, “individual rights” is code for their right to remain unburdened by whatever exercise of state power they happen to dislike.
So while Brooks and Beck may come out swinging from their respective corners, their “fight” ends in a loving embrace. Here is the conservative dilemma writ small. Egghead conservatives like Brooks offer a coherent communitarian philosophy of government, but would suppress (in the name of science!) the cultural innovations that have helped produce the creativity and wealth of the West. Meanwhile, talkers like Beck offer a politics of strong American families and an even stronger American security state no less collectivist then Brooks’. The language of limited government and individual liberty is mandatory in the theater of populist American nationalism, but the populist Republicans’ zany pastiche of jingoist tropes merely pretends to value those ideals. In reality, it offers no real alternative to the sober collectivist vision that explicitly marginalizes them.
As the flags wave and the eagles soar, the American Right’s commitment to individual liberty continues to crumble. Conservatism must stand for something. But here’s the big question: Can a politics of individual freedom be revived? Can it win elections? David Brooks—who knows all about “science” and the success of the hive-minded Chinese—says it can’t. Beck’s populist Republicans fume that Brooks is wrong, wrong, wrong. But why, then, does the substance of their politics have so much in common with his?Please enable Javascript to watch this video
ST. LOUIS - A St. Louis man was shot and killed Saturday afternoon and a small child was behind the gun. St. Louis Police were called to the 5400 block of Arlington Avenue in North St. Louis around 2:45pm. A child had been playing with a gun when it went off. The discharged bullet struck a man in his mid-20's in the neck.
Police say the man died at the scene. His name has not been released. Homicide detectives are handling the investigation.
Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice say they have seen too many cases of kids getting a hold of guns in the home with tragic results. They are trying to limit the problem with free gun locks. Their Lock It for Love program is a community outreach program that teaches gun safety with a focus on prevention of death or injury caused by guns kept in homes. They distribute free gun locks, particularly in areas where children are at greatest risk of gun violence
Click here to donate to the Lock it for Love program.
The group provides gun safety information and free gun locks at community events in the St. Louis area. E-mail gunsolutions@womensvoicesraised.org and include your organization name, date, brief description of the event and your phone number. They will get back to you.
Website: http://womensvoicesraised.org
38.694891 -90.243225Tony Abbott seems to have a new budget sales strategy – blame the critics.
On Tuesday he said Labor was acting like “vandals” and “risking Australia’s AAA credit rating” by criticising – and blocking – “$40bn” worth of budget savings measures in the Senate.
First problem: the allegation was based on the headline in that day’s Australian Financial Review, “AAA credit rating at risk”. But an S&P spokesman later told Guardian Australia its long-term view was that Australia had a “stable outlook” and “the rating is not at risk”. When asked if it could be at risk if spending cuts in the 2013-14 budget were blocked in the Senate, he replied: “No … our position has been the same for years, it has not changed.” The bloke from Standard and Poors was actually trying to say that if Australia seemed to think it could run very big budget deficits indefinitely, then in the longer term the rating might be reassessed.
Second problem: the budget papers clearly show (Budget paper number 1: table 6), that the decisions in this budget deliver only $15bn in net savings to the budget bottom line and $5.5bn in extra revenue – that is around $20bn in decisions. (In the budget papers it actually comes out as $18.8bn because some of it counts as capital investment, but let’s not quibble.) The $40bn figure includes about another $5bn in cuts that Labor proposed to help fund its “Gonski” school plan in the longer term, which it now says aren’t needed because the new government isn’t funding the Gonski plan in the longer term, and also programs the government wants to abolish because they were paid for from the carbon and mining taxes.
Labor is voting against a lot of the $20bn – the Medicare co-payment, the changes to unemployment benefit for under-30s, the changes to the pension, the removal of single-income family payments when the youngest child turns six, the deregulation of universities and the re-indexation of fuel excise. The first three appear set to fail in the Senate, the fuel excise indexation may get through with Greens support and the fate of single income benefits and university deregulation are still unclear.
Joe Hockey, on song with the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph, which portrays Bill Shorten sitting at the head of the “national complaints desk” and accuses him of being engaged in “sabotage”, said it was “now time for Bill Shorten to step up to the plate, not become a national complaints desk, and actually offer some constructive alternatives”.
Speaking to the national press club a few hours later shadow treasurer Chris Bowen did, saying that if the government ditched its paid parental leave plan it would save more than all the measures Labor was opposing.
It is true that historically opposition leaders have offered alternative savings to budget measures they vow to block – in 2009, for example, Malcolm Turnbull proposed to raise tobacco excise as an alternative to Labor’s proposed policy of means testing the private health insurance rebate.
But Abbott himself shifted the goalposts on this, responding to the budgets of 2010, 2011 and 2012 with alternative savings to pay for different things he said the Coalition would spend money on, but without savings for Labor’s budget measures he was opposing at the time, like changes to family tax benefits much, much milder than those he is himself now proposing, which, when Labor proposed them, Abbott described as “class warfare”.
Of course any government will challenge an opposition to nominate alternative savings, but the problem for this government is that voters have pretty clear views about the fairness of its own choices – the savings it has chosen (hitting students, pensioners, the sick and the unemployed) and those it has left untouched (superannuation concessions, negative gearing, the new paid parental leave plan) all of which disproportionately benefit the well to do.
And as well as criticising Labor, the government is also criticising premiers complaining about immediate cuts and $80bn in longer term reductions in school and hospital funding, saying they should grow up and take responsibility for the services they run.
Radio announcer Alan Jones was truly bewildered while interviewing Christopher Pyne on Wednesday, astounded that despite the education minister’s “brilliant” advocacy skills the “blockheads” running state governments could not understand that the allegation of an $80bn cut was totally wrong. In fact, Jones said, “there hasn't been a more monstrous lie perpetrated since Julia Gillard said there'd be no carbon tax”.
Pyne somehow neglected to refer Jones to page 7 of the government’s glossy budget overview which clearly states that the government is changing indexation of state grants and “removing funding guarantees for public hospitals. These measures will achieve cumulative savings of over $80bn by 20024-25.”
Nor did Pyne take issue when Jones suggested that the police should respond to the student protesters gathering around the country on Wednesday by “carting these thugs away and locking them up”. Indeed Pyne claims the students are “intent on shutting down democracy in Australia”.
Of course protests should be peaceful. But rather than attacking all its critics – the opposition, the states, the students – the government might do better just trying to explain its budget and the choices it has made.Artwork/Layout by Karl NE/Nachzehrer (Ex-Nastrond/Shibalba)
Tracklist:
01. Tablets Of Mercury
02. Schism Of Worlds
03. I-AM Ness-The tradition of EYE
04. Sopdet Denudata
05. Yesod Inversum
06. Rosa Andromeda
07. Savikalpa Samadhi
08. Amarta Artwork/Layout by Karl NE/Nachzehrer (Ex-Nastrond/Shibalba)Tracklist:01. Tablets Of Mercury02. Schism Of Worlds03. I-AM Ness-The tradition of EYE04. Sopdet Denudata05. Yesod Inversum06. Rosa Andromeda07. Savikalpa Samadhi08. Amarta
After revealing the title a few weeks back, Greek black metallers Acherontas have now revealed the artwork and tracklist for their upcoming eighth full length record,. A new trailer is also expected at the end of this month.The band said: "Withstanding a duration of 45 minutes and a unique meditative yet dynamic atmosphere, the new revelation is set to uphold the standards of the past and open wide the artistic horizons to the future. A strong return to the roots of Acherontas and the legendary sound waves of the 90's era, blend with an innovative orchestration that signifies the magical Work of 'Amarta'." Check out the full announcement here The album will be released by W.T.C Productions on a soon to be announced release date in CD/LP/tape plus special merchandise as zipper hoods and polo tshirts.Email Checker is a simple tool for verifying an email address. It's free and quite easy to use. Just enter the email address and hit check button. Then it tells you whether the email address is real or not. It extracts the MX records from the email address and connect to mail server (over SMTP and also simulates sending a message) to make sure the mailbox really exist for that user/address. Some mail servers do not co-operate in the process, in such cases, the result of this email verification tool may not be as accurate as expected.
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Note : We do not store any email address you submit on this website.Szczur, 27, has hit.211 (4-for-19) with one double, three RBI and two runs scored in 15 games for the Cubs this season. In his first full season in the majors in 2016, Szczur hit.259 (48-for-185) with nine doubles, a triple, five home runs and 24 RBI in 107 games for Chicago. His 12 pinch hits last season tied for sixth-most in Major League Baseball, as he hit.261 (12-for-46) with a double, a triple and five RBI in a pinch-hitting role. Originally selected by the Cubs as a fifth-round selection in the 2010 First-Year Player Draft, he has hit.243 (82-for-338) with 17 doubles, one triple, eight home runs, 40 RBI and 43 runs scored with four stolen bases in 202 games played over parts of four Major League seasons for Chicago (2014-17). Over parts of seven minor league seasons with the Cubs (2010-16), he owned a.281 batting average (613-for-2180) with 113 doubles, 19 triples, 26 home runs, 195 RBI and 362 runs scored with 140 stolen bases in 562 minor league games.
SAN DIEGO - The San Diego Padres today announced they have acquired outfielder Matt Szczur from the Chicago Cubs in exchange for right-handed pitcher Justin Hancock. In order to create room on the 40-man roster, the club transferred LHP Buddy Baumann to the 60-day disabled list. The club will make a corresponding move to the 25-man roster once Szczur reports. Executive Vice President/General Manager A.J. Preller made the announcement.
SAN DIEGO - The San Diego Padres today announced they have acquired outfielder Matt Szczur from the Chicago Cubs in exchange for right-handed pitcher Justin Hancock. In order to create room on the 40-man roster, the club transferred LHP Buddy Baumann to the 60-day disabled list. The club will make a corresponding move to the 25-man roster once Szczur reports. Executive Vice President/General Manager A.J. Preller made the announcement.
Szczur, 27, has hit.211 (4-for-19) with one double, three RBI and two runs scored in 15 games for the Cubs this season. In his first full season in the majors in 2016, Szczur hit.259 (48-for-185) with nine doubles, a triple, five home runs and 24 RBI in 107 games for Chicago. His 12 pinch hits last season tied for sixth-most in Major League Baseball, as he hit.261 (12-for-46) with a double, a triple and five RBI in a pinch-hitting role. Originally selected by the Cubs as a fifth-round selection in the 2010 First-Year Player Draft, he has hit.243 ( |
he often puts weird ingredients or blends with beer, juice, or soda, and has made perhaps the hoppiest double IPA-like cider ever. Here are some of Nat’s favorites out of his strangest:
Kumiss Mongolian Milkwine (aka Portland Drinking Cheese): Not technically a cider. Fermented milk with no sugar added. Traditional Mongolian/Kazakhstan drink from horse’s milk.
¡Tepache!: Again, not a proper cider, but an authentic Mexican drink made from fermented macerated pineapple.
Bourbon-Barrel Aged Hellfire: Due to be released in late 2016. Boiled apple juice for 18 hours, reducing it to 1/3rd its original volume, then fermented it to 16% ABV, now aging in Old Forester Bourbon barrels.
7 Deadly Sins ENVY: Collaboration with Barley Brown’s, a triple-IPA style cider, made at Hopworks, kettled/whirlpool/hopback just like beer with an extreme amount of hops.
Angel of Death: Facto-Fermented (preserved) lamb’s leg via bacteria harvested from Olympic Provisions salami, then used to ferment cider, keeping the lamb leg in the cider for three months (cooked the lamb like ceviche)
Feta Cheese & Spearmint in Holy Water(melon): Each year Rev Nat’s make a fresh watermelon juice cider. For a special Randall night, the cider is infused with feta cheese and spearmint, in an ode to the classic summer melon salad.
and “Gazpacho”: tomato juice, onion juice, spices in the previously mentioned Tepache
Open your mind (and your mouth) a little bit and you can find some mindblowing creations and the occasional traditional artisinal Gravenstein or Kingston Black hard cider in bottles. Definitely check out the tasting room, located centrally near the Rose Quarter and Lloyd Center Mall. 1813 NE 2nd Ave, Portland, OR 97212 (503) 567-2221
Bull Run Cider Taproom (Forest Grove, OR)
Bull Run Cider is another one of Oregon’s great cideries, sourcing fruit from its own orchards around the Willamette Valley, growing over 60 different types of apples. Bull Run uses traditional English and French cider apples, but also some dual purpose American apples and has its own pear orchards as well. Located less than 40 minutes outside of Portland, the artisan cidery is unique in that it owns both apple orchards and a nursery where owners Pete Mulligan, Shaun Shepherd, and cider maker Galen Williams can control the harvest and production methods and experiment with traditional cider apple stock. Bull Run makes mostly refreshing dry ciders with different flavors in blends of apples, single varietal Gravenstein, and Oregon fruit sourced ciders like Bramble Berry and Criikside Cranberry Perry. There is also a Pear Ice Wine. Bull Run finally opened a cider tap room in April of 2015, and though it’s only open weekends it has became a great gathering place to enjoy cider and live music including touring bands. 2225 Cedar St. Forest Grove, OR 97116 503-992-8001 http://www.bullruncider.com
Portland Cider House (Portland, OR)
Located on the busy and trendy SE Hawthorne Blvd., Portland Cider Co. is a true taphouse in that it makes no bones about being about anything else. The large number of taps rotate ciders mostly from the Pacific Northwest, including those of its owner, Jeff Parrish, who also founded Portland Cider Co. in Oregon City. The Cider House does not do bottles, beers, or a kids play area; even the food is just the minimum to allow all-ages during the day. It’s all about the cider flights here, so choose your own and enjoy it on one of the many group tables that Jeff Parrish built himself. The space is colorful and full of eclectic cider paraphernalia, visual art and cider signage. 3638 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR 97214 (503) 206-6283
Atlas Cider Tasting Room (Bend, OR)
Though located in what many call Beertown USA, the Atlas Cider Co. has managed to dig in a strong foothold into Bend, a small city known for the wealth of outdoor activities and the jam packed amount of breweries for such a small place. Founder Dan McCoy is an outdoorsman, snowboarder, and skater who left his day job as a teacher to open Atlas Cider after discovering craft beer and then cider. Atlas Cider Co.’s brands keep it pretty simple and relatively low alcohol, from the Session Apple Cider at 5.8% and semi-sweet to fruited ciders like POM-Cherry (pomegranates and cherries) to Apricot and Blackberry Cider. The reason the cidery makes this list as a top cider destination is more for the tasting room than anything. It is one of the most built-out full experiences in Oregon, not just a shell to sample the ciders. At the Atlas Cider Co. Tasting Room in the Bend Old Mill Marketplace you can enjoy live music on Fridays, a game of pool with friends, arcade games, and even a beer. 550 SW Industrial Way Bend, Oregon http://www.atlascider.com
Blue Mountain Cider Tasting Room (Milton-Freewater, OR)
Blue Mountain Cider in Milton-Freewater is one of the state’s largest and most successful cideries, and that is largely because of the easy access to orchards and its own cider apples. Blue Mountain makes one dry, two semi-dry, and a number of fruited ciders in its regular lineup. Blue Mountain Cider was founded in 2003 by the family-run parent company, Earl E. Brown & Sons, also located in Milton-Freewater, a successful family-run cider grower and apple packaging plant that began in 1977. Blue Mountain opened its tasting room in 2007 and grew to produce cider for five other private labels in addition to the house brand. The Brown family also makes wine, and the tasting room is similar to the winery tasting rooms you will find in the valley. Every Thursday there are special ciders and $4 pints, and in the summer there is a beautiful patio with live music and food trucks. Watermill Building at 235 E Broadway in Milton-Freewater, Oregon 541-938-5575 http://www.drinkcider.comThe body of a woman was found under debris Friday after firefighters extinguished flames at a cluttered Valley Village home.
The Los Angeles Fire Department responded to the blaze in the 4600 block of Farmdale Ave. at 7:37 a.m.
• PHOTOS: See the debris — and the damage — at cluttered Valley Village home gutted by fire
When crews arrived, they found “excessive storage conditions,” and heavy fire through the roof, LAFD spokeswoman Margaret Stewart said.
“There are pockets of it (fire) in the attic,” she said. “That’s where they are hitting it when it pops up.”
Because of the packrat conditions inside the home, firefighters transitioned to a defensive mode, fighting the blaze from the exterior in an effort to prevent the flames from spreading to other structures, according to the LAFD.
Stewart reported the fatality several hours later.Focal Utopia Headphones Review: Audiophiles And Melomaniacs $3,999 Worth Buying Headphones
When it comes to the time we want to find something useful, we don’t really know what should we buy. It is all a matter of tastes. A new car; a new camera; maybe a new pair of headphones. With dozens of headphones in the market, it is difficult to invest in the right one to fit our specifications. It won’t be a problem anymore with the Focal (France based company) headphones Utopia. These headphones are made to satisfy everyone needs with the quality of a concert sound system just above your head. The best headphones in the world!
They provide a rich sound, even better than a home theater. You are paying not for a home theater. Matter of fact, you are buying the replacement of all your sound systems for personal use. We can cover our loud music need problem using them. They don’t disrupt the sound. It doesn’t matter how loud you are listening to music, it won’t produce disrupt sounds. As they say, “world’s first audiophile headphones to be equipped with totally open-backed full-range speaker drivers with pure Beryllium ’M’-shaped domes. They meet all the requirements expected of high-end headphones due to their sophisticated and elegant design and to purposeful materialities, such as the carbon fiber yoke and true lambskin leather ear cushions.”
And we can back up their words: the Beryllium influence in the creation of the Utopia is to strengthen the material, making it stronger than ever, and also avoid the sparklings of the metals when they rub against any surface. In other words, they will last for a looong time! About what do they do to improve the headphones? Well, it is for the same purpose that Focal large room’s speakers have but in a miniature version, they work as a near-field speaker array. Where the ‘M-shaped’ means they are producing a high-end sound where we will have the perfect notion of each instrument, their pitches, and notes. And it resumes in we have a concert in every song played.
The Utopia Headphones doesn’t have the common mistakes with headphones. They have invested time in producing them and yes, they didn’t forget the main problem with headphones. “How comfort they are.” You will not feel a difference if you are wearing them or not after a few minutes. They are a bit heavy, but once you find your mood, the right music, you will forget the fact you are wearing them.
If you are looking for comfort, the best quality available in the market and the richest sounds you can imagine. You better go for a Utopia headphone. Focal have more than 30 years making sound systems and they know what they do. You will regret your decision just in case you are running low on budget.
Audiophiles, melomaniacs, music lovers in general. Those groups are the main target for the Utopia headphones. For those, who there isn’t better plan than relaxing in their home’s comfort while using these headphones to transport their mind into a new reality.Running late for a meeting can be disastrous. Never mind how it affects relations with the developers and PR kind enough to arrange the meeting, imagine being dropped into the hot seat on a new game having missed the first few minutes of explanation and introduction.
Fortunately this is my jam. This was Warhammer. The End Times are upon us and while I apologise profusely to Fatshark for running behind on things, this was the Vermintide.
Point me at the rats.
BURN
Let’s get a little bit of shorthand out of the way. If you have played, for example, Command and Conquer, you have played Warcraft 1. If you have played Doom, you have played Quake. If you’ve played Left 4 Dead, you have played Vermintide.
Does that mean it is bad? Not for a second. Does that mean it is derivative? No. To be perfectly honest my time playing Vermintide at Gamescom was my favourite playtime out of everything I got my hands on. There are games and settings that are just meant to be together, two great flavours that just go together. For me, Vermintide is one of those things. It had all the familiar mechanics of Left 4 Dead when I dropped into the hot seat on the Bright Wizard. Two weapons to swap through, a health kit to use, a slot for a bomb. Nothing wild or unusual there, just the perfect combination of setting and familiar play mechanics that meant that I could get right into what was on the screen.
To completely spell it out however, do not assume that just because you have played something mechanically similar before that there is nothing new or wonderful to experience here. The battle for Ubersreik just feels so utterly perfect. Warhammer games have been hit and miss down the ages, this though. This takes the cake for me. Brand new favorite. All hail the Vermintide.
MAIM
Despite being comfortable with the controls, I will admit being dropped into the action was a little disorienting. The particular mission we were undertaking required the party climbing to the top of a tower in Ubersreik and destroying the Doom Bell that the Skaven had in place. You don’t want that sort of thing hanging over you when you are trying to survive an absolute tide of Skaven.
So who did I get first? The Bright Wizard.
Sienna Fuegonasus is fun to play. This is the Warhammer world where the men are men and the women are women…. and absolutely every single man, woman and child will destroy you in a heartbeat. Sienna wielded both her Bright Wizard staff and a mace. Any unfortunate Skaven that popped up was free game for a mace to the head. Who needs whack-a-mole?
The real fun and frolics came when I swapped to Staff. There are different weapons that the heroes will get access to throughout the campaign and through crafting at the inn. This particular set up had me able to throw fireballs at Skaven and immolate them in a single shot. So everyone should hide behind the juggernaut of the Bright Wizard right? Eh…. magic isn’t free in Warhammer. Use too much magic too quickly and like any proper self respecting Bright Wizard you will catch hell for it. You can and will hurt yourself if you rely totally on magic to clear the Skaven scum from your path. It’s about picking both the right weapons for yourself and using the right weapons at the right moment for the mission. A Bright Wizard who turns herself to ash before finishing the mission is utterly useless to the party.
FASTER MANTHING
While everyone swapped terminals for another mission and to see how things work, lets talk about some of the systems that Fatshark is building into Vermintide.
First, lets talk about the bugbear of online gaming. People dropping out. If anyone drops out of your game, a bot will take over the character for you. There’s no need to stand around and agonise about going back and trying to get someone else on board. Press on and be assured that the bots have your back. If someone wants to come in and unseat the bot? That’ll happen as well. There is an incentive for people to jump into games in progress. The closer a mission is to completion, the closer the party is to rolling bones for the loot. Some people may leave, some people may leave you hanging, but there is a genuine reason for others to come to your rescue and try help you over the finish line.
Regarding loot, naturally as punishment for being late the dice Gods gave me the absolute worst roll possible. I got a green ranked sword as I recall. Pretty boring stuff. There are activities in each mission that can increase the chances of critical rolls and better loot. One that I saw in the second play through required carrying books of magic. Of course those books just happened to take up the same slot that your health kit does. Risk versus reward. Are you good enough to get through the horde without mending your wounds just for the better chance at better loot?
If you aren’t, don’t worry. Between bouts of Skaven stomping, our intrepid heroes return to an Inn in Ubersreik that is just so beautifully done. Honestly, if I had the money I’d finance an Oculus Rift port of the game just so I can get that little bit closer to being in the Warhammer World. The Inn comes equipped with storage for your loot and a forge. If, like me, you only ever get rubbish loot… you can reforge it into something bigger and better. Bad rolls are of course a disappointment but they aren’t a barrier to newer and better weapons for your characters.
Everyone was about to move clockwise around the room for the second play test. I had to know. I had to ask
“Which one is the Dwarf?”
KILL KILL
I love Warhammer Dwarfs. I love their society, I love their viewpoint. I love the fact that playing the Dwarf, the camera view is actually further down. Skaven appeared smaller for me on the Bright Wizard, but then I got shorter. This was more of an eye to eye thing.
Bardin Goreksson is a Dwarf Ranger. For this play through he came equipped with an axe and shield a his primary weapons and the Grudge-Raker as his secondary. What’s not to love about a fantasy setting that looks at a Dwarf and says “He needs a shotgun.”?
If you can think of something not to love about that, keep it to your damn self.
Warhammer: The End Times – Vermintide is easily and without a doubt the title I am most looking forward to from Gamescom this year, so much so in fact we gave it the Most Anticipated award in our annual Gamescom Awards. It’s not even a competition in my mind. Vermintide was just fun to play. Sure we died that second time. Sure it was up to the Wood Elf to try and save the day. Sure it didn’t pan out quite that way.
None of that mattered. This was a more powerful old Warhammer world feeling than Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. This was not a passing sense of familiarity, this was Warhammer. It dripped the tone of Warhammer, it was steeped in the style of Warhammer. I could talk about the Poison Wind Globadiers. I could talk about the Packmaster dragging people off to be killed elsewhere. I could talk about that bloody Gutter Runner. They’ll have to wait till next time.
Day one, I’ll be there on the Dwarf Ranger. Sometimes the right properties and the right ways of playing in them come together and make something wonderful.
Vermintide is that, it is wonderful.
Related: GamescomA waitress pours liquor into ice cups on an ice counter at the Ice Palace in Shangri-La Hotel in Harbin, China, on January 6, 2014. Kim Kyung Hoon/Reuters Imagine not having to say no to a drink anymore because you have to drive home.
That would be great for liquor sales, which have been hit hard by drunk-driving laws in countries like China and Scotland, according to a research note by Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas and his team.
Drinking and driving should, of course, always be mutually exclusive, but the rise of car-sharing services and the development of driverless cars could shake things up.
Uber, for one, claimed that it has prevented about 1,800 drunk-driving crashes since its launch in California in July 2012, according to a blog post last January. But the evidence is mixed: A study by researchers at the University of Southern California and Oxford University found no effect from Uber on crash rates.
Regardless, the driverless-car and alcohol industries could benefit each other significantly.
Here is Morgan Stanley (emphasis added):
"Shared and autonomous vehicle technology help address the mutual exclusivity of drinking and driving in a way that can significantly enhance the growth rate of the alcohol market and on-trade sales at restaurants. The total addressable market (TAM) of the global alcohol market is ~$1.5tn today (1.14tn drinks x $1.33/drink). As our base case, we believe greater prevalence of shared mobility (i.e. ride-sharing) in the next 10 years can add 80 bps to the annual growth rate of the alcohol market (currently ~2.2%). This assumes that the joint population of drivers and those who drink consume 1 extra alcoholic beverage per week on average. In reality, this is highly dependent on the timing and telemetry of shared models. Would be drivers who reside in cities where shared mobility is well penetrated are likely to consume more than 1 additional drink per week, in our view. Beyond 2025, we believe autonomous technology can unlock an even greater TAM opportunity."
To make their case, the analysts calculated current global alcohol consumption and its monetary value, and compared that with estimated figures under the impact of car-sharing and driverless cars. They found that the booze market could get an extra $98 billion:
Morgan Stanley Research
In the base case, where the analysts assume that would-be drivers who drink will have one more drink per week by 2025, the annual alcohol-consumption growth rate could increase by 0.8 percentage points relative to the baseline. In the bull case, the 10-year compounded annual growth rate for alcohol consumption could increase by 1.88 points.
Morgan Stanley Research
Brands that sell premium beer and liquor will benefit the most from these incremental drinks, according to the note, citing examples such as Corona's parent company, Constellation Brands, British whiskey distiller Diageo, and Chinese state-owned company Kweichow Moutai.
We already saw how Americans are increasingly trading up to more expensive alcohol, a trend that Constellation CEO Rob Sands believes will continue.People who enjoy whisky are pretty adamant about their choice of ice. Which makes sense when you think about it — who wants some inferior cubes sullying up the taste of their favorite beverage? Well if you've got the right water, now you just need the right shape. Time for a CNC machine.
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TBWA\Hakuhodo, an advertising agency based in Japan, created these amazing chunks of ice to promote Japanese whisky maker, Suntory, and their "3D on the Rocks" campaign. They created the former cubes using a CNC machine, creating intricate shapes in the process including sharks, guitars, and even Batman.
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I mean, if you're going to drink any ice cube, always drink Batman.
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Head over to the "3D on the Rocks" site to learn more.
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Kevin Whipps is a writer and editor based in Phoenix, Arizona. When he's not working on one of the many projects in his queue, he's looking for fun and irreverent things online to share with his friends.There are many stories about immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, and evidence can often be found to support them, whether they are about how these countries are home to doctors and engineers who are urgently needed in Germany, or about entire village communities with no job prospects who have found their way into the German social welfare system.
The reason they come remains the enormous disparity in wealth between Germany and the residents of these countries, where workers often earn hardly more than 180 ($245) per month. And the situation is unlikely to change soon, which makes the question of how the wave of migration will play out an interesting one.
The people coming from both countries are certainly not a homogenous group. On the one hand, there are university graduates whose departures weaken their home countries. But there are also members of minority groups like the Roma, many of whom have little occupational training, or are even illiterate.
The latest political debate surrounding the issue was sparked by the European Union opening its labor market to the citizens of these two new member countries, and the question of whether their presence benefits economic development or poses a burden to the social system. But research on the matter yields varying results, and regional differences are large.
Inconclusive Statistics
Influential German weekly Die Zeit wrote that 80 percent of immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania are in jobs that require them to make social insurance contributions. This number was subsequently picked up by various other media and attributed to renowned migration researcher Klaus Bade, who headed the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration (SVR) until mid-2012.
Asked to comment, Bade has since distanced himself from that figure. He now says that 80 percent of these immigrants are working, "and of these about 46 percent are qualified and over 20 percent are highly qualified."
The SVR reports "labor-market participation" of 81.4 percent for those from Romania and Bulgaria who have come to Germany since 2007, citing a special analysis of the 2011 micro-census conducted by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis).
But citing "labor-market participation" means little -- even those who have registered as unemployed are counted as participating in the labor market. Furthermore, only 25- to 44-year-olds were considered -- the group with the highest employment rate to begin with.
'Rough Analysis'
The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) recently concluded that the employment rate for 15-to 65-year-olds who have moved to the country from Bulgaria and Romania since 2007 was at 62.6 percent in 2011. According to the DIW, the micro-census cited by the SVR is not particularly significant because "small sample sizes" permitted only "rough analysis." Nevertheless, the Institute for Employment Research concludes: "Overall Germany profits from this immigration."
But Stefan Böckler, a sociologist at the Duisburg Office for Information Logistics, disagrees. "Labor-force participation is not an indicator for a labor market integration that insures livelihoods," he argues.
Analysis of data from the Federal Employment Agency, Destatis and the cities of Duisburg and Dortmund, both of which have a particularly high population of these immigrants, showed that just 10.8 and 14.8 percent of this group respectively were working jobs in which they paid into the social insurance system. Meanwhile, some 90 percent of the Bulgarians and Romanians registered at the Federal Employment Agency's job center had not completed vocational training and therefore had little chance of entering the workforce.
More revealing statistics will only begin to emerge now that the labor market has been fully opened to Bulgarians and Romanians.Remember that image sent recently by an anonymous tipster showing two versions of the Nokia Lumia 822 nestled comfortably within Verizon's device management system? Turns out there is something cooking between the Finnish phone maker and Big Red after all. The Wall Street Journal reports that Verizon has confirmed plans involving a Nokia Corp. tie-up, with sources familiar with the deal saying that the companies have been in talks since the spring. Just exactly what it is they're working on, however, still remains a mystery. Apparently, Verizon and Nokia are playing their cards close to the vest and refusing to disclose specific details about a potential deal. Still, the betting money is on some sort of tie-up involving Nokia's Lumia line. The Windows 8 handsets have seen a deluge of news this month, mostly involving the new 920 and 820 models. Whatever Nokia's got planned, several analysts also said the company needs to act fast. With Samsung's popular Galaxy S III already out and Apple's new iPhone expected to launch soon, Nokia's new phones are expected to see some tough competition.A man tricks the entire media establishment and millions of people into thinking that something unhealthy is actually good for them with a deliberately misleading study. Worse, they now think it’s the secret to being healthy. He’s a bad person right?
But what if it was actually an attempt to illustrate the woeful prevalence of junk science and how easily it can be propagated through culture? If the man was a computer hacker who revealed a back door, we might marvel at his mastery and cleverness. If he was a whistleblower, we’d admire his courage.
Some people might be conflicted at the story of John Bohannon, who recently revealed that he’d helped dupe millions of people into believing that chocolate was healthy. He created a fake organization, orchestrated a study to show that chocolate was correlated with weight loss, published it in an open access journal, put out a fake press release, and traded it up the chain until the news appeared in several major media outlets. Now, finally, he’s exposed the inner-workings of this stunt (his piece on i09 has been read more than 835,000 times).
I think John is a hero. I think he’s made the world better (or at least more aware) by what he’s done. The only people with anything to be embarrassed about are the ones who got caught sleeping on the job. You see, it’s journalists who are supposed to protect us against these types of manipulations. They’re supposed to weed out the bad studies from the good. They’re supposed to realize that Ship Your Enemies Glitter stunts are blatant money grabs or when self-interested sources should be excluded or qualified. They should see that someone like Charles C. Johnson is exploiting the political dialog.
Yet instead of learning from something like these, outlets like the Daily Mail are rushing to cover their ass. They deny they ever fell for it. And even if they didn’t—they can’t see how much their business models and the model of almost all journalism today needlessly exposes them to such risks. Because they don’t care. They don’t want to be better or know the truth. The truth would be bad for business.
As John recently told The Washington Post, although there is plenty of blame to go around there’s one group who deserves it more than any others. “It’s the reporters. The reporters and ultimately the editors… People who are on the health science beat need to treat [what they write] like science, and that has to come from the editors. You need to talk to a source who has real scientific expertise.”
It’s clear that reporters, not only in the health space, but everywhere, have stopped caring. Well, maybe a few readers do care. To help with that, I’ve reached out to John to get a little more information on how his brilliant stunt worked and what else people should know.
So tell us how you managed to fool not only hundreds of thousands of people and media outlets, but fooled them with something that is on its face, ridiculous?
Well, did it really seem ridiculous that chocolate can help you lose weight? Compared to the diet headlines you can read every day, it seemed like a fairly normal claim. And that’s the problem! Somehow we’ve all decided that the science of nutrition doesn’t matter.
What gave you the idea—any inspirations you can tell us about? Did you actually think you could pull it off? Was it exhilarating, scary, did you feel guilty? Tell us your thought process.
I got a call out of the blue in December from Peter Onneken, a German television reporter. It was all his brilliant idea: Do a really bad but authentic scientific study of chocolate and weight loss, then build a media campaign around it. I was skeptical that any of my journalist colleagues would take the bait. But take it they did.
Was there one outlet or channel that you feel like did more to propagate the narrative more than any others?
A huge thank you must go out to the Daily Mail. They even tried to weasel out of it. One of their PR people sent me and NPR an email implying that they hadn’t in fact taken the bait, since we accidentally used a screen shot of the wrong Daily Mail story. (It was one of their other stories about the miraculous health benefits of eating chocolate, if you can believe it.) They were clearly hoping that we would just quietly remove the screen shot and let them off the hook. To my knowledge, they have printed no retraction, correction, or clarification. Here is their story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3018945/New-study-reveals-eating-chocolate-doesn-t-affect-Body-Mass-Index-help-LOSE-weight.html
Some people might say that what you did was unfair or potentially harmful (this is a criticism I got with my stunts). Have got heard that at all? I believe you did everyone a favor by pointing out an obvious flaw in the system—it’s up to the reporters responsible to make changes around this information. What do you think?
It is true that these kinds of investigations pose an ethical dilemma. We must weigh the possible benefits against the possible harms. In this case, it is the risk of making some people eat a chocolate bar and embarrassing some bad journalists versus promoting skepticism about diet claims and showing that scientific studies can get misleading results when they don’t understand statistics. I’ll leave it to your readers to decide for themselves.
With that in mind, what do you think the solution is? What do we have to change?
The next time you read a news story that seems to be giving you clear diet advice to lose weight, you should get angry and write to the editor. We have a better understanding of why stars sometimes blow up than why people become obese. This is hard science, not “lifestyle” fodder.
You did this with something that I do think is relatively harmless and you did come clean. Do you think that the same tactics or manipulation could be used more nefariously? Is that what’s happening?
I think all of the diet-nutrition-fitness media is corrupt. It’s bad science and worse journalism, all driven by companies selling rubbish. Oh sorry, you weren’t talking about mainstream media?
Now that you’ve come clean and revealed the bogus facts behind the story—do you think the original narrative is going to die or keep going like some sort of zombie? Have you seen the corrections you were hoping for?
I’ve seen one and only one real correction.
Ryan Holiday is the best-selling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Ryan is an editor-at-large for the Observer, and he lives in Austin, Texas.
He’s also put together this list of 15 books that you’ve probably never heard of that will alter your worldview, help you excel at your career and teach you how to live a better life.
THE HUNGER GAMES: WHY JUICES CLEANSES, THE GLUTEN-FREE CRAZE AND ORGANIC EVERYTHING ARE OVERRATEDIf you liked the scene in Batman v Superman where Wonder Woman watched YouTube videos about the future members of the Justice League, you'll love Suicide Squad.
Instead of just one scene of plot-stopping fan service, Suicide Squad delivers an entire first act of soul-deadening exposition. The movie spends 20 story-free minutes with a Machiavellian bureaucrat while she sits in a restaurant discussing a top secret personnel file. Here is Deadshot, the world’s greatest assassin; this is Harley Quinn, the Joker’s psychotic girlfriend. Oh and have you heard about Captain Boomerang? And on and on and on.
Director David Ayer tries to liven things up with a couple of flashy DC cameos and lots of iconic rock songs on the soundtrack. But that’s just the proverbial lipstick on the dead pig that Jared Leto sent to his co-stars to prove his Method bona fides as the Joker. This opening sequence has all the excitement of a mildly contentious HR meeting, and the movie gets no better from there. Bland, boring, and sometimes borderline incoherent, Suicide Squad is a disappointing disaster.
The bureaucrat is named Amanda Waller ( Viola Davis, looking sad and a little lost). She wants to assemble a team of the worst villains on the planet to defend America the next time a Superman-type arrives and threatens humanity. Violent sociopaths seem like a poor choice to save the world, but Waller intends to keep them in line by Snake Plisskening their cooperation with implanted nanite bombs, and by bringing in a super soldier named Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) to lead them in battle. Does this sound like a terrible plan? That’s because it’s a terrible plan. And fittingly, it immediately backfires. (Without spoiling too much, the team is to blame for the crisis that necessitates its first mission.)
Besides Will Smith ’s Deadshot, a hitman with perfect aim and a daughter he misses, Margot Robbie ’s Harley Quinn, a deranged killer who enjoys bludgeoning people to death while not wearing pants, and Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang, an amoral Aussie with razor-edged boomerangs for weapons, the Squad includes El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), a remorseful gangster with the ability to spew fire, Katana (Karen Fukuhara), a martial artist with a magical sword, Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) an ancient witch in possession of a meek scientist, and Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), whose name pretty much says it all. By the time Waller gets White House approval for her “Task Force X,” their services are required to resolve a crisis in fictional Midway City.
So much time is spent explaining each Suicide Squad character’s backstory that there’s almost no room for an actual story amidst the subsequent onslaught of wisecracks and bloodless, PG-13 action. But few of the jokes land and the Squad’s main opponents are waves of literally faceless enemies with no goals or motivation. And even as Suicide Squad ramps up to its big second act, it keeps shoving more characters onto the team, including one member who shows up randomly halfway through the movie just so they can be killed a couple minutes later.
On paper, Ayer makes a lot of sense with this material. As the director of movies like Sabotage, Fury, and the underrated End of Watch, he knows a thing or two about compelling antiheroes and he has a knack for exploring the interpersonal dynamics in military and police units. Beyond the film’s fetishization of gun violence, though, Suicide Squad bears little of Ayer’s authorial stamp. The characters themselves have some personality (particularly Robbie’s spunky Harley Quinn), but the rest of the movie has almost none.
Despite the bright and colorful opening and closing titles, the cinematography by Roman Vasyanov is dark and dingy. The characters make inexplicable decisions and then reverse themselves at random. The locations are all interchangeable backlot streets and sets. Nothing of consequence happens until the movie’s climax, and when it does it might steal even more plot points from the original Ghostbusters than Paul Feig’s remake. Say what you will about Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman, but at least that movie had a point-of-view and some distinctive visual panache. Suicide Squad is yet another movie about destroying a big glowing beam of energy in the sky. The final battle takes place in a backlit cloud. It’s like watching people fight in a steam room through foggy glasses.
Ayer’s construction is as ill-conceived as Waller’s. Suicide Squad begins with introductions for Smith and Robbie, then gives them each another intro as part of Waller’s endless briefing, and then Smith is given a third chance to show just how good he is at shooting people in a scene at a prison shooting range. Sure, it’s kind of fun to watch Will Smith act like a remorseless badass, but how many times do we have to be shown the same information?
Characters come and go, as do several subplots. (Whatever happened to Ike Barinholtz’s guard?) A character needs to be rescued, then gets rescued, then immediately gets kidnapped and must be rescued again. Three totally different helicopters get shot out of the |
not: do the politicians or the press feel happy with what we get? It's: are we really protecting people who have been caught up and absolutely thrown to the wolves by this process. That's what the test is." (Official Transcript, 14 June 2011, page 57-8)
When it comes to this "test", you will be aware that the victims, after reflecting on the evidence put before the inquiry in all its modules, made a submission which gives our view on the proposal for continued self-regulation put forward on behalf of some in the press by Lord Hunt and Lord Black (the 'Hunt/Black' plan). As stated in this submission (pdf), we do not believe these proposals are satisfactory in themselves, that they meet the needs of the victims, or that they will restore public trust. The submission states:
"The Module 4 CPVs have considered the submissions and evidence of Lord Hunt and Lord Black [to improve self-regulation]. The Module 4 CPVs all agree that the proposal advocated by Lord(s) Hunt and Black for a new contractual self-regulatory body would not be a satisfactory solution. The proposal is considered to be an insufficiently clean break from the current PCC and the failings associated with that organisation. In the event that this system was established, it is anticipated by the Module 4 CPVs that complainants would be likely to prefer court proceedings as a forum for seeking redress."
We have therefore been alarmed and distressed by the widespread reports in the press (The Times, 31 August 2012), supported by comments made by senior members of your party, that you have already made up your mind and that you were "preparing to reject statutory intervention in the regulation of the press, even if it is strongly recommended by Lord Justice Leveson"; and that the "newspaper industry will be given another chance to improve self-regulation".
We were also frustrated to see that your own Head of Communications, asked to reject the assertions in these stories, refused to do so, stating only that the reports were "speculation". In the absence of rebuttal from you or your office, it is noteworthy that the Times (5 September 2012) felt able to repeat the story the following week, stating: "David Cameron is likely to reject statutory intervention in regulation of the press even if it is recommended by Lord Justice Leveson."
After we reminded the press and your office that the victims rejected continued self-regulation of the press with no statutory back-stop, and of what you had said in July under oath at the inquiry ("…the test of all this. It's not: do the politicians or the press feel happy with what we get? It's: are we really protecting people who have been caught up and absolutely thrown to the wolves by this process. That's what the test is"). The Times reported (5 September 2012) that "a well-placed source said Mr Cameron's words had been misinterpreted and he had not intended to give a veto to any particular victims over the new system of regulation".
It is highly regrettable to us that these articles, and supporting comments from senior Conservative party figures, have sought to undermine the work of the inquiry and to threaten any recommendations it may make for effective regulation of the industry. We are disappointed that you have so far not contradicted these articles, and therefore give the impression that you have, indeed, already decided to reject the recommendations of the inquiry which you set up, even before they are even submitted. We, the victims, would consider such a rejection to be a betrayal of us and of your previous commitments.
We therefore seek your reassurance that:
1 Contrary to the reports which we refer to above, you will consider the recommendations of Lord Justice Leveson with an open mind;
2 You have not already decided in favour of a proposal for continued self-regulation – which we believe to be unsatisfactory;
3 You will proceed on a cross-party basis;
4 That you stand by what you said at the inquiry.
To remind you once again: you said that the test of the future system of press regulation is not whether it suits the politicians or their friends in the press, but rather the public interest – including the need of members of society to be free from illegal and unethical press practices. Do we have those reassurances?
We look forward to hearing from you as a matter of urgency so that our minds can be put at rest and so that the public in general may know that your position on this vital matter has not changed.
Yours sincerely,
Charlotte Church
Jacqui Hames
James and Margaret Watson
Christopher Jefferies
Mark Covell
Paul Dadge
JK Rowling
Prof John Tulloch
Ian Hurst
Jane Winter
Joan Hammell
Mary-Ellen Field
HKJ (friend of politician who gave evidence anonymously)
John Anderson
Joan Smith
Ben Jackson
Graham Shear
David Archer
Trevor Akester
Tom Rowland
Mark Thomson
Brian Paddick
Father Richard Reardon
Michelle Milburn
Zoe Margolis
Patricia Bernal
Tricia Cooklin
Sally King
Andrew King
Louise Glass
Adam Lancelot
Denise Anderson
Stephen Toze
Anne Lee
Amanda Ramsey
Major Mark Cann
Lissa Gibbons
Jennifer Evans
Charlotte Harris
Noel Whelan
Patrick Watters
Nicola Smith
Sheryl Gascoigne
Simon Hughes
Max Mosley
Claire Ward
Hugh Grant
Eimear Cook
Christopher Eccleston
Steve Coogan
Alex Best
Nicola Duffett
Duncan Foster
Jude Law
Lee Chapman
Leslie Ash
James Burdge
Stephen Kelly
Sheila ColemanYou have been reading a lot from me on various Yoga poses good for the spine or belly or for pregnant ladies and what not. In every other post on Yoga poses, poor Blood Pressure (B.P) patients find a helpless mention in the contraindication section. So here is another post to make up for what they go through.
This post is dedicated to all the B.P. patients-cum-readers who wish to practice Yoga, but are unable to do so owing to the restrictions that come with certain Yoga poses.
Below is a list of top 10 poses that are absolutely safe for B.P. patients and have a couple of extra advantages other than just treating the blood pressure issue that they face:
Half Spinal Twist
Sanskrit Name: Ardha Matsyendrasana
Steps
Place one foot on the floor on the outer side of the opposite leg and twist the torso towards the top leg. Bend the bottom leg and keep the foot outside the opposite hip. Catch hold of either foot with your hands.
Associated benefits: Helps you get rid of side flab and improves digestion
Wind Relieving Pose
Sanskrit Name: Pavanmuktasana
Steps
Lie down supine on the floor. Press your knees and thighs against your chest and tummy.
Associated benefits: Facilitates good bowel movement and stretches lower back
Cobra Pose
Sanskrit Name: Bhujangasana
Steps
Start from the prone position, that is, lie on the floor facing downwards. Get onto your hands and lift up your chest, keeping the rest of the body as it was.
Associated benefits: Relieves from stress and fatigue while firming up the buttocks
Locust or Grasshopper Pose
Sanskrit Name: Shalabhasana
Steps
Start with the prone position on the floor. Use the strength of the upper and the middle back to lift up your legs as high as possible so as to form the shape of a locust.
Associated benefits: Increases flexibility of the body and helps develop stamina
Bow Pose
Sanskrit Name: Dhanurasana
Steps
Lie down on the floor in prone position. Catch hold of your feet and lift up the legs so as to form the shape of a bow.
Associated benefits: Helps lose weight and is effective in curing respiratory disorders like asthma
Child’s Pose
Sanskrit Name: Balasana
Steps
Kneel down on the floor and rest your buttocks on your feet. Now bend down in a fetal position and face the floor. Put your arms either to your sides or extend them in front of you. The forehead should touch the ground and the chest can go in between the knees.
Associated benefits: Releases tension from the back and helps get rid of belly fat
Seated Forward Bend
Sanskrit Name: Paschimottanasana
Steps
Sit on the floor and spread out your legs flat in front. Bend forward from the hips, such that the trunk becomes parallel to the legs. The head should be placed between the legs.
Associated benefits: Tones abdominal area and balances menstrual cycle in women
Cat Pose
Sanskrit Name: Marjarasana
Steps
Get on all your fours with your thighs straight and hands perpendicular to the ground. Inhale and raise up your head back while pushing down your navel. Exhale and curve out your spine towards the sky and push your head inwards.
Associated benefits: Increases blood circulation in the body and tones back muscles
Diamond Pose
Sanskrit Name: Vajrasana
Steps
Sit flat on the floor and fold up your legs as illustrated. Rest your palms on your knees and practice breathing exercises.
Associated benefits: Helps cure acidity and urinary tract problems while facilitating smooth digestion
Corpse Pose
Sanskrit Name: Savasana
Steps
Lie supine on the floor and spread your arms to your sides. Keep the legs wide apart, close your eyes and breathe slowly and deeply. Consciously focus on each body part and with each round of breath think that a specific body part is getting relaxed.
Associated benefits: Cures insomnia and is beneficial for those suffering from neurological disorders and diabetes
Check out my last post on how 8 minutes of yoga practice can give you 8 hours of great sleep.
Last updated: 17th July 2014
Next Update: 17th Sept 2014There have been two signs that Riyadh’s grip over its neighbourhood is loosening.
The first was a long range missile which the Houthis fired at Jeddah airport, west of Mecca. The second was the election of Michel Aoun as Lebanese president, which was guaranteed by the support of Saad Hariri, the businessmen the Saudis once bankrolled. Aoun is backed by Hezbollah and Damascus, the power he fought as a general.
Both are a form of blowback to the Saudi Kingdom. Each Arab neighbour has its own story to tell about the wild swings of a weather vein which goes by the name of foreign policy in Riyadh. In that time, they made three strategic blunders.
Take Iraq. Saudi gave Saddam $25bn in low interest loans to fight his eight year war with Iran. In 1990, two years after the war ended, Saddam was debt-ridden and Riyadh and Kuwait undermined him by refusing to lower oil production, one of the reasons for the invasion of Kuwait. They further paid $30bn to the US for the First Iraq War in 1991.
In 2003, the Kingdom played it both ways. The then Crown Prince Abdullah warned Bush about the consequences of invading Iraq and the Saudi foreign minister said Saudi would not allow its bases to be used. In practise, the opposite happened. Saudi land and military bases became essential for coalition forces.
The toppling of Saddam, de-Baathification and the power vacuum it created turned into an invitation on a silver platter for Iran. It started as a provider of welfare services to the Shia-dominated south. It developed into a major political sponsor, and eventually became a military power controlling its own proxy Shia militia.
Take Yemen. For decades, Saudi’s man in Yemen was its dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose life Saudi doctors saved when he was critically burned in a bomb attack. As I reported at the time, the Saudis, along with the Emiratis, made contact with the Houthis and encouraged them to advance on the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
The plan was to provoke a battle with Islah, the Islamists in Yemen. It backfired spectacularly as the Houthis marched into Sanaa unopposed and advanced onto Aden. Only then did the Saudis realise the mistake they had made in providing a new opening for Iran. They were left no few other options.
The result is a Saudi bombing campaign that has levelled the country, but so far failed to recapture Sanaa, or prevent a missile being fired at Jeddah or Mecca.
Take Egypt. There, the late King Abdullah can not be blamed for failing to take a strategic choice. He did. He decided to counter the Egyptian revolution and it was the biggest mistake Saudi Arabia has made.
Along with the Emiratis and Kuwaitis, the Saudis have spent over $50bn on a man who has failed to stabilise Egypt and is now courting the Saudi enemy, Iran. From the get go, his relationship with Saudi was about hard cash. Sisi wavered for three months in 2013 about whether to betray his president Mohamed Morsi.
He only did so, as a source told me and as I have previously reported, after he got the promise of $12bn from the Gulf States. What return have the Saudis got for their money?
Trading places
The current Saudi-Egypt spat can be overplayed. Some argue the Saudis will be loathe to abandon Sisi because they have invested so heavily in him.
As it stands though, Egypt has failed to provide the Saudis with troops for Yemen and voted for a Russian draft resolution on Aleppo which angered the Saudis. Egypt entered the talks in Switzerland, after the request of Iran to counter balance countries opposed to the Syrian regime, and has opened links with Hezbollah and the Houthis.
Egyptian diplomats say the purpose is to mediate an end to the war in Yemen, and support the Syrian state in Aleppo. As a result, however, Riyadh, has suspended 700,000 tonnes of oil products a month to Egypt.
As a result of all three blunders, Iran and Saudi Arabia have traded places. While Iran looked isolated before the Iraq wars, and the Saudis enjoyed influence in the region, Saudi Arabia is now encircled in conflict and by collapsing states. The kingdom has got war to the north and south.
Its arch foe, Iran is in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, boasting about controlling four Arab capitals. Saudi has spent tens of billions on its foreign interventions and the region is less stable than ever before. The crisis in Sunni leadership looms as large as ever, as millions are forced to leave cities for the refugee camps, or flee abroad. No one protects them.
Temporary ally, strategic fumbles
The internal stability of Saudi is also affected. It used to be based on a crude pact: “We pay you and you shut up.” After the collapse of the price of oil, and the lifting of some state subsidies, Saudis are inverting the unspoken maxim by asking themselves: “If the state can not pay us, why should we shut up?”
The kingdom considers itself a leader for the Sunni Arab world. To lead you need a vision, not only for yourself or your ruling family, but for your people. Saudi can not provide one.
Unlike Iran, Saudi has not been patiently and quietly been building its network of local allies. It may spell disaster for Aleppo or Mosul, as its efforts lead to sectarian division, but Iran can not be faulted for lacking a plan. It seeks to change geopolitical control and ethnic composition of the region. It hopes to dominate the area from Iran to the Mediterranean.
For this end, Iran creates long term strategic allies. The alliances Saudi makes are all temporary, either with states of their leaders, as Lebanon showed this week.
When Saudi had a strategic choice to make, it made the wrong one. That choice was presented by the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Mohamed Morsi was clear enough in his offer to Saudi Arabia, the destination of his first foreign visit in his one year in office.
He said: “I hereby say that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is in need of the bigger sister Egypt and great Egypt is in need of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. If these two partners agreed, if the two countries agreed, if the two peoples agreed, there will be a true renaissance in all the Arab (world) and even across the Muslim (world). God-willing this will happen. If the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the guardian of the Sunni, mainstream and moderate project, the project of the Sunni majority, then Egypt is the protector of this project.”
Boons and busts
King Abdullah had already made his mind up. He reacted to the toppling of his ally Hosni Mubarak personally, by imagining himself in Mubarak’s shoes. From 3 July 2013 until Abdullah’s death last year, political Islam became the strategic threat to the Kingdom.
It was a fatal mistake. The Arab uprisings could have been an opportunity for the Saudis. Morsi offered a pact in which Saudi Arabia would be in the vanguard of the new Arab status quo while Egypt would act its protector. This is exactly what the Saudis need now and what Sisi can not deliver.
Crushing political Islam opened up the space for the Islamic State (IS) group. The Sinai graduated from a local to a regional problem. For the kingdom, an almost permanent state of war has been an economic disaster, although a boon to arms suppliers like BAE Systems.
After the US and China, Saudi is the world’s third largest military spender. It spends $56bn, 25 percent of its budget. $1.14bn of this has gone straight into the coffers of BAE for the delivery of Eurofighter Typhoon jet. It is hard to believe, from the gruesome bombing campaign in Yemen, but Saudi has one of the best funded, state-of-the-art military forces in the region.
America was another destination for Saudi funds. These state assets are now in jeopardy with passing of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) which makes it easier for the US victims of 9/11 to take civil action in the US courts against the Kingdom. I understand from sources that the UAE has already withdrawn its assets from the US. Once again, the Saudis have been caught napping and are faced with a fire sale of their assets at bargain basement prices.
Imagine what could have happened if Saudi had poured this money into the region, if it had spent this money supporting democratically elected governments in Egypt and Yemen – no matter who won them.
Egypt by now would have been well into its democratic transition. The threat of Saleh and Houthis would have receded. There still would have been an insurgency in Sinai, but it would have less virulent. Islamists throughout the Arab world would have had a non-violent and successful model to follow. Support for the jihadists would have waned, as it had already begun to do in the aftermath of the January 2011 revolution.
Saudi’s claim to be the banker of the Arab World, to become to the region what Germany became to Europe, would by now be uncontested. The royal family would be well placed to start the process of political reform at home, increasing political transparency, holding elections, and turning itself into a constitutional monarchy.
It would not have lost its wealth, but nor would it be in the position it is today of demanding that Saudis tighten their belts, while the princes loosen theirs.
This article was first published by Middle East Eye
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.The Detection Club was formed in 1930 by a group of British mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Morrison, Hugh Walpole, John Rhode, Jessie Rickard, Baroness Emma Orczy, R. Austin Freeman, G. D. H. Cole, Margaret Cole, E. C. Bentley, Henry Wade, and H. C. Bailey. Anthony Berkeley was instrumental in setting up the club, and the first president was G. K. Chesterton. There was a fanciful initiation ritual with an oath probably written by either Chesterton or Sayers, and the club held regular dinner meetings in London.
Guidelines [ edit ]
In addition to meeting for dinners and helping each other with technical aspects in their individual writings, the members of the club agreed to adhere to Knox's Commandments in their writing to give the reader a fair chance at guessing the guilty party. These fair-play "rules" were summarised by one of the members, Ronald Knox, in an introduction to an anthology of detective stories. They were never intended as more than guidelines, and not all the members took them seriously. The first American member (though then living in the UK) was John Dickson Carr, elected in 1936.
The club continues to exist, although the fair-play rules have been considerably relaxed.
A number of works were published under the club's sponsorship; most of these were written by multiple members of the club, each contributing one or more chapters in turn. In the case of The Floating Admiral, each author also provided a sealed "solution" to the mystery as he or she had written it, including the previous chapters. This was done to prevent a writer from adding impossible complications with no reasonable solution in mind. The various partial solutions were published as part of the final book.
The oath [ edit ]
Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?[1]
Presidents [ edit ]
Lord Gorell shared the presidency with Agatha Christie, who only agreed to accept the role if a co-president was appointed to conduct the club's proceedings.[4]
Publications [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]The new centrist government under President Emmanuel Macron has warned it will take a tougher line on economic migrants (AFP Photo/bertrand GUAY)
Paris (AFP) - French police moved out around 2,000 migrants from a makeshift camp in an area north of Paris on Friday, the 35th evacuation operation in two years in the capital.
A similar roundup of the mostly Afghan and African migrants around the Porte de la Chapelle area in July saw 2,800 moved from the streets into temporary accommodation.
The new centrist government under President Emmanuel Macron has promised improved procedures and new resources for genuine asylum seekers, but has warned it will take a tougher line on economic migrants.
"It's a new operation because everyone will undergo an administrative check and will then be sorted based on their situation," said a senior Paris police officer, Yann Drouet.
Shortly after daybreak, around 30 buses were brought in to move out the migrants, many of whom were ready waiting with small backpacks.
"It's hard, really hard, especially when it rains and at night when it's cold," said Rachid, a migrant in his twenties from Sudan who said he had been sleeping rough for 21 days.Photo: Phil McCarten/Reuters/Corbis
On the latest season of Louie, Pamela (Pamela Adlon) delivers her first line — “Hi, stupid asshole” — right after literally kicking our antihero in the ass. “Why are you so mean to me?” he asks a few episodes later. “Why do you like it?” she replies. Louis CK and Adlon — an Emmy-winner for voicing 13-year-old Bobby on King of the Hill — previously shared acidic repartee as spouses on the series Lucky Louie, which HBO canceled in 2006 after one season (sample plot: Louie ruins a romantic weekend by calling his wife the C word). Before reuniting with CK for Louie, where she’s also a consulting producer, Adlon began a seven-season run as bikini waxer Marcy Runkle on Californication, which concluded with Sunday night’s series finale. We spoke with Adlon about the Louie scene that made us cringe, bar-hopping with Blondie, and reading porn penned by her dad.
It’s been four seasons, and I still can’t decide if I even like Pamela.
Yeah, when we were fleshing out the season and he told me I threw away his furniture, I was like, Okay now, she’s like a monster! A crazy person would throw away somebody’s furniture. [Laughs.]
Do you like her? Can you sell us on liking her?
It’s always been that she’s got a guard up for some reason, ever since season one. I think that she’s got so many good traits that people forget about, like [in season two] when they went into that apartment and I saw the old man in his underwear and I made him an egg. Or “Pamela” did. [Laughs.] No, no — I made the egg.
I did forget about that.
I think she’s a really interesting person. It’s funny reading the stuff on the internet — Louis and I have been talking about this recap culture and how people just, you know, start a big conversation while a season of television is running. All these fucking recaps, they’re crazy. It’s just the temperature of where social media is at now. A few episodes back on Californication, people in the first time zone watched one of the episodes, and then it’s all over Twitter, people going, “Karen’s alive!” And I’m like, “You guys are ruining it!” I love the conversation — I think it’s wonderful — I just think people are premature-ejaculating their opinions. I liken it to reading a book, and you’re halfway through and you put it down, and you say, “This is what happened in the book so far, and you know what? If this doesn’t happen I’m going to be so upset.” You know what I mean?
Absolutely.
Or being halfway through a movie and doing half a review. And the fact people were talking about, Did Louie try to rape Pamela? Was that a rape? Or calling it rape straight-out, which was nuts, because I never saw it like that, because they had this kind of over-the-edge connection and relationship. They do a push-me/pull-me thing. I know that one thing that motivates Louis and drives him is characters that don’t explain why they do what they do. You just see things happen and play out, and you don’t get a neat little button at the end of it. Pamela and Louie are both as flawed as the next person, it’s not cut and dry.
Compare your personality to your character.
I’m more of somebody who’ll bend over backwards for people and, you know, wait at the back of the line until everybody’s taken care of. That’s really my nature. I’m not nearly as bold as Pamela, but I relate to a lot of the stuff. And also, she’s just being a very pure version of herself and a modern woman. She’s a single mom and she’s dealing with, like, her guy who moved to Europe and all this kind of stuff and it’s just complicated.
Back to the “rape” scene: That definitely made me uncomfortable. On the page, that scene couldn’t have had as much tension as what you two ultimately brought to it.
That’s something that Louis came up with on his own, and when I read it I was dying laughing, because in the script he said, “Louie approaches her closing off the ring” — which is like a boxing terminology — and then he said, “and she’s holding on to the walls and furniture like a cartoon cat.” So when I read it, it read hilariously. Then on the day that we were shooting it, I was like, “Let’s really get into it,” and I grabbed the dresser and all of that. And then at a certain point, I looked at him and I said, “Somebody might get mad.” [Laughs.] But, you know, people are saying that he forced the kiss on me at the end in the doorway, but actually, I’m standing there and he said, “We’re romantic and I know you want to do something with me so I’m going to kiss you now.” And I’m sitting there and I go, “Okay, maybe.” But — I don’t know. I certainly am an advocate for women’s rights and everything. I have three daughters.
And he has two.
The notion that we’re being careless and putting some kind of dangerous message out is offensive to me. But I can’t help what people feel and what reaction they give to things. I said something to Louis at the beginning of this season, which was that when we’re doing stuff, more than going for a laugh or anything — or a reaction — we’re going for a feeling. If we come up with something and we both go, Oh my God, that’s amazing, we know that we’re making a feeling that people are going to respond to and really like. The bathtub scene was something that, you know, I was in my tub one day, and I was like, Oh, God, I know what has to happen — we have to take a bath together. We’ve gotta get in the tub, we owe it to everybody. [Laughs.]
That was your idea?
Yeah, the tub, the water gushing over and everything. And Louis was dying, he was like, Oh my God. And we knew that that was going to make a feeling, and I never knew how it was going to translate. And when I watched the episode all cut together — personally, those last two episodes — I can’t stop giggling and smiling throughout both of them.
Was it Louis’s idea to bare his butt in front of the camera?
[Laughs.] He’s not afraid of doing that kind of stuff. He did it in Lucky Louie.
There was some full-frontal male nudity on that show. Do you think the Louie character is really in love with your character, or is that kind of like a knee-jerk reaction to how things ended abruptly with Amia?
I really think that they have feelings for each other, yeah. I feel like they both love each other, it’s just that he’s able to say it and Pamela isn’t. And I think that because of what happened with Amia — like for everybody who gets into a relationship, rebound or not — people really want a place that they can go and know that they can get something back.
Does Pamela have a job?
Um [laughs], hmm. We were talking about that. I guess — I don’t really know. I can’t say, I have no comment right now [Laughs.]
And to clarify, her son is named Sir, S-i-r?
It’s spelled like S-E-R-G. I always thought it would be funny if I called my son “Sir.” Like calling your daughter “Ma’am,” or something like that.
It’s fun watching you on shows that can be so subversive and kinky, partly because your career couldn’t have started off in a more wholesome way, with The Facts of Life and Grease 2 and 21 Jump Street. Have your kids watched all those clips on YouTube?
Yeah, they’re aware of all that stuff. My oldest daughter and I recently found some clips from 21 Jump Street [she played a psychic teenager who predicts disaster], and we were dying. It’s a hilarious part of my past, all the sitcoms I did in the ‘80s. And then all the animation — animation is amazing. It’s really been great. I’ve always played kind of darker characters, like orphans, drug dealers, thieves, street rats. But most of the time they have a good heart.
What do remember about acting alongside Debbie Harry in Wiseguy?
[Shrieks] Oh my God, that’s the best question ever! Are you kidding me? I was like 20 or 21 — but that was like the greatest. For me? That time was so awesome. It was like a whole bunch of us going back and forth from L.A., doing a bunch of shows in Canada. And then to be on this show with Debbie fucking Harry. I remember one night [in Vancouver], she and I went out to a club called Heartbreak. We were in there for about one minute, and they started playing “Heart of Glass,” and she started moving her head and she turned to me and said [accented], “That sounds really good in here,” with this thick Brooklyn accent. But she was amazing. I was in awe of watching with her and with Paul McCrane, who I worshipped from the original Fame movie, and Glenn Frey and Paul Winfield and Patti D’Arbanville and Deidre Hall. Tim Curry — I was dying over Tim Curry. Are you kidding me? That was one of my greatest. I loved that. God, that was good.
On WTF With Marc Maron, you talked about how your dad wrote and produced several classic TV shows (Chico and the Man, The Love Boat) but also — using pseudonyms — wrote softcore-porn novels. Have you read any of his books?
Oh, yeah, I have a couple [laughs]. One is called Super Doll and one is called Turn the Other Sheik, like “The Sheik of Araby.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa — your dad wrote book called Super Doll, and on Californiacation a very realistic sex doll was made in your likeness?
Yeah. [Laughs.] It’s pretty funny.A former police community support officer has been jailed for 24 years for raping two young girls after one of the children had a flashback when another officer made a routine school visit.
Peter Bunyan, 43, from Penzance in Cornwall, was convicted of raping and sexually assaulting the girls when they were aged between three and six. One of the girls remembers him wearing at least some of his police uniform when he attacked her.
Bunyan, formerly a PCSO in Camborne and Redruth, was previously jailed for having sex while on duty and for using police computers to collect data about vulnerable women.
A jury at Truro crown court found Bunyan guilty on Monday of three counts of rape and one of sexual assault between 2005 and 2009. He was found not guilty of one charge of rape against one of the girls. Bunyan had denied the allegations.
The jury heard it was only when one of the girls had a police officer visit her school that her memory was triggered and she began to piece together what happened before confiding in family members and school staff.
Medical examinations carried out following the allegations suggested both the girls had suffered injuries that suggested they had been sexually abused.
Sentencing Bunyan, judge Simon Carr said: “You assaulted them in a way that they would stay quiet.... Both of the victims have since spoken of the pain they were in during and after the ordeal.
“Both of the girls are struggling to come to terms with what happened to them and the utter devastation caused by your actions. The victims have also since self-harmed as a way of coming to terms with it all.”
An NSPCC spokesman said: “Bunyan is a sexual predator who is now thankfully behind bars. His appalling crimes robbed his defenceless victims of their childhood and could have a lasting impact well into their adult years.
“No child should ever have to experience what the victims went through. It is vital anyone affected can get the support they need rather than suffer in silence, as sadly so many do.”
In 2013 at Taunton crown court, Bunyan was found guilty of misconduct in a public office.
He had neglected his duties by turning his police radio down on shifts before having sex with women and treated police computers “as a dating agency” by using them to perform background checks on women.ANALYSIS/OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — Another debate, another debacle for America’s media.
In the runup to the second presidential debate, CNN’s Candy Crowley declared that she would not just be a “fly on the wall” as she played the tiny role of moderator, that she would step in whenever she chose to say, “Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?”
And boy did she, cutting off Republican Mitt Romney repeatedly and often throwing the floor to President Obama with an open “let me give the president a chance here.”
More, she alone decided the topics for the debate, picking questions from the 80 so-called “undecided” voters chosen by the Gallup polling organization. Her selections were tailor-made for Mr. Obama — Mitt Romney’s tax plan, women’s rights and contraception, outsourcing, immigration, the Libya debacle (which gave Mr. Obama to finally say that the buck stops with him, not, as Hillary Clinton said, with her).
She even chose this question, directed to both men: “I do attribute much of America’s economic and international problems to the failings and missteps of the Bush administration. Since both of you are Republicans, I fear the return to the policies of those years should you win this election. What is the biggest difference between you and George W. Bush, and how do you differentiate yourself from George W. Bush?”
Ms. Crowley, who called Mr. Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as running mate a “ticket death wish,” asserted her unilateral power at the outset, telling the audience before the cameras went on that she planned to “give the debate direction and ensure the candidates give answers to the questions.”
After both candidates answered Question One, she blurted: “Let me get a more immediate answer” — whatever that means. But when Mr. Romney sought to correct falsehoods told by the president, she cut him off: “We have all these folks here.” In the end, Mr. Obama would get 9 percent more time.
At Question Two, Mr. Obama, asked by Mr. Romney how much he had cut federal oil permits, took over the floor — with Ms. Crowley’s silent approval. “Here’s what happened,” he said as he filibustered for a full minute. Mr. Romney sought to get the last word — as the president had the question before — but the moderator shut him down: “It’ doesn’t quite work like that.”
When Mr. Romney sought to counter Mr. Obama’s assertion after Question Three, Ms. Crowley again cut him off: “Before we get into a vast array….” she said before asking a completely different question.
The next question was pure Obama — workplace inequality (the president mention at every stop his Lily Ledbetter legislation). But the query gave him the platform to demand Americans pay for contraception for all women, saying the governor “feels comfortable having politicians in Washington decide the health care choices that women are making.”
For the record, Mr. Obama spoke for two minutes, then Mr. Romney, then Mr. Obama again. Ms. Crowley then rushed into the next question.
When the immigration question came up, both candidates gave their answers. Then the moderator once again butted in, ordering Mr. Romney to “speak to the idea of self-deportation.”
By then, Mr. Romney had had enough, and talked over her demands. “No, let — let — let me go back and speak to the points the president |
important additions was made to the software bundle under the project titled “Usability of Special Characters”, and these new features will be made available in the version 6.0 of LibreOffice (Release Notes for 6.0). Here is a glimpse of what the users will be receiving in the new update.
Note: Please zoom-in the web page or open the GIF’s in the new tab if the character grid is not correctly visible.
‣ Search functionality via generic code point name
Glyph name properties have been introduced to LibreOffice using the API provided by International Components for Unicode (ICU). The program identifies glyphs according to their names provided by ICU and then, the search results are displayed. There’s a display label which is dedicated to glyph’s Unicode name.
‣ Inter-font dynamic glyph search
As simple as it could be made, a user can now type the name of the glyph and scroll between fonts until the desired results are shown.
‣ Recently Used Characters and Favorite Characters
‣ Toolbar Dropdown control for Quick Access!
In pursuance of providing quick access to the above Recent and Favorite character list, a toolbar dropdown control has been developed. It is supposed to replace the current toolbar button which opens the special character dialog in the currently circulated LibreOffice 5.3.
The GIF below is an example of how easy a user can find the desired symbols and can pin it for quick access in future.
‣ Context-menu and Mouse click controls for easier interaction
Link to the major patch submissions:
‣ Glyph View and Recent Characters Control in Special Characters dialog https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=710a39414569995bd5a8631a948c939dc73bcef9
‣ Favourites feature in Special characters https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=f9efee1f87262b0088c249b2c306fb53ca729b53
‣ Special Characters Toolbar Dropdown Control https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=800ac37021e3f8859a52c5eebca261a5d3bc5a11
‣ Unicode Character Names Integration using ICU https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=43d65d1ab81a278e1352f64def9ca63b9e7dfab9
‣ Search feature for Special Characters https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=e74be9ad773c7769c5d8765bb2ac234967e420ec
I was mentored by Samuel Mehrbrodt, Heiko Tietze, and Thorsten Behrens in GSoC 2017. I would like to give my regards to the LibreOffice community which helped me through the deadlocks I faced during the project. It has been an awesome two-year journey with LibreOffice, and I hope it will remain the same in future and the open-source technologies will flourish with their full potential and thrive to its zenith.
AdvertisementsBy Ken Harvey
There is no evidence for homeopathy yet medical insurance companies – subsidised by the government – are extending their cover due to client demand, and health authorities lack the power to act on misleading claims.
Homeopathy has been in the news of late. Earlier this year, a homeopath and his wife were found guilty of manslaughter after their baby daughter died when they treated her severe eczema with homeopathic remedies rather than conventional medicines.
More recently an Australian homeopath claimed that homeopathic immunisation was effective against polio, meningococcal disease, cholera, whooping cough and other serious diseases. The Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) Complaints Resolution Panel agreed that these claims breached numerous sections of the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code, including promotion of a treatment for which there was no evidence of efficacy. The homeopath was asked to publish a retraction and withdraw misleading information but she refused, arguing that she believed there was sufficient evidence to back up her claims.
Homeopathy was conceived more than 200 years ago by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. He proposed that disease was a dysfunction of the body’s ability to cure itself, and that administering a diluted form of a toxic substance might provide the stimulus that the body needed to begin to heal itself.
In order to find homeopathic treatments, Hahnemann tested herbs and minerals in healthy people to see what reaction occurred. If a substance caused fever then that substance was noted as a treatment for conditions involving fever.
Hahnemann also believed that the more dilute the substance, the more potent effect it had against a given disease. Thus the preparation of a homeopathic product involves a step-wise dilution process along with vigorous shaking. Homeopaths believe that this process leaves behind the essence of the original compound in the water.
However, the theories and principles underpinning homeopathy are not supported by modern pharmacology, chemistry and physics (see p.7). Most homeopathic preparations are so dilute that they have little or no active ingredient, and it is unlikely that these preparations have any pharmacological effect. While some homeopathic studies of low methodological quality have found benefits, analyses of higher quality trials generally show that homeopathy treatments are no more effective than a placebo.
The World Health Organisation does not recommend homeopathy for the treatment of serious diseases. Since most homeopathic preparations contain little or no active ingredient, they are unlikely to directly cause harm. However, if patients seek homeopathic remedies for the prevention or treatment of serious diseases then the results can be deadly.
In the United Kingdom, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recently concluded that the UK health service should cease funding homeopathy because “homeopathic products perform no better than placebos”.
Despite the conclusions of these reputable bodies, homeopathic treatments are reimbursed by many private health insurance companies at a time when premiums are consistently rising faster than the consumer price index. As a result many people, especially those retired on fixed incomes, have great difficulty maintaining their private health insurance cover.
I am concerned that private health insurance premiums are higher than they need to be because the insurers involved fund alternative therapies that lack an evidence base, such as homeopathy, reflexology and iridology. Indeed, Medibank Private has told me that it is extending its cover for homeopathy this month because of client demand.
As the government substantially subsidises private health insurance, this means that all taxpayers are contributing to therapies that lack evidence of their effectiveness.
Because homeopathic medicines have been regarded as low risk, both the medicines and practitioners have been largely exempt from government regulation. While any claims made for homeopathic medicines are subject to the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code, the Complaints Resolution Panel that administers the Code has no power to enforce its determinations. The end result is that around one-third of those found to breach the rules fail to publish retractions or withdraw misleading material.
This issue has now been raised with two Parliamentary Secretaries in the Rudd government. Each has promised action but so far nothing has eventuated. The Rudd government needs to stand up to the alt-med lobby and give the TGA real teeth.The self driving car that can also FLY - and its inventors say a consumer version could be on the road (and in the air) by 2017
It has been a sci-fi dream for decades - a car that can simply take to the air to avoid traffic.
However, a Slovakian firm has said it has finally cracked the problem - and it will sell in it just two years.
The AeroMobil can fly 430 miles on a tank of petrol - and when its wings fold down, it'll fit into a normal parking space.
Aeromobil is a 'flying car' that can fit in a standard parking space, and could both take off and land at any airport in the world.
When in flight mode, it can go 430 miles, reaching 124mph - but can fold up its wings to travel on the road and fit in a single parking space.
Aeromobil is a 'flying car' that perfectly makes use of existing infrastructure created for automobiles and planes, and opens doors to real door-to-door travel,' the firm says.
When in its car configuration, it can fit into a standard parking space, and it also takes normal fuel pumped at every service station.
The latest version is the third generation of the craft.
'It is now finalised and has been in regular flight-testing program in real flight conditions since October 2014,' the firm said.
At South By Southwest, Juraj Vaculik, co-founder and CEO of AeroMobil, spoke at a panel about the future of flying cars, predicting a world ahead in which these vehicles easily merge with existing transportation.
He says it will be on sale in 2017, and that the firm was also developing a self driving (and flying) version.
Read more:t was the film that encompassed everything we wished our high school football careers could have been. It didn't have clear eyes or a full heart, but it did have a 500-pound Billy Bob, a pig named Bacon and a Tweeder end zone dance. "Varsity Blues" introduced audiences to whipped cream bikinis, the Oopty Oop and a backup quarterback named Mox played by a guy known as Dawson. Football was a way of life in West Canaan, Texas, and the tale about the teenage bonds of friendship and triumph over the tyranny of a dictator-in-coach made the film one of the most iconic sports films ever made. t was the film that encompassed everything we wished our high school football careers could have been. It didn't have clear eyes or a full heart, but it did have a 500-pound Billy Bob, a pig named Bacon and a Tweeder end zone dance. "Varsity Blues" introduced audiences to whipped cream bikinis, the Oopty Oop and a backup quarterback named Mox played by a guy known as Dawson. Football was a way of life in West Canaan, Texas, and the tale about the teenage bonds of friendship and triumph over the tyranny of a dictator-in-coach made the film one of the most iconic sports films ever made.
"Varsity Blues" opened in January 1999 debuting No. 1 at the box office and becoming a surprise hit for MTV Films grossing more than $50 million on a $16 million budget. The unknown cast became stars overnight and the filmmakers would become mega producers and directors.
The story of how "Varsity Blues" was made and how it became a pop-culture phenomenon is fascinating. Fifteen years later, the cast, crew and creators for "Varsity Blues" sat down with NFL.com to chat about how it all happened: the script that was stuck in bankruptcy, the epic race with "Friday Night Lights" to get to the theaters first, the auditions, the on-set shenanigans, the injuries and the tales only the making of a Hollywood film can provide. As Billy Bob says, it's "a 10... a 10... a ***** 10!" - Amar Shah
The writers and filmmakers behind "Varsity Blues" describe how the script came to be and the extensive process it took to develop.
PETER ILIFF (WRITER) ("Varsity Blues") was the third screenplay I would ever come to write. In 1984, I.C.M. gave me an article on high school football in Odessa, Texas. It outlined the real pressure of these kids to perform at football and how it defined the rest of their lives. So, then I read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle on Jerry Rice (who played) for a school called Mississippi Valley State, in an offense that was scoring 77 points a game, running the oopty oop offense. So, I completely ripped that off for "Varsity Blues."
TOVA LAITER (PRODUCER) When I was president of production at Imagine Entertainment, somebody approached me with that script. I read it, and I loved it, but six months before, I optioned another book that was quite similar, which was called "Friday Night Lights." And so I said to that person -- 'I love your script, I think it's even more fun to do it in comedy, but I'm already committed because I bought "Friday Night Lights.'"
PETER ILIFF At that time, "Friday Night Lights" hadn't come out. I did read it, and it's a fabulous book. But I decided to take more of a comical approach. Because I didn't wanna be basically ripping off that book. So, I would have to say it was a great influence on me. But I went a different direction. I really wanted to make a dramedy as they say in the business.
TOVA LAITER When I left Imagine, I had a meeting with Peter about another project, and I said to him, 'What happened to your script, "Varsity Blues?" I really liked it.' And he said, 'Oh, somebody else optioned it.'
PETER ILIFF It got optioned six different times.
TOVA LAITER Two years passed, and I saw him again, and I said, 'What's happening with your script?' He said the person who had the script went into bankruptcy and it's in bankruptcy court. And I said, 'Let's get it out.' So we did. It took about a year, and after that we took it out. Most people passed.
PETER ILIFF She had gone to four different executives and gotten all "nos." But then she realized that Paramount executive Don Granger was my executive when I did the film "Patriot Games." Over his desk is a picture of him playing offensive guard on his high school football team. She goes, 'Don will buy this.'
TOVA LAITER Just so you know how fun the movie business is, I gave it to Paramount two or three times before and they passed.
PETER ILIFF And, well, what do you know, Don buys it. They bring in Daniel Stern, the actor, to direct this thing. And we had a moment where we're in John Goldwyn's office, the president of the studio, and he says the words I have never heard before, and I'll probably never hear again. He goes, 'I love this script. Don't change a single word of it.' Well, sitting next to me, Stern's having a heart attack 'cause he wants a page-one rewrite. A month later, he's fired. A month after that, I'm fired. I was told by Paramount executives that, 'We need a fresh voice on "Varsity Blues."'
BRIAN ROBBINS (DIRECTOR) I had made my first movie at Paramount based on a show that we produced for Nickelodeon called "Good Burger." And Paramount sent the script to us for "Varsity Blues" -- the original "Varsity Blues" script, which was nothing like the movie that we made -- to see if we were interested in doing it. My partner Mike Tollin was not, but sent me the script. And I was like, 'Well, this script is not great. But there's a great story here and a great movie here.'
MIKE TOLLIN (PRODUCER) It's a big moment when a studio reaches out to you as young filmmakers and offers you material that they're interested in making. The first instinct is to say, 'Yeah, let's go make it.' The second of course is to sit down, read it and really evaluate it. So when we got this script it wasn't the version that we wanted to tell. Brian and I decided to go back to Paramount and say, 'We're interested in the project but we think we wanna go another direction.' They were very open to the idea of finding a new writer with a new take.
BRIAN ROBBINS So there's a writer named John Gatins who really is the guy that wrote "Varsity Blues." I mean, Peter Iliff is the credited writer, and he wrote the original script, and he is responsible for the original idea. But John was a young writer who hadn't really written anything at the time.
JOHN GATINS (WRITER) I had written a spec screenplay called "Smells Like Teen Suicide," and met with David Gale and Elysa Koplovitz at MTV Films. They liked that script a lot, and they asked me to take a look at this script that they had called "Varsity Blues." So I read it and they then put me in a room with Brian Robbins and Michael Tollin to talk about how I would potentially rewrite that script.
BRIAN ROBBINS John and I met, and I was looking for someone to rewrite the script and make it more dramatic. And he pitched me the idea of the younger brother with all the crazy religions. He pitched me the whipped cream bikini, and I think that was it. And I was like, 'I'm in. Like, I gotta work with this guy to write this movie.' So it was John's idea. He really is the guy that took that movie from the original script to what it became.
JOHN GATINS In the script that I read, Tweeder, the Scott Caan character, actually committed suicide. It was this incredibly kind of sad thing that happened towards the end of the second act. I said, 'Look, what if it's not Tweeder, but what if it's Billy Bob who has a suicidal thought and a really rough night. And that our hero Mox comes to his side and kind of inspires him to kind of redirect his life.' That's where that scene of blowing up the trophies came from which is one of my little favorite moments in the movie.
MIKE TOLLIN The turning point was the studio's willingness and actual enthusiasm for us going another direction. As was working through MTV Films, which had been recently set up under the aegis of Paramount Pictures.
TOVA LAITER We gave the studio the script on Friday. Monday morning we had a meeting with John Goldwyn, and he basically said, 'I wanna make this movie. But it's not going to be the second movie of that genre.' Now that put me a very strange position where I was competing against my former project at Imagine, you know, two football movies that I'm in effect responsible for. And we looked like the underdog. Our script was a 10-year-old script. We had a director at the time that was not in the same league as Richard Linklater. I was not Imagine, and the odds were that they were gonna go first. They tried to stop us in a certain way.
BRIAN ROBBINS I remember getting a call from Brian Grazer, who was the producer of "Friday Night Lights," trying to talk me out of making "Varsity Blues" because we were sort of getting ahead of them. I didn't listen to him.Hector Montoya gave up his dream of owning a PS4 to help others (Picture: NBC DFW)
A boy who had been saving up for a PlayStation 4 decided to use the money to buy smoke detectors for vulnerable people instead.
Nine-year-old Hector Montoya, from Texas, was looking forward to purchasing the next generation console after saving $300 (£178), but changed his mind when he heard the tragic story of a mother and child who were killed in a blaze.
The family reportedly did not have a smoke detector in their home.
He managed to get his hands on a PS4 in the end (Picture: Sony)
‘I decided saving a life was more important because one life lost is too many,’ he told CBS News.
The boy’s money was used to purchase more than 100 detectors, with most of them being installed in the homes of pensioners.
His kindness was rewarded when two siblings, touched by his story, decided to buy a PS4 for him anyway.
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‘We thought he deserved something special,’ said Ashton Harder, 19, who bought the PS4 along with his sister Peyton, 14.
He added: ‘To see a nine-year-old worrying about so many others, you can’t help but want to give him what he wants.’Russia is making consequent its decision last fall to ban the commercial planting of Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO in its agriculture acreage. The latest decision, effective February 15, 2016 does not at all please Monsanto or the US Grain Cartel.
On February 15, a Russian national import ban on soybeans and corn imports from the United States took effect. The Russian food safety regulator Rosselkhoznadzor announced that the ban was because of GMO and of microbial contamination and the absence of effective US controls on soybean and corn exports to prevent export of quarantinable grains, also known as microbial contamination. The Russian food safety regulator added that corn imported from the US is often infected with dry rot of maize. In addition, he said, corn can be used for GMO crops in Russia. The potential damage from import and spread of quarantinable objects on the territory of Russia is estimated at $126 -189 million annually.
Striking the heart of the GMO cartel
The Russian decision is a huge blow to USA agribusiness. For decades, the US grain cartel companies–ADM, Cargill, Bunge–have dominated the global trade in soybeans and corn, the most widely used animal feed for cattle, pigs, chickens because of its high protein content.
Today, the contamination of national agriculture and the food chain in different countries, even those banning planting of GMO crops, typically comes in through a back door, namely, the free import of GMO contaminated corn and soybeans. I’ve been told by people in a position to know that EU agriculture policy is determined less by European farmer organizations, for example, than by the large US agribusiness lobby of Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Cargill and friends. Similarly, though until recently the Chinese government officially banned planting or licensing of GMO crops inside China’s commercial agriculture, GMO has inundated the country via a loophole that allows unrestricted import of GMO soybeans. Today more than 60% of all soybeans consumed in China or used for animal feed is GMO. The Russian decision, to my knowledge is the first blow to be struck against the powerful GMO agribusiness cartel. Thank US sanctions in effect that the crisis created the opportunity.
As a long-term two year independent laboratory rat experiment has demonstrated, a diet of GMO soybeans or GMO corn over a period of more than six months produces virulent tumors in the GMO-fed rats and excessive early mortality. Were we to eat a diet of McDonald GMO-contaminated hamburgers for a six month period, I shudder to imagine the human damage that would wreak. McDonalds hamburger patties, I was told by an insider in the grain trade, contains beef supplemented with up to 30% GMO soybeans. Today almost 100% of soybeans on the world market are GMO, most from Monsanto.
With this latest ban, the Russian authorities almost make complete their decision, announced September 2015, to rid the country of GMO for consumption by humans or animals.
That decision still left a gaping loophole by not also banning GMO soybeans and GMO corn. After this latest decision, now the only loophole remaining, which is still significant, to rid Russian agriculture entirely of GMO contamination, is to extend the GMO soybean and GMO corn import ban to all countries which cannot conclusively demonstrate their corn or soybeans are GMO free, using the same criteria used for US soybean and corn imports.
Today the USA is the world’s largest followed by Argentina and Brazil. The three countries produce 85% of all world soybeans. And almost all of that, aside from pockets of certified GMO-free acreage in Brazil, is GMO contaminated.
Then come India and China, each with around 5% of the world total. China recently changed its GMO policy and seems intent on the dubious policy of becoming a leading GMO soybean and maize producer with the $43 billion ChemChina takeover bid last month of Swiss GMO and pesticide giant, Syngenta.
Soybeans are high protein and are used in almost every industrial food product today from chocolate bars (lecithin) to the feed for KFC fried chicken, to soy drinks. Because of the power of the GMO lobby over the past two decades, almost all that soybean food is GMO. As well, the GMO comes into the food chain via so-called high protein “power feed,” a mix of soybeans and corn. Soybean meal and soybean hulls are widely used in animal feeds. This 44% – 48% protein meal is the most common source of protein in feed used in poultry, hog and dairy rations. Corn Gluten Meal, made from processing corn, has a 60% protein content and is used widely for poultry and dairy cattle feed in the USA, Canada and the EU.
Despite the fact that a majority of EU member countries, including Germany, have chosen to ban planting of GMO, a Brussels loophole permits ADM and Cargill unlimited import of soybeans or corn that is GMO. That way the food chain is contaminated via GMO in the animal diet.
Since near 93% of USA corn today and 94% of its soybeans are GMO today, a safe rule-of-thumb is the precautionary principle–ban it unless proven GMO-free, which is precisely what Russian authorities have done. The Precautionary Principle is simply that, if regulatory authorities are not 100% certain it is GMO-free, prohibit it.
The US-based agribusiness cartel, led by Cargill and Monsanto, ensured that the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture, written by a former Vice President of Cargill, Daniel Amstutz, prioritized the right of free trade above that of national food health and safety. The latest move by the Russian Federation authorities shows that a major food-producing nation, today surpassing the USA as world’s largest grain producer, in part thanks to the foolish US sanctions on Russia, is prioritizing the health and safety of its citizens above the corporate interests of agribusiness. That’s a healthy development.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.Capcom has announced that there will be an update to Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate tomorrow which will bring both voice chat and USB keyboard support for the Wii U version of the game. The update will also allow gamers to control the camera angle via the Wii U GamePad’s ZL and ZR buttons. Here’s a complete list of the update via Capcom Japan.
To answer the stong wishes from Hunters, we’ll be launching a function update!
(From February 19th) If you start the game while the system is connected to a network, it’ll be updated automatically.
Voice Chat Support!
Voice chat will be possible with the Wii U GamePad’s microphone. Furthermore, headphones and headsets will also be usable via the Wii U GamePad’s headphone socket. The Wii U microphone will also be supported when connected by USB.
*As an option, voices in game (voice chat sound) can be set to come from the Wii U GamePad or the TV.
USB supported Keyboards will be usable!
If you connect a USB supported Keyboard it can be used for chat input.
Change the camera angle via the ZL/ZR buttons!
It will be possible to change the camera angle using the Wii U GamePad’s ZL and ZR buttons. This update is to match the control feeling of the Nintendo 3DS/LL Expansion Slide Pad."We haven't broken the Internet…" says Chris Jaffe, vice-president of product innovation at Netflix. He pauses a few seconds for dramatic effect before punctuating the pronouncement: "…yet." Laughs break out in the streaming video company's busy control centre, dubbed – appropriately enough – the war room.
Season two of the Emmy award-winning political drama House of Cards has just gone live and data has started to stream in from around the world. The launch is no small feat, considering that it goes live at the same time in each of the streaming service's 41 countries. Netflix is now responsible for nearly a third of all downstream internet traffic, according to Waterloo, Ont.-based monitoring firm Sandvine. New episodes of its shows inevitably spike those already massive numbers.
A dozen employees are clustered around a long table, noses buried in their laptops, while a similar number are stationed at televisions around the room. Each person is tasked with making sure their individual piece of the larger whole is working properly. A gaggle of journalists look on and try to stay out of the way.
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The room is plastered with House of Cards paraphernalia. A large upside-down U.S. flag – the show's logo – adorns one wall, while a giant screen showing the Netflix home page and a live stream of fans tweeting takes up another. The menacing glare of Frank Underwood, the scheming congressman played by Kevin Spacey, is difficult to escape thanks to the ubiquitous posters. A lone vase of wilting white tulips sits in the middle of the table. The techies, busily typing into their computers, are oblivious to it.
Jaffe takes a roll call of the various platforms that Netflix's 44 million subscribers use. "iPad? Check. Android? Check. Website? Check." Somebody reports that season two has indeed gone live on the Nintendo Wii console. Another confirms that they're seeing it on their smartphone.
Next up are countries. Brazil looks good, so does Mexico. Europe is okay. The 10 TVs around the room have the show running in 10 different languages. The French subtitles for Quebec are appearing without any problems.
It takes about a minute for the first episode of the new season to become the top-viewed show on Netflix in the United States, and about 14 minutes in Europe. It's late night in North America but morning on the other side of the Atlantic – Jaffe explains that Europeans are probably more in the mood for cartoons right now than heavy political intrigue, but that will change in the evening.
The good news prompts a round of cheers. Champagne follows and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. A major launch has gone smoothly.
Netflix has rollouts like this down pat by now, having done it several times over the past year with such original series' as Orange is the New Black and the fourth season of Arrested Development. The Los Gatos-based company is now comfortable inviting the press to witness its inner workings, a rarity for otherwise secretive Silicon Valley technology firms.
At the core these rollouts is a highly automated and decentralized system, where if one part breaks down, other backups and redundancies can step in to make sure things keep working. In that way Netflix is built very much like the Internet, a series of widely distributed nodes that the military originally designed to withstand nuclear attacks. The strain on the network imposed by a new season of a show such as House of Cards is therefore not unlike a nuclear strike on the Internet itself.
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The company is a veritable poster child for cloud computing. Rather than spend resources on huge data centres in each country, it instead relies on Amazon to do so. Netflix then stores its TV shows and movies with Amazon Web Services, the book seller's cloud hosting division, then supplements that with smaller servers within each country that local internet providers can connect to. In Canada, both Bell and Telus are part of this content delivery network.
This distribution across services lowers costs for everybody, from Netflix down to its subscribers, while maintaining a reliable, fast and dynamic system.
"The goal for us is to build a system that automatically adjusts our capacity so we can grow and shrink as customer demand ebbs and flows. It shouldn't matter when the biggest spike will be because we'll be ready for it," says Yury Izrailevsky, vice-president of cloud computing and platform engineering. "It's really the elasticity of the cloud being able to spin up additional capacity within seconds that's allowing us to do this."
While the war room is currently abuzz, the rest of Netflix's headquarters is a figurative ghost town. A large theatre near the entrance of the main building, not unlike the kind you'd find at a multiplex, sits empty. A sign out front lists screening times for the first episode of the new House of Cards, which employees were able to take in a day before the official launch. Meeting rooms named after movies – there's one for Batman, another for Lord of the Rings – sit unused, but that will probably change in the morning.
Despite housing some 1,200 employees across five buildings – with more being built – the company can effectively run on a skeleton crew, Izrailevsky says. Its systems are largely automated and support staff are only called when problems are detected. And if they do get roused in the middle of the night, they can usually fix most issues from their laptops at home.
It's not a perfect machine, though, as Netflix does occasionally go down. The causes can vary, from malfunctions on the devices that viewers use to watch to problems with local Internet providers, but only rarely does something happen on the cloud side of things. "We aim for four nines – 99.99 per cent there," Izrailevsky says.
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If the champagne and cheers are any indication, the company has succeeded at that goal: a new season of House of Cards has arrived, and the Internet isn't broken. At least for now it isn't.Julius Randle’s role in the Los Angeles Lakers’ rotation has been greatly diminished — especially over the last couple weeks despite Brook Lopez’s injury. The Lakers would reportedly “love” to trade Randle and Jordan Clarkson, but what would such a deal look like?
Lakers Outsiders has learned that the during this past summer, the Lakers were very much in on attempting to land Avery Bradley of the Boston Celtics, who had to move him in order to free up enough cap space to sign Gordon Hayward.
The Lakers were willing to offer a package centered on Randle and a second rounder, but the Danny Ainge apparently preferred Larry Nance Jr., considering he isn’t a free agent until two summers from now, whereas Randle would have to get paid in only a few months.
Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka stood firm on offering Randle and still felt confident their offer would get it done.
Ainge instead chose to send Bradley and a second-rounder to the Detroit Pistons for Marcus Morris.
Once Detroit had Bradley in the fold, it was crystal clear that they had no room for Kentavious Caldwell-Pope either in their rotation or under the cap. He hit the open market, where the Lakers pounced and signed him to his current contract lasting one year for $18 million.
It’s also been reported that the Lakers have discussed sending Randle to Dallas for Nerlens Noel, who finds himself in a somewhat similar predicament regarding role and future with the organization.
Combining the context of both the Bradley and Noel trade rumors, it’s becoming pretty clear what the Lakers are looking for in any trade featuring Randle: a starting-caliber player on an expiring deal. This narrows down their options and, seeing as the rest of the NBA is aware of their intentions with Randle at this point, Johnson and Pelinka have their work cut out for them.
There haven’t been any specifics to this point regarding what a Jordan Clarkson deal would look like, though per one report, the Lakers would prefer to trade him after the season, given how he’s helped them win games.
(Randle also helps win games but apparently, that doesn’t matter.)
Side note: Avery Bradley has recently been accused of sexual harassment, per TMZ. He denies the allegation but did pay to silence the victim. As Bradley is not a Laker, this is not necessarily relevant to the above information, but not mentioning it in this climate would be a disservice.The owner of popular beachside cafe Yelo has won his battle with the City of Stirling, which accused him of breaching planning rules by accommodating his throng of customers.
The cafe, overlooking the northern suburbs coastline, has become a favourite local haunt since it opened seven years ago, with queues regularly stretching out of the door.
But that success has not been welcomed by all, with residents near the West Coast Drive outlet complaining customers parking on the road and nearby verges cause intolerable congestion.
Those complaints led the City of Stirling to first investigate soon after the cafe opened in 2009 — and eventually launch a prosecution years later which finally reached court last year.
Today, magistrate Richard Bayly said the council had been confused about what it had approved the cafe to do — having agreed to allow 20 seats on a verandah outside, but then saying they were not allowed seating inside.
Magistrate Bayly said while the cafe could be “overcrowded” that did not in itself mean they were breaching the rules.
He acquitted owner Michael Pond of the charge and ordered the council to pay costs, which came to just over $33,000 after the five-day trial.
The council had claimed the cafe breached planning approval first enshrined for the premises in 2003, which allows service of takeaway food and drink only, and restricts seating to 20 on the al fresco verandah.
And at a trial last year, planning officials told Magistrate Bayly that covert inspections had shown people staying for up to 45 minutes to drink coffees and eat organic fruit toast or bircher muesli — with seating for about 55 provided inside the premises.
Camera Icon The court said while the cafe could be “overcrowded” that did not in itself mean they were breaching the rules. Picture: WA News
Mr Pond argued he had constantly complied with the planning approvals — only serving food and drink in throwaway containers, and never at tables, or with plates, knives and forks.
Experienced barrister John Prior said no mention was ever made in the planning approvals of how much seating was allowed inside the cafe, meaning Yelo had never actually breached the rules.
An application in 2012 by Mr Pond to amend the planning approvals to officially allow more seating was rejected by the council, which also said the cafe was not permitted to sell retail items such as thongs, books, surfboards and wetsuits.
The court also heard council officials had ordered the cafe to remove signs they had provided pointing customers to a public carpark 80m away at a nearby dog beach, even though they were designed to alleviate the parking problems.This scene means a lot.
Finnick’s sight line only falls after Judy interjects. He opens the door assuming there’s someone taller and much meaner waiting. There are no lights or sirens and no one ambling up to the driver’s side door, so it’s not an officer hassling him for vagrancy (again). Not even a suspicious cop “checking for registration” on a windowless van! Finnick expected someone vicious enough he needed a baseball bat for defense.
His eyes fall and widen. The pole lowers, but the grip remains. The girl Nick’s been torn over for weeks suddenly knocks on his van door asking where Nick is? That look isn’t annoyance or anger. It’s just shock. This is “the conversation that got away” whether Nick admits it or not. And here it is, wrapped in pink plaid.
I |
. In 2012, SpaceX succeeded in twice sending a rocket of its own manufacture into orbit and twice linking a capsule of its own manufacture to the International Space Station, and Elon Musk succeeded in convincing some of those who have regarded him as a con man dependent on government largesse that he may yet become what one of his admirers calls the "Steve Jobs of heavy industry," if not the "Henry Ford of rockets."
Certainly, he has some of Jobs's instincts for both controlling every aspect of the companies he runs and for subjecting even his own need for control to the discipline of taste. It is impossible to sit behind the wheel of his Tesla Model S alongside one of the company's representatives without hearing that Musk designed the car's ingotlike rearview mirror himself and insisted that its dashboard have no buttons and an audio system with a volume control that "goes to 11." It is impossible to visit SpaceX's earbud-white headquarters in the featureless aerospace-dominated outskirts of Los Angeles without hearing that Musk also designed it — that he picked the colors and the furniture, including the trash cans suggestive of rocket ships. He is even wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans as he eats dinner, and has just concluded a meeting in which all his engineers were wearing the same. What separates Jobs from Musk, however, is a matter of scale and stakes:
Steve Jobs made gadgets; Elon Musk is making cars and rockets. And though Jobs might have relished inspiring people to wait on long lines to avail themselves of his vision, he never dared speak of inspiring them to die.
Musk does. He has to; Mars is far away. Mars is tens of millions of miles away from Earth at its closest orbit and hundreds of millions of miles away at its most distant. It exists to the human eye not as a sphere but as a colored star, as part of the endless outnumbering firmament, as the nightly whispered message that we may not reach what awe inspires us to grasp. And so although Musk, as he eats, repeats the mantra that has won him not only investors and employees but followers — he says that his goal is to "make humanity interplanetary" as a way of increasing the odds that human consciousness survives in the universe — he has to admit the possibility that just as a lot of people had to die in order to settle the New World, a lot would have to die in order to settle the red one.
It is neither a decree nor a warning; it is, instead, a kind of invitation, stated with cool certainty. Musk is forty-one years old, with the face of a schoolboy and the manners — the scrubbed affect — of a surgeon. He has brown hair, reddish lips, and nearly hairless arms. He talks about working eighty to a hundred hours a week as often as he talks about going to Mars, but he is thick-legged and broad-shouldered and exudes physical health and power. He is often referred to as a "rock star" but maintains a studied sanity. If he is a rock star, he is one of the reasonable ones, like, say, Coldplay's Chris Martin. He laughs readily at his own most obscure jokes, smiles faintly in equal parts amusement and disappointment, and indeed acts as though only he can see the membrane that separates him from the rest of the world. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that there is something alien about him, it would be no surprise if he lifted his shirt and revealed that he had no navel.
Ever since he made his first fortune developing and then selling the Internet businesses Zip2 and PayPal, he has been capturing people's imaginations by presenting himself as a mythic figure — by saying things like "The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur." But he wants more than wonder. He is a man grounded not in fancy but in a sense of his own strength, and his unlikely dream of going to Mars has allowed him to realize practical ambitions much closer to home.
"It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost," he says. "Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly." It is, in his words, entirely manageable — "if America has the will."
And that is the key to Elon Musk. He has the will. "Elon is not afraid of breaking things — he will break himself if he has to," says Justine Musk, his first wife and the mother of his five children.
Dan Winters
He was not born in America, and yet when he was a very young man, he gave up everything to become an American. Now he wants Americans to be willing to give up everything in order to reclaim the one essential thing we've lost. He wants to make us once again "a nation of explorers" — but first he has to find out what price we're willing to pay.
He grew up in South Africa without ever really considering himself South African. Like the rest of his family, he was just passing through. The Musks were a race nearly as much as they were a family, with a specialized awareness of themselves as wanderers and adventurers. Every Musk is able to tell the story of forebears whose accomplishments serve as an inspiration and whose energy endures as an inheritance — a grandfather who won a race from Cape Town to Algiers; a great-grandmother who was the first female chiropractor in Canada; grandparents who were the first to fly from South Africa to Australia in a single-engine plane. "Without sounding patronizing, it does seem that our family is different from other people," says Elon's sister, Tosca Musk. "We risk more."
If the Musks had arisen from literature, they would come off as an unlikely combination of Salinger's Glasses and Faulkner's Snopeses — a combination of insular giftedness and rude commercial energy.
"I have two brilliant children, but Elon's a genius," says his mother, Maye Musk. "I can explain Tosca and [Elon's brother] Kimbal pretty well. I can't explain Elon."
She was a dietitian and a fashion model; her husband, Errol, was an engineer and what a family member described as a "serial entrepreneur." According to Maye, they knew their oldest child was "advanced from the very beginning." He read continually, read not simply to amuse himself but to acquire knowledge, so they sent him to school early in Pretoria. "Elon was the youngest and smallest guy in his school," Maye says, and soon he found himself in conflict not just with other children but with what seemed like South Africa itself.
"It's pretty rough in South Africa," Kimbal Musk says. "It's a rough culture. Imagine rough — well, it's rougher than that. Kids gave Elon a very hard time, and it had a huge impact on his life." Huge, Tosca says, "because there was no recourse. In South Africa, if you're getting bullied, you still have to go to school. You just have to get up in the morning and go. He hated it so much."
It turned out he had two recourses. The first was his family — and his ability to think of himself as a Musk, and therefore as a kind of transcendent citizen rather than as a South African. The second was the advent of the personal computer. "He was on computers as soon as they were available to us," Tosca says. What distinguished him from the legions of other brainy put-upon children who found refuge in the digital universe, however, was his ability to put his digital identity at the service of his familial one. He had not only seen his father start businesses, after all; he had accompanied his father to Zambia, where Errol Musk had an interest in an emerald mine. "They'd go in a plane stocked with chocolate bars, because that's what the customs agents wanted," Kimbal Musk says. "You basically would give them chocolate bars, and they'd allow you to do business."
When he was sixteen, he tried opening a video arcade near his high school with Kimbal, who was a year younger. "We had a lease, we had suppliers, but we were actually stopped," Kimbal says. "We got stopped by the city. We couldn't get a variance. Our parents had no idea. They flipped out when they found out, especially my father."
Errol Musk was South African. He left his wife and his children when Elon was eight — or they fled him — and Elon to this day has what his brother says is "not the greatest relationship" with him. But he'd given them the curious gift of other places, taking them on annual trips intended to give them perspective on where they lived, and then the most curious gift of all: "My father was very strict," Tosca remembers. "So while everybody in South Africa had maids and servants, he'd have us play this game. It was called America, America, and when we played it, we'd have to do everything an American child would do. We'd have to clean the house, mow the lawn, do all sorts of American chores...."
Elon made his move after he graduated high school. Though he already felt like an American, he'd done research and concluded that it would be easier to obtain American citizenship as a Canadian immigrant rather than as a South African one. His mother was from Canada. Most of her family still lived there. "Elon went to visit my family and he never came back," Maye says. Kimbal and Tosca remained in high school in Pretoria, where they were not like their brother — they were popular. But Elon used to practice hypnosis on them when he was a boy, Tosca says. "He wasn't very good at it. I'd be like, 'No, Elon, I'm not going to eat raw bacon.' But he kept on trying."
Now his beckoning — the exercise of his will — worked. One by one they followed him, first Tosca (who was then fifteen) and Maye, then Kimbal, then even his cousins on his mother's side. He robbed South Africa of all his family members with the exception of his father; as his cousin Lyndon Rive puts it, "They stayed in South Africa one generation, and then they left."
He handled getting them their citizenship between attending university in Ontario and sleeping on the pullout couch at Maye and Tosca's sublet apartment in Toronto. Then he moved to the U.S. to attend the University of Pennsylvania, and they followed him across that border as well. Ten years ago — ten years after his arrival in the New World — Elon Musk took the oath of American citizenship with thirty-five hundred other immigrants at the Pomona Fairplex, in a ceremony he calls "actually very moving." Tosca is the last of the family still an alien, and as she studies to become an American citizen, she has come to believe in Elon's ability to make her a Martian citizen, too. They all have. They are a family that has formed an unshakable consensus around one of its members. Tosca says, "Elon has already gone to the future and come back to tell us what he's found."
And what's most important is that before he had his fortune, before he even had many friends, he had — he was born with — his first followers.
Musk divorced his second wife, Talulah Riley, in January. By early fall, she was back in his life, making sure that he doesn't go "king-crazy." Jason Merritt/Getty
In 2001, Elon Musk was discussing his fortune with a friend he'd met back at Penn, Adeo Ressi. Well, they were both discussing their fortunes, because they had both made them in the tech boom and were now wondering what to do with them. Ressi had recently sold his Internet company, Methodfive, and Musk was just about to take PayPal public. It was the weekend before Memorial Day, and they were driving back to New York City from the Hamptons. It was late, it was dark, and there were people asleep in the backseat. They started talking about outer space.
"It was almost a joke at first," Ressi says. "We were both interested in space, but we dismissed it as soon as it came up. 'Oh, that's too expensive and complicated.' Then two miles would go by. 'Well, how expensive and complicated could it be?' Two more miles. 'It can't be that expensive and complicated.' It kept going on like this, and by the time we made it through the Midtown Tunnel into New York City, we'd basically decided to travel the world to see if something could be done in space."
They'd mentioned Mars in the car — "the obvious destination," Ressi says — and so when Musk got to his computer, he went to the NASA Web site and searched for information on NASA's Mars mission. He found nothing. "I thought there was some kind of mistake," Musk says. "I expected to find that they were well on their way and that we'd have to figure out something else to do. But there was nothing at all."
A month later, an aerospace consultant named Jim Cantrell was driving home after work in Utah when his cell phone rang. "I had the top down on my car, so all I could make out was that some guy named Ian Musk was saying that he was an Internet billionaire and needed to talk to me. I'm pretty sure he used that phrase, 'Internet billionaire.' I told him I'd call him back when I got home, but when I called, I got a fax machine. I said, 'Sure, Internet billionaire.' Then my phone rang. I asked him what was with the fax machine. He said, 'I don't want you to know my cell number.' Then he launched right into the same pitch he has now. 'I want to change mankind's outlook on being a multiplanetary species.' I listened, and he said, 'Can we meet this weekend? I have a private jet, I'll fly to your house.' Well, that rang my alarm bells, and I said, 'No, I'll meet you at the airport in Salt Lake.' Tell you the truth, I wanted to meet him in a place where he couldn't bring a weapon, so we met in the Delta Crown Room. Adeo came, and I finally thought, Holy crap, this is interesting. I said, 'Okay, Elon, let's put a team together and see how much this is going to cost.'"
They weren't starting a rocket company. The idea at the start was, in Ressi's words, "to influence public opinion by launching a high-profile mission to Mars." That was it, and that was all — they planned to buy a rocket and then send it to Mars with something in it, something alive that had a chance of staying alive. At first, they were going to send a mouse; then they thought of sending a plant, maybe a food crop in its own biosphere. "We created a company called Life to Mars, because that was the objective," Ressi says. "We were going to show the world that two guys with money and vision could reach Mars, and that it wasn't that bad a place."
They began shopping for the rocket, or, in aerospace-industry parlance, the "launch vehicle." Cantrell had arranged for them to meet with Arianespace, the European consortium that sends a significant portion of the world's satellites into space, and Musk and Ressi arranged for them to stay in Paris. "We rented the penthouse suite of one of the major hotels in Paris, across from the Louvre," Ressi says. "We had the whole top floor, usually rented by the sultan of Brunei or something. Elon and I invited all our friends. It was basically about sixty hours of meetings and thirty hours of partying, and by the time we got to Russia, we were destroyed...."
They went to Russia because Arianespace's rockets were too expensive, and they'd been told that Russia was selling what Cantrell calls "repurposed ICBMs" for $7 million apiece. A superpower had collapsed, and Musk and Ressi thought they could cash in by buying three of its rockets. "This was when it was still the Wild West over there," Ressi says. "I mean, there were like dead people on the side of the road. We got pulled over multiple times, at gunpoint, and had to bribe the police. No reason. Just 'Give us money.' 'Okay....'
"Then we started having meetings with the Russian space program, which is basically fueled by vodka. We'd all go in this little room and every single person had his own bottle in front of him. They'd toast every two minutes, which means twenty or thirty toasts an hour. 'To space!' 'To America!' 'To America in space!' I finally looked over at Elon and Jim and they were passed out on the table. Then I passed out myself."
It was no different when the Russians visited Musk and Ressi in Los Angeles. "They came to L.A. to ask us for cash," Ressi says. "'We can't continue unless you give us $5,000 in cash.' We heard this on a Saturday, because they wanted party money for the weekend. How do you come up with five grand in L. A. on a Saturday? You don't. So we went to the Mondrian, where I knew the manager. 'I need all the cash you have....' We cleaned the Mondrian out to give the Russians their fee. The final bits of cash were ones...."
They had two more trips scheduled to Russia; now Ressi decided, as he says, "I didn't like dealing with Russians," and told Musk he wasn't going back. Musk went anyway. On the second trip, Musk brought his wife, Justine — "I think that's the trip when the lead Russian designer started spitting at us," Cantrell says — and on the third and final trip he brought his money. He was ready to buy three Russian ICBMs for $21 million when the Russians told him that no, they meant $21 million for one. "They taunted him," Cantrell says. "They said, 'Oh, little boy, you don't have the money?' I said, 'Well, that's that.' I was sitting behind him on the flight back to London when he looked at me over the seat and said, 'I think we can build a rocket ourselves.'"
He showed Cantrell the spreadsheet he'd been working on. "I looked at it and said, I'll be damned — that's why he's been borrowing all my books. He'd been borrowing all my college textbooks on rocketry and propulsion. You know, whenever anybody asks Elon how he learned to build rockets, he says, 'I read books.' Well, it's true. He devoured those books. He knew everything. He's the smartest guy I've ever met, and he'd been planning to build a rocket all along."
He'd even contacted someone who could build it for him — at least the engine. On a dry lake bed at the outer edge of the Mojave Desert, a propulsion engineer named Tom Mueller was doing what he calls "amateur rocketry" with a group of enthusiasts who called themselves the Reaction Research Society. Except that Mueller wasn't an amateur; he worked for an aerospace company that was about to become part of Northrop Grumman, and he went out to the desert to "do the crazy stuff I wasn't allowed to do at work." He'd built a rocket engine in his garage, and one day he got a call from an associate who said that "an Internet millionaire" named Elon Musk wanted to see it. Musk wound up visiting him at a warehouse where he was assembling his engine, and seeing it was, in Cantrell's words, "apparently a religious experience for Elon."
"He was very focused," Mueller says. "He asked if I could build it, and I said, 'Yes, if I had the right people.' Then he said, 'How much will it cost?'"
And so when he returned to the United States from Russia, Elon Musk spoke to Adeo Ressi about turning the company Life to Mars into what would become SpaceX — about building rockets. "He pretty much said, 'I don't need these Russians,'" Ressi says. "I was like, 'Whoa, dude. Let's use the Socratic method. I got screwed by the Russians doesn't equal Create launch company.' We wound up literally having an Alcoholics Anonymous — style intervention where I flew in people to Los Angeles and we all sat around a room and said, 'Elon, you cannot start a launch company. This is stupid.'
"Elon just said, 'I'm going to do it. Thanks.'"
As soon as he started SpaceX, he started talking about going to Mars. He talked with family members, magazine writers, movie stars, and other rich people of entrepreneurial inclination. He announced that he would be the first private citizen to pioneer outer space, and, in so doing, he turned himself into a public figure. When his mother asked why he wanted to pursue celebrity, he said, "Nobody will sell me any parts if they don't know who I am."
There has always been a practical purpose to the narrative he has advanced, but the narrative has ended in the myth of a man beyond practical considerations. The mythical Elon Musk has led a charmed life. He starts companies. He is a billionaire. He has seen the future and predicates everything he does in the present on the totality of his vision. His genius is ineffable, without precedent or explanation, and yet suffices to explain him. If he succeeds, humanity succeeds; in his striving for himself, he strives for us all.
All of this is partially true, but it does him the disservice of ignoring what makes him interesting: He is a devourer as well as a creator. He is opportunistic and improvisatory. He is something of a takeover artist; he built Tesla after investing in it and ridding himself of its founders. He shares his superpower not with Tony Stark but rather with Donald Trump — the ability to carry debt. He can be slippery. He is more than occasionally desperate. He has a genius for engineering but perhaps a more powerful one for salesmanship, which is why he always felt himself to be, in his heart of hearts, an American.
His life is not charmed. What he pursues he usually gets, but what he gets he sometimes loses. He met the woman who became his first wife shortly after he came to Canada. He met her — saw her — while attending Queen's University in Ontario, and, as his brother, Kimbal, said at their wedding, went after her as relentlessly as he went after his parents back in South Africa to buy him a motorbike and a computer. And yet Justine Musk did not see him as a man who got what he wanted so much as a man who didn't have some very basic things:
"I don't think people understand how tough he had it growing up," she says. "I was a really lonely kid and he was a really lonely kid and that's one of the things that attracted me to him. I thought he had this understanding of loneliness — of how to create yourself in that. A lot of the things that come naturally to people he had to think about. It's more deliberate with him. The lessons he had to learn were different from most of us."
That was the missing dimension. The extra dimension, for Justine, was "the body he was born into." He could endure almost anything, impose his will on almost anyone. "He's a big man, he's strong-willed and powerful, he's like a bear. He can be playful and funny and romp around with you, but in the end you're still dealing with a bear."
They were married in 2000. They had their first child, Nevada Alexander, two years later. At ten weeks old, he stopped breathing in his crib; after being taken off life support, he died in Justine's arms. Elon Musk could figure out how to build a rocket from reading books, but loss — the place he had to make in his life for its invisible enormity — baffled him. "He was very much in the mode of stiff-upper-lip, the-show-must-go-on, let's-get-it-over-with," Justine says. "He doesn't do well in the dark places. He's forward moving, and I think it's a survival thing with him."
Six weeks after the death of her son, Justine Musk went to the office of a fertility specialist and began the process of in vitro fertilization. They had twins in 2004 and triplets in 2006. The children were all boys, and two of them were diagnosed autistic. (One, according to Justine, is no longer on the spectrum.) She wrote and published three novels, but the bearlike presence of her husband had inevitably become what it had become to his partners at PayPal and Tesla: an obliterating one. "Elon does what he wants," she says. "If you want what he wants, life can be very exciting — that's how he seduces people, I think: He taps into a shared dream. But he rules through strength of will. What he has comes at a price, sometimes to Elon, sometimes to people close to him. But someone always pays."
In the spring of 2008, Justine told him how unhappy she was. They went to counseling for a month, and Elon delivered an ultimatum: accept the marriage as is. When she said she couldn't, he filed for divorce the next day, and six weeks later he announced his engagement to the British actress Talulah Riley. In 2002, he had started a rocket company without bothering to tell his wife that he was starting a rocket company — he left that to Adeo Ressi. Now, though, his life was more complicated. During the intervening six years, he had turned himself into a public figure and, in so doing, risked public humiliation. He was divorcing one woman and announcing his betrothal to another while at the same time struggling to save Tesla and wagering everything he had on something he had already failed at:
Putting a rocket into orbit.
Musk's rockets use nine of these Merlin engines to blast into orbit. On the October 7 mission to the space station, one failed seventy-nine seconds after liftoff. Dan Winters
He'd used his own moneyfor the first one. He started SpaceX with $100 million of the money he made from PayPal. He used that money to build the Merlin engine designed by Tom Mueller and the single-engine Falcon 1 rocket. SpaceX was, at the time, in 2002, just what Elon Musk said it was. It was a private company, a "commercial space" company. Musk was going around and trying to drum up business.
"We were in an office in Bethesda, Maryland, and one day I got a call," says Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium, a satellite-communications provider. "'Hey, Matt, this is Elon Musk. I could be at the hotel next door in a couple of hours — is there any chance that you could come for a beer?'"
Desch had his own ambitious plan; he was planning to put a "constellation" of satellites into orbit, and "a lot of the more traditional launch companies looked down their nose at us. They thought we should be thrilled if they allowed us to use their rocket ships." He met Musk and characterizes him this way: "He was not nearly as cool as he is now. He was a formerly-famous-and-trying-to-be-famous-again entrepreneur. He didn't have an entourage, and we had an incredibly content-rich conversation about the whole process. He wasn't just pitching rockets. But he didn't talk about Mars, either. That probably would have scared me at that point. For all his grand plans, he's a pretty pragmatic businessman who knows how to build a company."
By March 24, 2006, Musk had orders to put satellites into orbit in his order book and was about to get a $278 million agreement with NASA intended to help him develop his company. He had to do one thing: prove that he could fly. He used the launch pad at the testing ground on the Pacific coral atoll of Kwajalein to launch his first rocket, and he went to the launch with, among others, his engine designer, Tom Mueller.
"Everyone was cheering," Mueller says. "But my engine went on fire. It burned through the wires, and the data was terrible. Thirty-three seconds in, it flamed out and Falcon fell a mile back onto the reef. We lost everything, all data, everything. There was the jubilation of it lifting off and the agony of it crashing. It was a pretty unpleasant time to be hanging with Elon. We flew back on the jet and there was an intense session to figure out what went wrong."
One year later, there was another failure. And when the third Falcon 1 fell into the sea in August 2008 — along with a payload contracted by NASA and the Department of Defense, along with the ashes of the actor who played Scotty on Star Trek — Musk faced disaster.
At the same time, he was at a crisis point with his other business, Tesla. He had begun production of Tesla's first car, the high-performance Roadster, but he couldn't produce enough of them. He hadn't yet begun receiving the proceeds of a half-billion-dollar loan from the federal government, and the financial system was commencing its collapse. He was searching for money and laying off people, and he wound up closing an R&D center and taking over for the CEO he'd hired to replace another CEO he'd fired earlier in the year.
"This wasn't Elon facing adversity," Kimbal says. "This was, 'Holy shit.' Personal bankruptcy was a daily conversation. Tesla was on the limb to deliver cars that people already paid for. Bankruptcy would have been easier than what he did. He threw everything he had into keeping Tesla alive."
He threw more than that into the Falcon 1's fourth launch on September 28, 2008. When Musk had decided to go into the rocket business, Adeo Ressi had counseled against it for two simple reasons: Outcomes are binary. "Rockets explode."
"Everything hinged on that launch," Ressi says. "Elon had lost all his money, but this was more than his fortune at stake — it was his credibility. He'd sold all these launches and would have to give the money back. And [if that had happened] right now we'd be having a conversation about his epic failure. If it works, epic success. If it fails — if one thing goes differently and it fails — epic failure. No in between. No partial credit. He'd had three failures already. It would have been over. We're talking Harvard Business School case study — rich guy who goes into the rocket business and loses it all...."
The rocket didn't explode. It rose into the sky and disappeared into orbit, Elon Musk's burden lifted as if for all humankind.
The problem with the Americans is that they were like Russians. No, they weren't gangsters, and they didn't make a business model of drinking you into a stupor. But the guys in American aerospace acted like they had you, and when you showed up with the money, they asked for more. Musk didn't like that. He didn't like getting screwed. He particularly didn't like getting screwed by people who also laughed at him. One time, for instance, he needed a valve—"The one we had was too small, and we needed a bigger one," Tom Mueller says. "We called a vendor and they said it would cost a quarter million dollars and it would take a year to make. We said, 'We need it this summer.' They laughed and told us to go away. So we decided to make it ourselves. They called us back in the summer. They were like, 'Hey, how is it going with that valve?' We said, 'We made it, we finished it, we qualified it, and we're going to fly it.'"
Another time, Musk had an issue with a vendor that makes the big aluminum domes that top off the fuel tanks. The issue was that they were going Russian on him. "We got a big increase from the vendor after the first units were delivered," says Mark Juncosa, SpaceX's lead structural engineer. "It was like a painter who paints half your house for one price, then wants three times that for the rest. That didn't make Elon too enthusiastic. He was like, 'All right, we're not going to get screwed by these guys....'"
SpaceX now makes its own domes — as Juncosa puts it, "We have our own dome-manufacturing facility in the back of the factory." This is a big deal: Elon Musk is not just assembling rockets in Hawthorne, California; he's manufacturing 70 percent of them, piece by piece. It doesn't mean that vendors have stopped trying to screw him, though, and on the evening that Musk sits eating his medieval turkey leg at his desk, Juncosa walks in to tell him that Alcoa is going Russian on him. The problem is that the domes are made of aluminum, and Alcoa has a special machine for making the aluminum SpaceX needs. They're the only ones who have it, they spent a lot of money on it, and now they want to make SpaceX pay for it....
This conversation takes place in the second week of September. SpaceX has a launch scheduled for October, less than a month away. But what Juncosa is discussing with Musk has nothing to do with the upcoming launch. It has nothing to do with any launch on the SpaceX flight manifest or any rocket that SpaceX currently manufactures. The current SpaceX rocket is the Falcon 9 1.0. It uses nine of Mueller's Merlin engines, and it's been to space four times. But Musk doesn't have engineers like Juncosa and Mueller working on it. Instead, he has them working on the future. He has them working on the Falcon 9 1.1 and the Falcon Heavy, which is meant for deep space. More important, he has them working on making rockets reusable.
"SpaceX has the most advanced rockets in the world," Musk says, but so far the advances have been "evolutionary" because the rockets are expendable — they end up in the ocean. "The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable."
This is a compelling idea. But when Musk gets into trouble, it's not because of the unifying intensity of his vision. He gets into trouble because of his divisions — because he builds great products he can't deliver. Tesla is in trouble again, is running short on money again, because it is having difficulty building enough of its amazing Model S sedans for people who've already paid for them. And SpaceX does not currently face the challenge of reusability or of going to Mars. It faces the challenge of living up to the faith of guys like Iridium's Matt Desch, who's counting on SpaceX to put nearly seventy satellites into orbit over the next five years.
"Elon's got to make SpaceX a company that will deliver tens of rockets a year and get his costs down much further than they are now," Desch says. "The technical challenge isn't getting to space — it's getting to space twenty times in a row. That's the really big technical challenge over the next two years. SpaceX knows that we get nervous every time we hear they have a big idea."
"Nobody understands what's driving this," Jim Cantrell says. "Right now, he's producing rockets at an industry average, and yet his flight manifest is much higher than industry average. It's exactly like Tesla. He has a rocket that works. But before he even finishes with that, he's building the next one."
And yet he can't help himself: He wants to build the next one. He has big ideas. He sells SpaceX with the reality of expendability and himself with the dream of reusability. He sells SpaceX with its launch manifest — its order book — and himself with Mars. His PR person describes him as "an unconventional man with conventional customers," not to mention vendors who act like Russians. So now as he finishes his turkey leg, he listens to Juncosa tell him that he's found a way to go around Alcoa, involving smaller pieces of aluminum. "Maybe," Musk says. "But they seem to be operating on the principle of 'What is the degree to which we can screw the customer, and that is the actual limit on the price.' They're giving the shaft to Tesla as well, and it really pisses me off."
The real problem, Musk tells Juncosa, is that "they make a shitload of aluminum."
"They're definitely not easy to push around," Juncosa says.
Musk smiles. He has a funny smile, boyish and playful but also private and a little rueful — he tends to laugh at the world's absurdity, and smile at his own.
"It makes me want to start an aluminum company," Musk says. "There has to be some serious gravy in that."
The October 7 mission successfully docked with the space station for the second time, even though one engine malfunctioned. The plan is for SpaceX to ferry humans there. Bruce Weaver/Getty
He knows what to do when he enters into a new partnership. He takes over. When he married Justine, he told her as they danced at the reception, "I'm the alpha in this relationship." And when he invested in Tesla in 2004, he quickly took control of its board of directors and deposed founder Martin Eberhard in 2007.
And so he knew what to do when, in 2006, NASA began changing from an agency that explores space into an agency that invests in space. When its essential charter was changed, NASA didn't know what to do: "It was a whole new way of doing business for us," says Alan Lindenmoyer, the head of NASA's commercial crew and cargo program. It even hired a consultant to teach it how to do venture capitalism and develop what Lindenmoyer calls "true partnerships" with "commercial space" companies like SpaceX. Musk knew what to do, though. He'd made his money in Silicon Valley, and some of his best friends were venture capitalists. He knew what worlds await those who can make themselves indispensable to their partners.
And he was indispensable to NASA from the start. An agency emblematic of national unity in the twentieth century spent the first years of the twenty-first responding to shrinking budgets and straitened circumstance. It had been shaken to the core by the death of seven astronauts in the space shuttle Columbia's return from space |
ones who want to earn college history credits while in a high school AP course) came about because Republicans think the coursework doesn’t shill for “American exceptionalism” enough. But why would Oklahoma Republicans – who embrace education “options” – want to rob all of their brightest high school seniors of the choice to inexpensively earn college history credits just because their history lessons may be critical and not necessarily full of pro-American propaganda?
If America is exceptional for anything, it was exceptional for the process its founders set in motion at the moment of its birth, when they put their plans into the tangible words of the Constitution. It was an imperfect document to be sure (that “three-fifths thing”, for example), but words were a vastly improved repository for nationhood than a crown.
That Constitution gave us the impetus to place both our nation and our history – wretched and glorious alike – in writing, in a document which could be amended, but would never be erased. We write shit down and improve on it: that is the American exception. The written word records our history, all of our history, in a way oral history alone can not, especially not with the centuries-long holocaust of Americans of color.
Republicans’ efforts – in Oklahoma and otherwise – to bury the past and replace it with a prettier version are outright un-American – in addition to being 100% ahistorical. Holding our children’s futures hostage by refusing them the opportunity to learn both the good and the bad is simply an effort to secure future votes, not help children learn... and you can’t hide the truth from kids forever, as any parent who welcomed Santa Claus into their home knows all too well.As foreign influence dominates the news cycle with President Trump's former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, and former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, registering as foreign lobbyists, getting better access to foreign lobbying documents is vital. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) collaborated with a number of other civil society groups to submit a public comment on ways to improve the collection of and public access to foreign lobbying documents.
These functions are regulated in part by the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires U.S. lobbyists who represent foreign governments to register their activities with the Department of Justice (DOJ). But as POGO detailed in our 2014 report “Loopholes, Filing Failures, and Lax Enforcement: How the Foreign Agents Registration Act Falls Short,” there are several significant issues with the law and the Justice Department’s enforcement of it.
The DOJ’s struggles with FARA enforcement were recently thrust into the spotlight when it became clear that President Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, failed to register his foreign lobbying activities under the law. Without proper enforcement of FARA it’s impossible for the public to know which foreign entities are attempting to influence U.S. policies and how.
In addition to fighting for improved enforcement, POGO—along with Demand Progress, The Sunlight Foundation, ProPublica, and The Center for Responsive Politics—have been working for years to better facilitate access to and analysis of these documents and offer recommendations to the DOJ. Right now downloadable data is difficult to analyze due to a lack of standardization, reports to Congress are filled with miscalculations and incomputable data, and sensitive or personal information can be accidently released.
While DOJ has made some significant progress in providing greater standardization of documents, more intuitive features, and better methods of collecting information from foreign lobbyists (including DOJ’s effort to develop new online capabilities for the FARA website), there is still a long way to go. Our recommendations are intended to further improve the quality, utility, and clarity of information collected and finally bring the collection of and access to these documents to an effective level.
If enacted, these records would provide the public with better tools and the knowledge needed to understand how foreign governments are attempting to influence U.S. policy, as the law intends.Sony's 4K video store has officially gone live today, offering owners of the company's $699 4K media player over 70 movies and TV shows in native Ultra HD resolution. Sony expects its 4K video library will grow to over 100 titles by the end of the year. The company previously outlined some of its launch titles, though it saved one surprise for today: for the first time, Breaking Bad fans can view the AMC hit in 4K resolution. TV episodes run $3.99, with film rentals priced at $7.99 for a 24-hour viewing window. Buying movies is a bit more costly at $29.99, but Sony says "select" content will include UltraViolet digital copies — a nice perk for early adopters.
Sony's 4K player can store up to 50 feature-length films on its 2TB hard drive, so thankfully it seems you won't need to erase or re-download the huge movie files often. Unfortunately the entire setup is only compatible with Sony-branded 4K TVs. That's not altogether surprising, but if you've already invested in another brand, it seems you're out of luck.Getty Images
Because of Sam Bradford’s injury and the presence of offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer, the Rams were among the early list of possibilities for former Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez.
And now, coach Jeff Fisher confirms that interest is real.
“I’d say that there is interest. I can’t say how much. But there certainly would be interest,” Fisher told Jim Corbett of USA Today. “I don’t have a backup with experience on the roster right now.”
Bradford is five months out from his torn ACL, and could still be ready for the start of the regular season. But the Rams only have Austin Davis behind him, after losing Kellen Clemens to the Chargers in free agency.
And it’s worth pointing out that Sanchez’s most effective years were with Schottenheimer, who was calling plays for the Jets when Sanchez was at the wheel for back-to-back AFC Championship Game runs (which included four road playoff wins).
“Brian had a good relationship with Mark,” Fisher said. “He’s just learning. He’s been to the AFC Championship game a couple of times, so he’s been there.”
The Rams have insisted they’re committed to Bradford, but having a better grade of backup would be wise also, as they enter a year with increased pressure to win.I n this piece, I’m going to lay out the simple, straightforward, indisputable case for veganism. It’s not an argument for veganism for health reasons. And it’s not an argument for veganism in order to combat climate change — though that appears to be a very good reason to go vegan by itself. Instead, I am concerned here with the argument from ethics.
1. The less suffering, the better.
Nobody lives a life in which they do not cause harm to others in some way, shape or form. There is no such thing as a cruelty-free lifestyle. Being vegan does not make you a saint.
But vegans are doing something to reduce the amount of suffering in the world, and that matters. Those who point out that our clothes, cellphones and laptops were crafted by overworked-and-underpaid laborers in atrocious conditions — as if this fact is a refutation of veganism — are not imploring us to make more ethical choices. Instead, they are telling us to stop making the ethical choice to not consume animal products, because the world will always have pain and suffering. Part of this pseudo-argument is in response to the aforementioned belief among many vegans that we don’t contribute to cruelty. If vegans can be shown to contribute to any measure of suffering, the “why bother trying at all” people believe, then veganism loses its higher ground. Of course, the extent to which we can make more ethical choices in our consumption habits is the extent to which we should.
And no, plants do not feel pain. Aside from the fact that plants don’t have brains — a prerequisite to having subjective experiences — pain serves no evolutionary purpose to an organism that cannot move. Even if plants did feel pain, however, veganism would still be the way to go, as plants would not need to die in order to feed animals which we eat in turn — a process that produces far less calories than if the plants are consumed directly.
Similar to the anti-vegan argument above, someone who makes the “plants feel pain” argument is attempting to convince you to abandon all efforts to make the world a better place. Else, they’d have to face the fact that their lifestyle causes a double-whammy of suffering: pain inflicted on plants fed to the animals which are then chopped up and eaten. On top of that, the plant-calories that turn into edible meat after being fed to animals is far less than the number of calories available if a human eats the plant directly. (One can similarly advocate for veganism on the basis of combating climate change using this formula.)
Of course, though we will never get to a world with zero suffering, less suffering is better. If you disagree with this basic idea, there’s not much of a point in continuing to read this post.
2. Animals feel pain.
If you are or have been a pet owner, you can tell when your little friend is suffering. You hear their whimpers and their cries, see their winces, and quite literally feel their pain.
Animals undoubtedly suffer. Cows, pigs, chickens and fish — the most commonly consumed animals — have all of the physiological, neuroanatomical and neurobiological substrates associated with not only the sensation of pain, but the experience of suffering due to said pain. This is not in dispute, as the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness — written and signed at a gathering of some of the world’s top biologists, physiologists, and neuroscientists — makes clear:
“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
Every species differs with respect to their ability to experience pain, but the fact remains that just about every animal we consume — with possible exceptions being clams, oysters, and similar species — is capable of suffering much like we are.
3. Animal agriculture causes suffering.
From cramped living conditions to tail-docking and debeaking sans anesthesia, animal agriculture is heartless. There is a very good reason that the laws against cruelty to animals specifically exempt the animals we raise for food. We’ve all seen the videos. And many of us know the standard practices. A baby calf torn away from its mother so that her milk can be purchased by humans who have no need for another species’ mammary secretions. Egg-laying hens stuffed in battery cages; their male offspring immediately placed en masse on a conveyor belt leading to a grinder.
If animals could choose, not one of them would pick a life carved out for them by the animal agriculture industry. And that’s besides the moral quandary of needlessly ending a life, something inherent in such an industry.
To make the argument crystal clear: we should avoid supporting the animal agriculture industry because animals are capable of suffering, and animal agriculture inflicts suffering. For just about everyone, this means going vegan is the right thing to do.
That’s all we need. Arguing that veganism is the healthiest diet is irresponsible and probably incorrect. It could be the case that a ketogenic diet that consists of almost exclusively animal products is the optimal diet for humans. Nutrition science is complex. The only way to know that someone is incorrect is if they are unequivocal in their proclamations about the relationships between diet, health and disease. If we keep saying that veganism is the healthiest dietary choice then we will look like morons if and when we are proven wrong.
We can’t afford to put forward weak arguments. So let’s stick to this, the simple, bulletproof case for veganism.Why don’t more craft beers have twist-off caps?
Two reasons. First, pry-off capping machines are slightly less expensive than their twist-off counterparts. Second, it is believed that twist-off caps can allow more oxygen into the bottle, potentially oxidizing and damaging the product. Sierra Nevada Brewing conducted 12 years of research on this topic that revealed that twist-off caps did allow a tiny bit more oxygen into the beer—but not quite enough to make a difference. Overall, craft breweries continue to use pop-off caps because it is a way to distinguish their pricier beers from popular domestic lagers (Budweiser, Coors, etc.). Plus, it’s deeply satisfying to produce that handy opener that lives on the end of your keychain—for a fleeting moment, you’ve created fire and are the most powerful member of the tribe.
Is there an official alcohol content level that defines a “session” beer?
For competitions, the Brewers Association rules state that the ABV of a session beer should be less than 5.1 percent, but there’s no official definition. A good session should have an even distribution of hop and malt flavor and light density—you should be able to throw back a couple and not fall off your barstool after an hour.
Which is correct, Black IPA or Cascadian Dark Ale?
The name “Black IPA” was coined first, as craft breweries across America started using darker malts to complement the crisp, floral hops that they were using in their India Pales. The term “Cascadian Dark Ale” came about because brewers from the Pacific Northwest had an influential hand in the popularity of this particular style. The Brewers Association attempted to settle the debate in 2010, landing on “American Style India Black Ale.” Most craft breweries did not accept this compromise, however, and continue to title their beer as they see fit. We encourage you to do the same
Is there a taste difference between a can and a bottle?
Cans are lighter, are more easily transported, don’t shatter, and keep a tight, effective oxygen seal. Some drinkers claim they can detect that subtle “metallic taste” in a canned beer, but since 1935 cans have been lined with a thin coat of plastic to combat precisely that perception. In a blind taste test conducted by Huffington Post last year, the test group preferred the beer poured from a can in three out of the four beers sampled. Many breweries—including Sierra Nevada, 21st Amendment, Kona, Fort George, Hopworks, and Caldera—have embraced aluminum, and there’s even a mobile canning operation in Portland, sealing up some of the region’s finest. You be the judge.
What’s a “farmhouse” ale?
Farmhouse ales came about when 19th-century French farmers would use local crops—either traded from neighboring farms or grown in their own fields—to whip up a fresh, impromptu beer to enjoy after a long day’s labor. Because they would toss in whatever ingredients were on hand, without much thought or planning, these beers were (and are) frequently lower in alcohol, unpasteurized, and charmingly rough around the palate. Around these parts, farmhouse ales usually refer to yeasty small-batch brews created by craft brewers like Logsdon and the Commons.I love indie games. Sure, I still play big triple-A games, but those can sometimes feel like empty calories. The thing I love about indie games is that they have the opportunity to do something a bit different. They don’t have to cater to the lowest common denominator, so they can do things like work with ignored genres or focus, focus on a specific element like A.I., or even try out new types of gameplay. Yes, sometimes you’ll find pretentious crap or lazy developers who slop together a game in hopes of cashing in on the trend, but when you find something that scratches your itch it’s so awesome. (And usually the indies are more willing to chat with you about their game.)
I was approached by Leszek Sliwko, author of the game Age of Fear. Age of Fear is a fantasy turn-based strategy game. Looks like the kind of thing that would definitely be of interest for people who read my blog, so I figured I’d get Leszek to do a quick interview about his experiences developing the game.
1. Who are you and what is your background? Where are you from?
Hi, I am Leszek Sliwko from Poland, Lower-Silesia region. I have studied on Wroclaw University of Technology and got my Master of Science there. I did few courses in meta-heuristic algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (it was called Computing Logic or something similar then) and found that I really like this area of science.
2. What’s the local independent game scene like where you live?
I know few guys who do flash games in their free time, but aside from that I am not aware of any indies in my area :-(
There are few game studios in Poland, like CD Project (The Witcher) or Techland (Call of Juarez), however I would say developing games is not as popular of a trade as in the US.
3. What was your motivation for creating your game? What creative works and other games influenced you?
As I mentioned I am all into AI, but my next big interest are fantasy books. I have read almost all David Eddings and Harry Turtledove’s books. Their attention to details and the complexity of their worlds is not something you can find in today’s literature. Especially The Belgariad – this is a story of 4000 years old guy’s life. And you still want to read it after first 1000 pages :-) I hope I was able at least partially mimic this in Age of Fear’s story.
Two games really influenced me: Warlords 3 (low hit points and interesting abilities) and Battle of Wesnoth (story and experience system). Battle of Wesnoth is still my favourite game! I have spend hundreds of hours playing that and many features in AOF were based on what was done in this game. I will even say more – it Battle of Wesnoth implemented ranged attacks and more meaningful magic – Age of Fear will never be created at first place (as I will be busy playing) :-D
4. What was the worst thing that happened during development?
The hardest thing in developing turn-based strategies in AI module. In RTS or shooters computer has advantage of speed or multitasking. In turn-based strategies your game is challenging human brain with his amazing adaptation abilities (perfected over last few million of years) and its save-game button. It’s gets especially hard when you want to create non-cheating AI. To give an example – engineers needed about 30 years to create a good chess player. And chess are very simple in comparison to current strategy games.
Age of Fear was originally designed for player to lead up to six characters top, however it was much more fun to have bigger teams fighting each other. Problem was that AI was originally designed to handle individual units only – it was working very fine with small teams (through some simple meta-heuristic optimisation algorithms), but it was totally dumb when it was controlling more characters, who needed to cooperate with each other.
I had to throw the AI module into the bin and start from scratch, but that was really fun work. Today, about 30% of the code is AI module only. In short: planner module creates projects (like KillUnit, HealUnit, ProtectUnit, etc.) and assigns priorities to them (fuzzy logic + influence maps are used). Then units (software agents) pick up the projects where they think they do the best and coordinate project’s execution between themselves. The effect is that computer player tries rather to get into better tactical position, than to kill player’s units. AI module has been also evolved (by Genetic Algorithm) to optimise weights used on project priorities assignment (but it does not learn anymore).
5. What advice would you give to people working on their first independent game?
Start with good design – I mean really good design – few sheets of papers with ideas are not good enough.
Times for cowboy coders have ended – you just cannot hack together a complex system and hope it will work together. You are doing software application and you need software engineer’s approach – there is no easy way around it. Object-oriented design, event-driven architecture, unit tests, etc. – those are your best friends :-)
You will also need a team or you can outsource parts of work – but make sure to describe everything in details. Contractors are very motivated, but they cannot read your mind.
I often have read that you should start with small project – I don’t agree. You should start with something that interest you and only then you will have determination to finish it.
Thanks for sharing your insight!
Looks like an interesting game. The graphics aren’t spectacular, but it’s about what you expect from an indie game. Leszek asked me to play before, but it was during GDC so I didn’t get much time. I hope to sit down and spend a bit more time with it soon.
If you are interested and you buy now, there are a few discounts you can take advantage of:
50% off price in first week (until 17th April)
25% off price in second week (until 24th April)
Visit the site http://www.age-of-fear.net/ for more information.The following is a semi-satirical video produced by freedom fighter Brendon O’Connell several years ago before his imprisonment. It is still very relevant. It demonstrates how Hamas, which was created by Israel, is no friend to the Palestinians and is, in fact, a controlled opposition caper working for Israel in order to give the Israelis the pretext to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. It also keeps rank-and-file Jews in obedience through fear. It’s a classic false flag deception.
Remember what former Israeli Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky revealed in the early 1990s:
Supporting the radical elements of Muslim fundamentalism sat well with the Mossad’s general plan for the region. An Arab world run by fundamentalists would not be a party to any negotiations with the West, thus leaving Israel again as the only democratic, rational country in the region. And if the Mossad could arrange for the Hamas (Palestinian fundamentalists) to take over the Palestinian streets from the PLO, then the picture would be complete.
—Victor Ostrovsky, The Other Side of Deception – pg. 197
For those not familiar with how the Zionist terrorist network in Israeli is structured, Ostrovsky gives the following illustration in By Way of Deception (1990):
Note: Shin Bet is now Shaback, which is basically like the FBI. However, this information is likely slightly outdated, as Ostrovsky’s books were published in the early 1990s. The Mossad (like America’s CIA) is Israel’s crown assassination Golem.EPISODE RECAP
This weekend ACL features two powerful singer-songwriters: Jason Isbell and Neko Case, each possessing a distinctive style and voice.
Hailed as “one of America’s thoroughbred songwriters” by The New York Times, Jason Isbell opens the episode, making his ACL debut. The Nashville-via-Mussel Shoals, Alabama singer/songwriter’s 2013 album Southeastern scored a Top 25 on the Billboard 200, and critical raves, including topping many critic’s year-end best lists. The New York Times Magazine declared, “the record is a breakthrough for Isbell—prickly with loss, forgiveness, newfound sobriety and second chances.” Rolling Stone calls it “one of the year’s best in any genre,” and Pitchfork raves “Southeastern is easily Isbell’s best solo album.” A former member of acclaimed Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers, Isbell launched a solo career in 2007. Backed by his band the 400 Unit, including his wife, fiddler Amanda Shires, and with a rawness and honesty that’s rare in contemporary songwriting, Isbell gives a stunning must-see performance on the ACL stage.
“It doesn’t happen very often,” said executive producer Terry Lickona, “but when Jason sang ‘Elephant,’ it literally gave me chills. That’s the kind of writer he is, and that’s the kind of performer he is.”
Neko Case makes a thunderous return to ACL (she first appeared in 2003) performing songs from her acclaimed 2013 release The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, her sixth studio album. Case emerges from a three-year period the artist describes as full of “grief and mourning,” in the wake of the deaths of not just both her parents, but several intimates as well. With her fearless songwriting and musical curiosity, Neko Case captures fans with “one of the most memorable and seductive voices in music” (NPR). Pitchfork says The Worse Things Get… “is the most potent album of her career,” and Rolling Stone raves that Case is “one of America’s best and most ambitious songwriters.” Case performs a captivating set of songs from the new record, and a few gems from her recent releases.
“There’s something about that voice, but it’s also about the delivery – which makes this performance that much more special,” said Lickona. “Her television performances are few and far between, so this is one that’s not to be missed!”
Check out the episode page for more details. Don’t forget, you can click over to our Facebook, Twitter and newsletter pages for more ACL goodies. Next week: another brand-new episode featuring fun. and Dawes.An opinion piece in the UC Berkeley student newspaper is complaining of gender discrimination and male "toxicity" in the world of video gaming.
“Video games, too, should be taken seriously for their influence on society in simultaneously combating and perpetuating structures of oppression,” student author Mumu Lin writes in the Daily Californian.
The piece, titled “Don’t be a dick: Toxicity in the gaming community,” details Lin’s personal experience with the callous insensitivity found among video gamers.
Once during a contentious video game competition, the Daily Cal writer shouted “Hey, thanks!” to a teammate, because this individual saved her character from being shot down. Subsequently, another teammate of Lin’s stormily responded, “Shut up, fag!” Lin muted herself from the game.
“I was always someone who avoided confrontation and social interaction, and the prospect of encountering harassment had turned me off of online gaming for a while,” Lin admits.
Her argument is that this instance of inscrutable animosity on behalf of her online adversaries, due to her high-pitched female voice, is demonstrative of a much broader topic that she calls “Video Game Culture.”
The editorial suggests that there is a patriarchal overbearing found in the video game community.
“The straight male demographic traditionally dominates, and the loudest voices seemed to prefer that this self-imposed bubble stay the way it is,” Lin writes. “This was very much evident in just how many people supported all of the sexism and racism that spewed once given a banner to rally under.”
Lin makes reference to the 2014 Gamergate controversy, in which multiple allegations of misogyny and sexism arose within the video gaming community, but believes that a social movement can bring justice to the world of video gaming. As the number and diversity of video gamers progress, “encountering harassment based on race or gender should not continue to be normalized."
She concludes, “My feelings on video games, in the immortal words of Mayor Quimby from ‘The Simpsons,’ can be two things. Even my most beloved works of media and communities can improve, and that’s an exciting prospect rather than a negative one.”
Now what Lin perhaps fails to understand is that sexist, racist, or otherwise horrendous comments made online while people play Xbox has little do with video games and everything to do with space and anonymity. The hate Lin describes is not unique to video games. You can find the same rhetoric in the comment section on YouTube or the hate spewed on Twitter.
Hiding behind a screen often brings out the worst in people. The spatial distance allows others to shield themselves from the pain they create. It's even easier to shoot off a mean text message than to say the same thing in person. While it's admirable that Lin believes a social movement can clean up the banter on Xbox live, it may help her, and the rest of the video gaming community, to identify the real problem first.
Isaiah Denby is a college freshman from Tampa Bay, Florida studying economics and political science.Get the biggest Sunderland AFC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Jermain Defoe has revealed the critical part he played in Younes Kaboul’s move to Sunderland – and the Black Cats striker insists the club have signed a “natural leader who has got everything”.
Kaboul has joined the Wearside outfit in a £3 million, four-year switch from Tottenham Hotspur.
The 29-year-old played alongside Defoe at both White Hart Lane and Portsmouth.
And Defoe has explained how Kaboul and Dick Advocaat sounded him out about the move before Thursday’s deal was completed.
“Dick Advocaat asked me what I thought of him and I told him if you can get him he’ll be a top signing,” he said.
“He’s a great guy. Obviously I played with him at Tottenham for a few years and then again at Portsmouth.
“He’s a top player and a top professional.
“Younes messaged me about the move as well, and he’s looking forward to linking up with the squad.
“He was Spurs captain and he is a leader on the pitch. Physically he’s so strong, I think he’s a player who has got everything and I think he’ll do really well at Sunderland.
“Younes is a winner and a natural leader on the pitch and he’ll come to the club and bring that attitude – he’s a great signing for us.
“Even in training he was always going for it, running, tackling, heading, attacking – fans will love what he’ll bring to the team.”
Kaboul has returned the favour by telling Sunderland’s official website safc.com how highly he rates Defoe. “He’s a special guy,” he said. “You enjoy working with him every day and I can’t wait to see him and play with him again.
“He only needs one yard to shoot or to score. He can surprise anyone quickly. For us to have a player like that is amazing.”
And Kaboul is relishing the chance to work with Dick Advocaat.
“He is a great man, a great manager,” he said.
“From what I saw of the game against Arsenal, I was really impressed by everyone involved with the club. It was really emotional. What the guys did was amazing. You need that team spirit, it’s the most important.”
Kaboul added: “I have very good memories (of Tottenham).
“Now that is behind me and I’m looking forward to starting a new challenge.
“There is good leadership here already in John O’Shea, who was at Manchester United a long time. He’s got great experience. You’ve got Sebastian Larsson, you’ve got Jermain Defoe. Many players. Lee Cattermole.
“I’m very delighted to join them here and I hope we’ll have a great, healthy season.”Gardaí believe a giant Russian man was fatally attacked in a drunken row at a party because of his height and nationality.
Gardaí believe a giant Russian man was fatally attacked in a drunken row at a party because of his height and nationality.
Officers in Co Kerry launched a murder investigation into the death of Dmitry Hrynkevich (24), the third tallest man in Ireland standing at 7ft6in (2.32m), after an attack at Killeen Wood, Tralee, on Wednesday, September 30. Mr Hrynkevich was found lying on the front lawn of a property in the estate shortly after 10.30pm with serious head injuries. He was rushed to Kerry General Hospital.
The young man was placed on a life-support machine but, despite the desperate efforts of surgeons, he never regained consciousness. He died on Friday evening with his heartbroken family by his bedside.
Supt Jim O'Connor described the incident as "very serious" given the injuries involved.
"This is a very serious matter and we appealing for help from the public," he said.
For operational reasons, gardaí have declined to release the results of the post-mortem examination conducted at Kerry General Hospital by the State Pathologist's Office.
But it is understood Mr Hrynkevich suffered horrific head injuries. They were consistent with a brutal and prolonged attack. Mr Hrynkevich is understood to have attended the Killeen Wood property together with a number of others for a social gathering.
The young man was well known in Tralee and Killarney for his height, standing 7ft6in (2.32m). He was born in Russia but grew up in Killarney, having addresses at both Aghadoe and Bishop's Court.
The young man had been targeted in the past as from his early teens, he stood over six foot tall.
Killarney friends described him as a very gentle man who was very conscious of his height.
Two men were arrested by gardaí in the vicinity of Killeen Woods on Wednesday evening and detained under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act.
Both were questioned at Tralee Garda Station before being released without charge on Friday.
The duo, in their late 20s and early 30s, are both east European nationals though neither is Russian. They both have addresses in the Kerry area.
A file will now be prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).
Gardaí sealed off the semi-detached house which is located in a quiet cul-de-sac immediately after Mr Hrynkevich was found unconscious on the front lawn.
Officers undertook door-to-door inquiries as well as conducting a detailed forensic examination of the scene.
Investigating gardaí are appealing for witnesses, or anyone who could provide background information, to come forward.
They are particularly appealing to anyone who was in the vicinity of Killeen Woods at the time of the incident to contact them. Gardaí also want to clarify Mr Hrynkevich's precise movements on Wednesday and who was in his company that evening.
Detectives believe a number of people were in the property involved on Wednesday and appealed to them to contact Tralee gardaí even if they had left the house before the incident occurred.
Gardaí believe the incident in which Mr Hrynkevich sustained his fatal injuries began inside the property before spiralling outside.
Anyone with information is asked to contact Tralee Garda Station 066-7102300 or the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111.
Locals admitted they were shocked to learn that the injured man had died. One local man said he was aware that a party was taking place in the property at the rear of the cul-de-sac.
He later noticed the presence of a large number of uniformed gardaí.
"That was the first I heard someone had been hurt. It is very sad," he said.
Irish IndependentWe’ve already tried to generate power from ocean waves and tides. Now engineers are trying to tap energy from another of the sea’s abundant resources: salt.
Efforts to generate power from the salinity difference between seawater and fresh water from rivers and lakes are already well advanced in Europe, where two alternative approaches are being tried out.
Last week Redstack, based in Sneek in the Netherlands, was granted permits to build a pilot salt battery at the Afsluitdijk dyke in the north of the country, fuelled by waters from an inland lake and the North Sea. The plant should initially be able to deliver 5 kilowatts, but the company wants to increase this to 50 kilowatts over the next few years if funding is secured, says director Pieter Hack.
The company already has a small pilot plant operating on waste water from a salt mine in the same area.
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Red sea power
Its salt battery is based on a process called reverse electrodialysis (RED) and consists of a stack of membranes. Each one is waterproof but allows either positive or negative ions to pass through, with “positive” and “negative” types alternating in the stack.
Salt and fresh water are pumped into chambers in the stack that are sealed off from one another by the membranes. The positive sodium ions in the seawater flow across one membrane to the fresh water, while the negative chloride ions from the seawater flow across a membrane in the other direction. This process generates a potential difference between titanium electrodes coated in a precious metal placed at either end of the cell.
Redstack calculates that there is enough water available at the Afsluitdijk dyke site to support a 200-megawatt plant.
Pressure drop
Meanwhile power company Statkraft in Lilleaker, Norway, is testing a different approach to osmotic power, known as pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO). Last November the company opened a prototype plant on the Oslo fjord at Tofte in southern Norway. Here a water-permeable membrane is used to draw fresh water on one side to salty water on the other. This creates a current that drives a turbine.
Whatever the choice of system, there is theoretically enough energy available across the globe in the estuaries where rivers and seas meet to generate more than 2 terawatts of energy, enough to meet all of the world’s electricity needs, claims Bert Hamelers, an environmental engineer at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Better still, osmotic power plants would provide a continuous source of electricity, whatever the weather – unlike wind, wave and solar energy.
But the technology is expensive. Hack has estimated that a 200-megawatt salinity power plant would cost up to $600 million to construct. As a result electricity from the plant would cost around $90 per megawatt-hour – almost twice that of fossil fuel-generated electricity at $50 per megawatt-hour.
So Hamelers and colleagues are developing a new type of salt battery that he claims will be able to generate power from a salinity difference much more cheaply.
Saline solution
In Hamelers’s design, seawater is fed into a chamber containing a sandwich of two ion-permeable membranes between two electrodes. Like the RED device, the positive sodium ions are drawn through a membrane that allows only positive ions to pass, and are then attracted to the electrode. The negative chloride ions are drawn through a membrane that only allows anions to pass, and are attracted to another electrode on the opposite side.
Electrons from the now negatively charged chloride electrode then begin flowing to the positively charged sodium electrode, generating a current between the two. Once the seawater electrons are exhausted, fresh water is pumped into the chamber, the sodium ions are drawn back through the membrane to the water, and the electrons begin to flow in the opposite |
iPad can not only house information on opposing batters and pitchers – including spray charts, tendencies and any other statistical information under the sun – but also video.
Reds right fielder Jay Bruce said he looked at the iPad on Monday, the first game it was in use, just to look at it. He said he didn’t look too deeply into it because he’s already familiar with most of the Cardinals pitchers.
“I know these guys well enough that, if I need to look at too much video or stuff on paper, I’m in trouble as it is,” Bruce said.
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He did note that the video could help him against a team he doesn’t know as well, such as the Mets, who start a four-game series at Great American Ball Park on Thursday.
As of now, the iPads aren’t allowed in the bullpens, but that time could be coming.
The biggest issue, Price said, was security. He had a conference call last weekend with Major League Baseball explaining the security. MLB is also concerned with teams getting live feeds on their iPads in order to steal signs.
“There’s going to be some conspiracy theories, but the way MLB has explained it is that it’s a tool that can’t be breached by another team or in any way that can compromise the integrity of the game,” Price said.
The trial period will likely give teams a chance to see how it works and how to utilize the technology in different ways. The NFL has had tablets on the sidelines for several years now.
“I think utilizing the resources you have is huge – not just in baseball, but any profession,” Bruce said. “If it’s there, if it’s going to make me more successful, I’ll use it.”
IGLESIAS IMPROVING: Right-hander Raisel Iglesias is improving from his sore right shoulder and could throw a bullpen soon. He could return to the Reds’ rotation before the end of the season, Price said.
“Until you go out there on the mound and see him pitch, it’s hard to say exactly what you’re going to get in return,” Price said. “The next step for Raisel will be to throw a bullpen, and if we get through that, we can start to talk seriously about penciling him in maybe for a start at some point before the season’s out, or at least an appearance.”
Iglesias last pitched on Sept. 13 and allowed two runs in five innings. The rookie has thrown 124 1/3 innings between Cincinnati and Triple-A Louisville this season.
“We’ll wait until we get back to Cincinnati before we define what throwing protocols we want to satisfy before we consider him for games. I’m optimistic that he’ll take the mound again this year. Really, in my opinion, the only reason he wouldn’t is (if we're) being extremely cautious. I don’t think there’s anything medically that will prevent him from being able to go out and pitch.”
REMEMBERING YOGI: The Cardinals held a moment of silence before the game for St. Louis native and Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, who died Tuesday night.
Price said he remembered watching the Berra-managed Mets as a fan from the stands of the Oakland Coliseum in the 1973 World Series. Reds third baseman Todd Frazier said he met Berra after his New Jersey team won the 1998 Little League World Series.
“We went to his hall of fame and museum in Montclair, and he signed everyone’s ball,” Frazier said. “He was very gracious, one of the best to ever play this game. He stuck to his roots. He’s a guy you look up to for sure. He loved his family and he loved the Yankees. That’s something you look upon. I love the Reds. He had a passion for the game, you can’t not look up to a guy like that. It’s a sad day for baseball.”Greeting and salutations, everyone! Unmistakable here with another full-length deck tech. This time around I wanted to do something REALLY special. In my Previous Three Deck Techs, I showed you some fun, budget builds for the family-friendly EDH meta. This time around, I’m looking to showcase to you guys the inner workings of one of my meanest decks. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet The Grand Arbiter. This deck is a laser-focussed, no-holds-barred deck that comes out of its box when I hear complaints that games aren’t lasting long enough. In which case, they end up lasting FOREVER.
Why Grand Arbiter Augustin IV?
…Is what I hear when people see me reach for his deckbox. When I wanted to build a Prison deck with a cheap(ish) landbase, Azorius colours came to mind. While Brago, King Eternal is also a very solid option, I picked GAAIV primarily because:
He himself is a taxing effect, and rushing him out (and having repeated access to his effect) is incredibly disruptive to opponents, especially when averaging turn 2-3 Commander casts.
is incredibly disruptive to opponents, especially when averaging turn 2-3 Commander casts. His presence immediately breaks parity with the table by granting me a discount on coloured spells.
He doesn’t rely on feeding an activated ability like Gwafa Hazid, or making a combat connection like Brago. This allows his interaction with players to begin straight away, rather than being a looming, must-answer threat that can be stopped.
The Deck
Win Conditions
I’ll begin with the Win Conditions of the deck: Winning is secondary in this deck, with the primary aim being to lock all others out of the game firstly. However, there are multiple easy-to-assemble combos:
Jace, the Mind Sculptor – The flashiest win condition of the deck is also the least used. Often Jace will just represent a card advantage engine, as repeated brainstorms will allow me to see enough cards to set up a lock with ease. However, there have been times where a late JtMS has allowed me to pile pressure onto flailing opponents, allowing me to filter their draws so their desperate search for answers remains desperate until Jace takes their library.
Basalt Monolith, Rings of Brighthearth, Power Artifact, Staff of Domination, Stroke of Genius – Here is the meat-and-potatoes of the win-con package. Basalt Monolith, coupled with either rings or Power artifact, enables infinite colourless mana. From there, we funnel the mana into either the Staff or the Stroke to Draw our entire deck to find more combo pieces. Alternatively, the Stroke can be turned on an opponent to deck them out. The Rings in particular are an MVP here due to their ability to duplicate planeswalker abilities, allowing a double-tutor with Tezzeret, or a Double Unsummon/Brainstorm with Jace.
Helm of Obedience, Rest in Peace – The other combo, the merciful pillow that takes one of your victims from the game. Rest in Peace is also just a solid hate card on its own, combined with Helm of Obedience (and perhaps copied with Rings of Brighthearth), it can force a player to mill until they find a certain number of cards in their graveyard – which will never happen. Because exile. The most common way to take an opponent out of the game, it is also often followed by multiple concessions of people desperate to move onto the next game.
Hate Pieces
Now that we’ve covered the kinder ways for our prison deck to win, lets talk about the other cogs in this concession machine.
Aura of Silence – A very common (and powerful) stax piece, sticking one of these early on into the game disrupts the building of mana rock suites from your opponents, as well as setting up of combo pieces such as Nim Deathmantle or Altar of Dementia. Once it has successfully disrupted your opponent’s long enough, it doubles as a free naturalize (two with Rings) to mop up some of the artifacts/enchantments that slipped through the cracks. It also works as a deterrent from anybody using infinite loops incorporating artifacts like the afforementioned Mantle/Altars.
Aven Mindcensor – A great little trick, this guy flashed in can blank fetches, tutors for answers, turns off Birthing Pod engines (most of the time), and really puts the screws on reanimator decks looking to use Buried Alive to cheat things in through the yard.
Back to Basics – My undoubted favourite card in this deck, Back to Basics has caused so many turn 3 concessions that I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t used more. In a two colour deck, nonbasics are nowhere near as important for fixing purposes, so slamming this early can leave you completely untouched while it has just blanked the greedier 3 colour (and more recently, 4 colour) decks of all of their mana on field and in hand. Couldn’t recommend this card more.
Cursed Totem – A very recent inclusion to this deck – one that almost didn’t make this article in fact – the totem is a small but mighty addition to Augustin’s Arsenal. This piece is completely asymmetrical in this deck – you have zero creatures that get hosed by it, but the totem is a VERY powerful stax piece that hoses entire strategies. In my local meta there are decks that win off of the back of Kiki-Jiki, Rhys the Redeemed, Tasigur, the Golden Fang, Metalworker, Palinchron, and many many more – all of which are completely bricked by this little two-mana artifact. A very useful piece of tech that after trying out for myself I can’t see myself being without in this deck.
Ethersworn Canonist – A quintessential hatebear, this one’s very situational in its uses. GAAIV himself has roughly 1/4 of his nonland permanents be artifacts through his extensive rock suite, so he can fight through an imposed Rule of Law a lot quicker than other decks such as Edric that spew out their ramp through creatures; Dorks are a lot less attractive when its the only thing a green deck can do in a turn.
Humility – A hate card for those stompy decks and creature-based combo decks. Facing a Kozilek, the Great Distortion eldrazi/manarock tribal deck and a Riku twin combo deck on a regular basis, I jammed Humility in here to deal with those despite not having the other secondary lock pieces like Night of Souls’ Betrayal. Great to slow down creature decks until you hit your stride, and will almost always draw an expletive or two out of your opponents.
Propaganda – See above. Being in a creature-based meta is rough on old GAAIV, and often one hate card doesn’t quite scratch the itch. As such, a backup Ghostly Prison effect (The blue one being easier to cast in a 60% blue deck) is a necessity to keep those nasty Deceiver Exarchs and Reality Smashers off my face.
Sphere of Resistance – ‘But Unmistakable!’ You might say, ‘This is Symmetrical! It slows you down just as much as it does your opponents!’..Well. You would be right, if it wasn’t for the second ability on GAAIV negating the tax on you. A turn two GAAIV into this on turn 3 backed up with something like Back to Basics beforehand can just completely lock all but the most competitive decks out for the remainder of the game.
Interaction
A prison deck wouldn’t be much without a bunch of interaction to keep your opponents out of the game, right? Well, GAAIV is in the house bringing it in spades.
Arcane Denial, Counterspell, Dissipate, Dissolve, Force of Will, Mystic Confluence, Negate, Pact of Negation, Swan Song – The main Counterspell suite. There are some that I’m leaving out of this discussion, and I’ll list them after. These represent blockades in your opponent’s attempts to break the locks you’re putting on them. You need to pick your moments as they are finite, but with an explosive enough start spells will be trickling so slowly you can be REALLY generous with the counterspell love.
Council’s Judgment – Perhaps one of my favourite elements of the removal suite, this spell is nuts in its flexibility. You paint a target, and your opponents have an awkward conversation about what the outcome is. 9 times out of 10 if you paint the target right you’ll take out what you’re aiming for, through hexproof and shroud. Often you’ll also get a bonus 2-for 1 out of a spite vote for another permanent as well, which being exiled for 3 mana (just WW with your commander active) seems like a great deal for me.
Cyclonic Rift – [Token quip about being a blue staple for a reason here]. All jokes aside, this card is nuts. For 2 mana you can take a guy off of a combo long enough to seal that avenue back up by the time it is next their turn, or for 5 more mana you can set everybody back to empty board to battle through your taxes and counters all over again. Also causes many concessions.
Hurkyl’s Recall – In a meta with Kozilek manarock tribal, or Daretti Reanimator, or a newly-forged Breya deck, this often comes a lot closer to a 2 mana Cyclonic Rift than it’s narrow-looking application would imply. At worst a turn’s worth of setback, at best a complete uprooting of a board state; and for two mana, that’s ok.
Mental Misstep – Modern bannable, Legacy Bannable, Vintage (barely) legal, Commander fair game. The Misstep has earned its own spot in the interaction discussion through it’s surprisingly wide and varied uses. A lot of power cards in EDH are 1 mana – Deathrite Shaman, Sol Ring, Mana Vault, Enlightened Tutor, Sensei’s Divining Top, Vampiric Tutor, Dark Ritual, Mystical Tutor, Burgeoning… Every deck has a premier 1 drop that it wants as soon as possible. If they have it and nobody has land on turn 1, they’ll go for it. Nobody has interaction, right? Nah, friend. I’ve caused a lot of decks to fold because they banked their shaky hand on snowballing that Sol Ring turn one, only to have it crumble in front of them before I’ve even hit my first upkeep? This card can turn brutal openers into brutal failures for just 2 life.
Path to Exile, Swords to Plowshares – One mana creature removal that punctures through indestructible clauses. Swords is infinitely better to Path, but redundancy declares that both be run to be sure I have the answer when I need it. Path can help break the player’s stall, but if they’re sculpting the top of their library they may not choose to grab the land, or can disrupt their plan by absent-mindedly picking up and searching their library. Great supports to the other spells.
Supreme Verdict, Wrath of God – Sometimes, the floodgates open. Sometimes creatures will stream through your lock pieces, and you sit there scrabbling to put the lock back on. These are the reset buttons. Will probably kill GAAIV too, but if you’re as ahead on resources as you should be, resummoning after will be a lot less costly than letting creatures run rampant in YOUR battlefield.
Draw
Coming up next, Card advantage is imperative to make sure you’re keeping ahead on the game. So in GAAIV, we draw a LOT of cards.
Consecrated Sphinx – This is in draw despite being a heady threat because well, it drowns you in card advantage. Quite literally, you draw up to 2x more each turn cycle than your opponents do combined. It takes your game plan into overdrive, and will assemble combos quicker than your opponents can cast spells.
Dig Through Time – Another card that feels unfair in every format, Dig helps you find exactly what you need; be it more answers, hate pieces or the final combo pieces. All for a cool 2 mana. Synergises well with the Consecrated Sphinx, as your ‘yard will stack up VERY fast when you end up drawing 8 cards per turn cycle.
Fact or Fiction, Impulse, Thirst for Knowledge – Instant speed card advantage. When you’re looking for something in particular, the FoF will often help you get there with a slightly deeper delve than Thirst, but with the deck being highly populated by artifacts, you’ll often only discard one to Thirst, making it incredibly potent for only 3 mana (2 with GAAIV). Impulse is the odd one out because even though it digs deeper than Thirst, it only cantrips. This is often a very potent action and with the amount of redundancy in the deck through a tutor suite, this will almost always be what you want it to be.
Mystic Remora, Rhystic Study – Two enchantments that grind out card advantage VERY quickly. Rhystic Study is often another tax for those savvy enough to not let you draw, which is also fine on top of the others. Remora however often just reads like a one-sided Heartwood Storyteller, as the +4 payment on each noncreature spell is often too unwieldy to play around.
Ponder, Preordain – Basic topdeck manipulation cards; these can turn shaky hands into quick starts, and help dig for answers at minimal cost. The shuffle effect on Ponder is relevant with an active Top or Rack too, more on those in a sec. Either way, I’m never unhappy to see these early, as it’s a small price to pay to get closer to action.
Scroll Rack, Sensei’s Divining Top – Standard card advantage artifacts, both of these get greater with shuffle effects. Despite not owning the critical mass of fetches, I’m confident that between the ones I do have, the tutor suite, and my shuffling draws such as the Timetwister effects and Ponder, that it is almost certainly enough. Special mention goes to Scroll Rack here, which really comes into its own when your hand is brimming (through a large Sphinx’s Revelation or Consecrated Sphinx), allowing you to see half or even three quarters of your deck in a single turn.
Sphinx’s Revelation – This one is in the same category as Stroke of Genius but can’t be classified as a win condition due to its inability to target opponents; this card is as busted in EDH as it was in its heyday in standard. Once you’ve vomited out your rocks and lock pieces, you can rev to give yourself a complete refill, and a well timed sphinx’s rev is often the sign that you’ve completed your stabilisation.
Time Reversal, Time Spiral – Two Timetwister-esque (I’d have one if I had the money) effects are important to the overall lock in the following ways: 1) It recycles your spells/destroyed pieces back into the library, 2) it flash refills your hand with answers, and 3) it is one of the few ways the deck can deal with hands. As the game continues, the combo players often manage to sneak through the odd tutor, looking for ways to fight through the lock and take me out of the driver’s seat. With a well-timed Timetwister, however, their carefully sculpted hands go back into the abyss, to be replaced with (ideally) worse options. I was sceptical about trialling these when I first figured out they’d be worth it (and I got some weird looks when I tried them out), but over time I’ve become completely sold on their importance in this form of deck.
Tutors
In any EDH deck, consistency is important to making sure you get where you need to go.
Enlightened Tutor – This card is a very flexible addition to GAAIV’s toolbox. It could represent a Mana Crypt in the early game to help power out that turn 2 Commander. It could represent that Back to Basics you’ve needed to finally eke ahead of your opponents. It also could represent that final piece of the kill combo you need to grant the hand of mercy to your opponents so you can move onto the next game. In any situation, it’s always fantastic to have access to a spiritual second copy.
Fabricate – A much more expensive, much less flexible tutor; it makes up for it by giving you the artifact straight away as opposed to in a turn, like Enlightened Tutor. Regardless, there are some times where you’ll be happy that this is the tutor in your hand over the others; once you achieve infinite mana, for example, this reads U: Fetch Staff of Domination and commence deck drawing.
Mystical Tutor – This tutor is the only one of its kind in the 99, but nevertheless it is always a happy draw. It gives you access to any answer, or any draw spell – Swan Song while you’re building up, Time Spiral while you’re knocking them down.
Tezzeret the Seeker – Easily the most powerful tutor in the deck. At any time, this guy represents any artifact in your deck and, timed right, a whole load more too. With the quality of the rock suite, it is not abnormal to -0 (with potential to copy with Rings) and grab Mana Crypt, Mox Opal, or Chrome Mox. This solidifies your lead in terms on mana, while keeping the options of searching for a Sphere of Resistance or your Helm of Obedience open. Given the critical mass of noncreature artifacts in the deck, going on the aggressive by plussing Tezzeret’s loyalty is also a plan, and many games have been ended by mana rock beatdown.
Trinket Mage – Our final tutor is a lowkey workhorse. At any time you play this, the littlest tutormage can be an additional copy of any of your powerful mana rocks; Miss your turn 1 Sol Ring? Here, have it! Got your metalcraft going? Have a Mox Opal, Free of charge. If you’ve hit enough of your rocks however, he also comes with the option of picking up your copy of Sensei’s Divining Top on the way to ensure your draws remain live throughout the game.
Utility
I put these two guys in here because they don’t really fit anywhere else, but I view them as important enough to include.
Serra Ascendant – That’s right. I play Serra Ascendant when I can, and am (reasonably) unapologetic about it. In commander, this guy reads a 1 mana 6/6 flying lifelink, and that is an offer too good to pass up. Never been unhappy to see this guy early, he provides pressure on opponents by forcing them to defend themselves rather than disrupt me setting up.
Snapcaster Mage – Modern staple come GAAIV’s best friend, Snapcaster mage is as flexible in this deck as he is in modern or legacy. He represents another copy of a counterspell most of the time, but if you draw him in the late game he easily represents a second Fact or Fiction, or a Dig through Time, or a Stroke of Genius while you’re comboing off to finish another guy. Seems like a good deal to me.
Ramp
Azorius Signet, Chrome Mox, Fellwar Stone, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Mind Stone, Mox Opal, Sol Ring, Talisman of Progress – GAAIV’s Mana rock suite; not being green, GAAIV needs all the help he can get to up his mana production quickly; luckily, we’re just about one Grim Monolith from hitting a true critical mass. GAAIV hits by turn 3 95% of the time, often hitting earlier due to the sheer amount of mana rocks (and mana rock tutors) present in the list; As a pro once said, ‘Magic is a game of mana – the player who has the most is winning’ – and while this isn’t strictly true, it hits close enough that I firmly beileve the rock suite might be one of the most integral pieces of any competitive EDH deck.
Land Tax – I will proceed to gush slightly less about this card; however, it is great. It keeps us on parity with any ramp decks that manage to get more lands out early, as well as acting as a shuffle effect early on (we can even elect to not find any land, keeping the shuffle always active), this card thins the deck like no other while enabling us to hit our land drops even till the mid-late game when a lot of decks run out of land steam, keeping us at the forefront of the mana game.
Voltaic Key – A small but hard working piece of the suite, the Voltaic key represents an extra 1 mana when used in combination with Sol Ring or Mana Vault, or an extra 2 mana with Basalt Monolith or Mana Vault (While also handily being able to preserve our life total by untapping the vault before it starts hurting us). It also comes in handy when we have an active Scroll Rack, allowing us to activate it twice per turn (this is only really good if we have some shuffle effects handy though, or we start drowning ourself if cards we’ve already seen).
Lands
A lot of the lands are straight up fixing lands; all untapped options within my price range that tap for both of my colours including all of the relevant Khans of Tarkir fetches to ensure that I can fix as necessary (or grab a basic before I drop Back to Basics). However, some utility options:
Maze of Ith – This card represents a lot of defensive power for a deck like this. When I’m allowed to choose what can resolve, and then limit options for combat, further allowing to shape their options with the ability to blank an attacker for no extra cost is powerful, allowing a single blocker of mine (mostly Consecrated Sphinx, as the others aren’t too good at blocking) to effectively block two creatures, through the threat that i’ll blank one and kill the other. It’s a land I never want to see early, but it’s rarely a land I end the game without.
Strip Mine, Wasteland – These powerful lands round out GAAIV’s mana suite and provide a hefty amount of presence. An untapped Strip mine threatens to colour screw the 4 colour deck, and both tell your opponents that they’re going to have to play their game without Gaea’s Cradle, Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx or Cabal Coffers. When you have 2-3 opponents to keep in check, it is not often a bad idea to launch both of them at one person to make double sure help isn’t coming, and if you’ve limited the early game properly taking even one colour away from a 3 colour deck can ensure their silence for a while.
Discussion
So, thats the deck; what’s the plan?
A typical game plan works as follows: In your opening hand there should be 2-3 lands, a rock or two, alongside any combination of hate pieces, draw or answers. For the first few turns, this deck ramps hard – the earlier it can slam GAAIV down, the earlier your opponents are on the back foot 1-2 mana behind you.
Then, once GAAIV has been achieved, leverage the discount he gives you to accelerate through your deck looking for pieces. Favourites of mine to find first differ from time to time; Back to Basics and Sphere of Resistance are almost always highest priorities though. If this phase is executed without anything from your opponents, the game may already be won as the prison is set.
From turns 5 onwards, you seek out your combos while answering any attempts to gain tempo. By inhibiting mana and threatening counters, you are completely in the driver’s seat, able to dictate what resolves and when, miles ahead on card advantage as you churn through your deck. Sometimes the lock is broken, either by you not drawing the pieces or the right sort of answer being presented; this isn’t always the end of the world, and is why GAAIV always brings a board wipe or two to the table.
As I mentioned before, while the deck IS around 1/10 counterspells, you aren’t the counter police; use intuition and threat assessment to dictate what should be countered and what is ok to resolve; if a fatty manages to sneak its way from under your prison pieces but you have a Maze of Ith down or Humility in hand, don’t sweat it! If you’re struggling to hold a table underneath a single Back to Basics and your next piece nowhere in sight, sometimes countering that Cultivate might be the right play; it’s all about adapting to the game you’re playing.
Improvements
So now that I’ve laid it out, what would I do to improve GAAIV? I’ve thought about it extensively, as it happens.
Grim Monolith – My current hot item on my to-do list is the second Monolith. it brings another infinite mana combo with Power Artifact (though just that, not rings), makes Voltaic Key a lot more powerful by existing, and enables another avenue to power out pieces in the early game; overall it would be a great increase in consistency for GAAIV, but is currently just out of reach.
Transmute Artifact – Another victim of reserved list price spikes, Transmute is another way to help GAAIV search out the combo once the lock is in place, or turn a mana rock into a lock piece to buy us time.
Flusterstorm, Mana Drain – Two of the most premium Counterspells in the game, adding both of these to the deck (likely in the place of the two 3 mana counterspells, Dissolve and Dissipate) would thoroughly streamline GAAIV’s answer-suite; Flusterstorm has always been a point of contention in my mind as a narrow answer as there have not really been any Storm deck variants in my local meta; this could be a great option if that becomes the case however.
Timetwister – Unsurprisingly, the only piece of power nine legal in the format would make this deck very, very happy. A cheaper Time Reversal that doesn’t exile itself is great, increasing the maximum amount of times GAAIV can twist to three, up from the currently available two. As mentioned in the discussion, these effects are incredibly important to Augustin’s disruption game plan, and he would benefit immensely from one of these.At least 15 terminally ill Palestinian patients have died since the beginning of the year after Israel denied them permits to travel out of the besieged Gaza Strip for treatment, says a human rights group.
At least 15 terminally ill Palestinian patients have died since the beginning of the year after Israel denied them permits to travel out of the besieged Gaza Strip for treatment, says a human rights group.
The al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights on Wednesday released a statement condemning Israel’s blockade on the coastal sliver, while stressing that the siege has brought Gaza’s healthcare system to “its knees.”
The group noted that all of those who had died had on multiple occasions requested for permission to receive treatment outside of the Gaza Strip.
“The Israeli regime shirks its international legal obligations by denying residents of Gaza the flow of necessary medical relief and supplies into Gaza, while simultaneously denying and delaying the movement that residents require to seek the care outside of Gaza,” read the statement.
The statement was released during a visit to Gaza by United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who called for an end to the decade-long Israeli blockade earlier in the day.
"I am deeply moved to be in Gaza today, unfortunately to witness one of the most dramatic humanitarian crises that I've seen in many years working as a humanitarian in the United Nations," Guterres said.
Israel has had Gaza under blockade since 2007. The blockade has caused a decline in the standard of living as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty.New Zealand (5) 8
Try: Woodcock Pen: Donald
France (0) 7
Try: Dusautoir Con: Trinh-Duc
Lock Brad Thorn celebrates New Zealand's victory at the final whistle
New Zealand were crowned world champions for the first time in 24 years after squeezing past an inspired France team by a single point.
Tony Woodcock's early try and a penalty from fourth-choice fly-half Stephen Donald were enough to see the All Blacks home in an extraordinary match that defied all pre-match predictions.
France produced their best performance of the tournament and appeared to be close to pulling off one of the great upsets after captain Thierry Dusautoir's try with half an hour remaining set up a nerve-shredding finale.
But Francois Trinh-Duc missed a long-range penalty before desperate defence saw the favourites hang on for a famous win.
TOM FORDYCE'S BLOG As you looked around Eden Park late on Sunday night, camera-flashes twinkling among the black-clad thousands in the stands like stars in the night sky, one emotion dominated all others: an enormous, unmistakable sense of relief Read the rest of Tom's blog
The final whistle triggered scenes of wild jubilation at Eden Park as a nation celebrated a repeat of the outcome from the very first World Cup final in 1987.
And when skipper Richie McCaw hoisted the Webb Ellis Trophy high into the night, a quarter of a century of hurt was blown away in an explosion of fireworks and cheering.
An already febrile atmosphere within the ground before the start had been stoked still further when France's players formed an arrow formation to face down the haka, and then advanced slowly over halfway as the capacity crowd roared.
The drama seemed to unsettle the players, both sides making early errors, and when Piri Weepu pulled a penalty badly wide the nerves began to spread to the stands.
With one well-worked line-out move they were soon silenced. Weepu put a penalty into the corner, Jerome Kaino took the ball off the top and popped it down into the arms of the advancing Woodcock to put the veteran prop through a gaping hole.
Match stats NZ France 1 / 4 Kicks at goal 1 / 3 111 (9) Tackles made (missed) 87 (10) 2 Line breaks 2 45% Possession 55% 45% Territory 55% 7 Penalties conceded 10 15 (2) Line-outs won (lost) 14 (2) 7 (0) Scrums won (lost) 6 (0) 4 Offloads 11
Weepu missed a simple conversion but France were rattled.
For all their good early work they found themselves on the end of some harsh decisions from referee Craig Joubert at the scrum and breakdown. With fly-half Morgan Parra forced off with a head injury the All Blacks began to dominate possession, only for Weepu to miss another straightforward penalty from 25 metres out.
The scrum-half's struggles meant the lead remained at just five points instead of a possible 13, and with half-time approaching the tide began to turn.
Fly-half Aaron Cruden hyper-extended his knee horribly in contact and was carried off the pitch, forcing Graham Henry to bring on Donald - a man who was fishing for whitebait a fortnight ago before injuries to Dan Carter and Colin Slade triggered his emergency call-up.
France's own stand-in stand-off Trinh-Duc missed with a drop-goal when well set but then set off on a curving run through a scattered defensive line which carried him deep into enemy territory until Weepu's desperate tap-tackle finally brought him down.
Dusautoir's try made it a tense final half-hour
He had a chance to reduce the deficit to just two points only to slide a penalty from the left touchline across the face of the posts, and was then penalised by Joubert to give Donald the simplest of kicks for 8-0.
If some expected France to fold, Les Bleus had other ideas. Trinh-Duc gathered a poor kick from Weepu and sliced through the All Blacks line again, and although Dimitri Yachvili slipped with the line at his mercy the ball went wide, was recycled and put into the hands of skipper Dusautoir to slide in under the posts.
Eden Park was stunned, Trinh-Duc converting for 8-7 and the previously impregnable home side badly rattled.
France were transformed from the feeble, divided unit that had squeaked past Wales in the semi-final, their half-backs finding the corners with beautifully judged kicks from hand, the forwards making yards with every drive and a reorganised Kiwi line-out beginning to malfunction.
WORLD CUP CHAMPIONS 1987: NZ bt Fra 29-9
bt Fra 29-9 1991: Aus bt Eng 12-6
bt Eng 12-6 1995: SA bt NZ 15-12
bt NZ 15-12 1999: Aus bt Fra 35-12
bt Fra 35-12 2003: Eng bt Aus 20-17
bt Aus 20-17 2007: SA bt Eng 15-6
bt Eng 15-6 2011: NZ bt Fra 8-7
With 16 minutes left on the clock and the tension climbing through the roof, Trinh-Duc tried his luck with a penalty from just inside halfway only to push it wide, but the unthinkable now seemed a real possibility.
Replacement Damien Traille burgled a high ball from Israel Dagg and made good ground, the All Blacks scrum coming under increasing pressure and the crowd falling silent as their World Cup dream threatened to become a nightmare.
With the seconds slipping away and the gap just one point, France went through an 18-phase attack that made little ground but resulted in an attacking scrum on the New Zealand 10m line, only for the hosts to steal the ball back when Aurelien Rougerie was wrapped up.
The All Blacks drove upfield, using up the remaining moments, and when Joubert blew for another French infringement, the biggest party in New Zealand's history was under way.
New Zealand: Israel Dagg, Cory Jane, Conrad Smith, Ma'a Nonu, Richard Kahui, Aaron Cruden, Piri Weepu; Tony Woodcock, Keven Mealamu, Owen Franks, Sam Whitelock, Brad Thorn, Jerome Kaino, Richie McCaw (capt), Kieran Read.
Replacements: Stephen Donald (for Cruden, 34), Ali Williams (for Whitelock, 48), Andrew Hore (for Mealamu, 49), Andy Ellis (for Weepu, 49), Sonny Bill Williams (for Nonu, 76). Not used: Ben Franks, Adam Thomson.
France: |
, and now Diamondback Jason Kubel.Every aircraft has a distinct story. And even some of those that fell on some sort of misfortune live on beneath the waves, allowing scuba divers to explore the wreckage and visit these planes in their second life. Here are six examples of airplanes that now live on the seafloor and the history behind their demise. Bristol Beaufighter — Malta
This Bristol Beaufighter that flew during World War II is now a diving attraction 1,000 yards off the coast of Malta. iStockphoto
On March 17, 1943, Sgt. Donald Frazee and Sgt. Sandery of the Royal Air Force took off in a Bristol Beaufighter with eight other Beaufighters and nine Beauforts on a “shipping strike of Port Stelo” during World War II, according to the wartime diary of Frederick R. Galea. But just 13 minutes later the plane began to shake violently and lose speed. The culprit: engine failure. The crew ditched the ship and was brought to safety. In 2005, this long-range fighter was seen once again, this time lying inverted on the sandy ocean floor, about 1,000 yards off the coast of Malta. Now, divers can explore this twin-engine aircraft once more, as it lies in about 125 feet of water, with its main fuselage, wings and undercarriage still intact. Moray and conger eels can be seen at this dive site, along with the coral starting to grow on the plane in its second life. Aichi E13A — Palau
This Jake is a popular hangout for both marine life and photographers. iStockphoto
Known to the Allied forces as a Jake, this long-range reconnaissance seaplane was used commonly by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific. Although it was introduced (1941) and retired (1945) in the same decade, more than 1,400 of these seaplanes were produced. One of them can be found in about 45 feet of water, about a five-minute boat ride from Koror, Palau. The engine of the aircraft is broken off from the fuselage, but the plane is relatively intact, making it a popular subject for underwater photographers. On impact, the tail section and one pontoon broke away. This wreck is especially appealing to divers because it is resting on a large coral head, which attracts a variety of marine life, including octopuses, nudibranchs and a host of tropical fishes. Vought F4U Corsair — Hawaii
This American plane is now home to snapper, squirrelfish and pufferfish. iStockphoto
The pilot of this American fighter thought that he had a faulty fuel gauge when he noticed it quickly plummeting after taking off from Pearl Harbor on a routine mission in 1948. But when his engine failed, he realized that it was a more dire issue. The pilot successfully landed his aircraft about 3 miles off the southeast coast of Oahu and was later rescued, but his plane was a casualty of the mistake. This relatively intact wreck can be found in 115 feet of water today with its left wing submerged in sand, keeping the wreck in place despite strong currents. Divers can explore the Corsair — which was introduced in 1942 and used by the U.S. Navy and Marines, along with the Royal Navy and Royal New Zealand Air Force — and enjoy encounters with resident snapper, squirrelfish and pufferfish. Bristol Blenheim Bomber — Malta
This Bristol Blenheim can also be found on the seafloor off the coast of Malta. iStockphoto
There’s another warbird lying on the seafloor off the coast of Malta that was crafted by the Bristol Aeroplane Company. A Bristol Blenheim — a light bomber used extensively by the Royal Air Force during World War II — can be found in 130 feet of water, just 875 yards off the Delimara Peninsula. The exact combat record of this aircraft is unknown, but we can assume that it went down at some point in 1941, when several Blenheim squadrons were stationed on the Mediterranean island. It’s believed that the pilot ditched the plane after an Italian Macchi C.202 took out one engine in combat. This three-man bomber was used mostly as a long-range and night fighter during WWII. Today, divers can explore the surprisingly intact wreckage. The wings and engines are mostly intact, with the port-side propeller missing. Shorts 330-200 — British Virgin Islands
This aircraft overran the runway and wound up in the sea, where it was left to become a great spot for divers. iStockphoto
This passenger aircraft — built to carry three crew members and 30 passengers while it was produced from 1974 to 1992 — overran into the Caribbean sea after aborting takeoff on May 6, 1993. All of the passengers on the plane, which was taking off from what was then known as Beef Island Airport in the British Virgin Islands, were unharmed, but the plane was a lost cause. The aircraft — measuring 75 feet from wing to wing and 58 feet in length — was stripped of its instruments and repositioned in 42 feet of water off Great Dog Island for divers to explore. Vulcan Bomber — Bahamas
What was once an Avro Vulcan high-altitude bomber for the James Bond film Thunderball is now a beautiful underwater attraction in the Bahamas. Stuart Cove Dive BahamasLast week’s successfully concluded Iran agreement is one of the two most important achievements of an otherwise pretty dismal Obama presidency. Along with the ongoing process of normalizing relations with Cuba, this move shows that diplomacy can produce peaceful, positive changes. It also shows that sometimes taking a principled position means facing down overwhelming opposition from all sides and not backing down. The president should be commended for both of these achievements.
The agreement has reduced the chance of a US attack on Iran, which is a great development. But the interventionists will not give up so easily. Already they are organizing media and lobbying efforts to defeat the agreement in Congress. Will they have enough votes to over-ride a presidential veto of their rejection of the deal? It is unlikely, but at this point if the neocons can force the US out of the deal it may not make much difference. Which of our allies, who are now facing the prospect of mutually-beneficial trade with Iran, will be enthusiastic about going back to the days of a trade embargo? Which will support an attack on an Iran that has proven to be an important trading partner and has also proven reasonable in allowing intrusive inspections of its nuclear energy program?
However, what is most important about this agreement is not that US government officials have conducted talks with Iranian government officials. It is that the elimination of sanctions, which are an act of war, will open up opportunities for trade with Iran. Government-to-government relations are one thing, but real diplomacy is people-to-people: business ventures, tourism, and student exchanges.
I was so impressed when travel personality Rick Steves traveled to Iran in 2009 to show that the US media and government demonization of Iranians was a lie, and that travel and human contact can help defeat the warmongers because it humanizes those who are supposed to be dehumanized.
As I write in my new book, Swords into Plowshares:
Our unwise policy with Iran is a perfect example of what the interventionists have given us—60 years of needless conflict and fear for no justifiable reason. This obsession with Iran is bewildering. If the people knew the truth, they would strongly favor a different way to interact with Iran.
Let’s not forget that the Iran crisis started not 31 years ago when the Iran Sanctions Act was signed into law, not 35 years ago when Iranians overthrew the US-installed Shah, but rather 52 years ago when the US CIA overthrew the democratically-elected Iranian leader Mossadegh and put a brutal dictator into power. Our relations with the Iranians are marked by nearly six decades of blowback.
When the Cold War was winding down and the military-industrial complex needed a new enemy to justify enormous military spending, it was decided that Iran should be the latest “threat” to the US. That’s when sanctions really picked up steam. But as we know from our own CIA National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, the stories about Iran building a nuclear weapon were all lies. Though those lies continue to be repeated to this day.
It is unfortunate that Iran was forced to give up some of its sovereignty to allow restrictions on a nuclear energy program that was never found to be in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But if the net result is the end of sanctions and at least a temporary reprieve from the constant neocon demands for attack, there is much to cheer in the agreement. Peace and prosperity arise from friendly relations and trade – and especially when governments get out of the way.One hour into a presentation on the perceived threat posed by Muslim immigrants, St. Cloud car salesman and anti-immigration activist Ron Branstner ramps up his pitch.
The United Nations, he begins, sends Muslim refugees to the United States and to such cities as St. Cloud, “to divide and conquer, get rid of our Constitution, get rid of our way of life and implement it with another way of life called. …”
Branstner pauses for effect, and a few people in the crowd of 100 shout the answer: “sharia law!”
The speaker nods. “Sharia law.”
Branstner’s radical message made up of broad anti-Muslim themes mixed with fears about immigration and the cost of helping refugees is increasingly finding a receptive audience, especially in places where new immigrants are changing the face of the community.
He’s not the only one talking.
Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR-MN, had an exchange with St. Cloud State students after giving a talk about Islamophobia in February.
From Mankato to Mountain Iron, speakers such as Usama Dakdok, A.J. Kern, Brigitte Gabriel, Cynthia Khan, Jeffrey Baumann and Clare Lopez are showing up in churches, restaurants, VFWs and community centers to address crowds and air concerns about immigrants, the Qur’an and what they see as a threat to the U.S. Constitution.
Some portray Muslims as practicing a hateful religion, some say Muslims are practically duty-bound to destroy Christians. Others maintain that Muslims are working to someday take control of the United States.
The speeches, which sometimes draw several hundred people, often blend verses pulled from the Qur’an and items plucked from the news to paint an alarming image of Islam, a religion practiced by some 3.3 million Americans, about 1 percent of the population.
To some, such as a Grand Forks, N.D., City Council member who invited Dakdok to speak there last fall, the talks are viewed as an exercise in free speech. But the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other groups see the message as dangerous hate speech that riles up audiences with depictions of a Christian America under threat.
In December, a few weeks after Dakdok spoke in Grand Forks, a Somali restaurant in the city was firebombed. A Minnesota man has since been charged in the attack.
“A lot of these fears are coming from that type of general fear of the ‘other,’ and not real knowledge of Islam,” said Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of CAIR.
Protests and legislation
Anti-Muslim sentiment has risen dramatically nationwide in the past year, sparking protests and anti-refugee legislation in Idaho, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas and elsewhere, said Stephen Piggott of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit focused on civil rights.
In Minnesota, a state senator introduced a bill purporting to protect the U.S. Constitution from sharia, but legal experts said it’s completely unnecessary because the threat as depicted by the senator doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, groups like ACT! for America, which has a Minnesota chapter, have gone so far as to push for an end to Muslim immigration.
The local chapter recently sponsored speeches by Lopez, the vice president of an organization known for pushing conspiracy theories and someone Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has said would be on his foreign policy team.
This month, Lopez told a St. Cloud radio audience that Muslims have turned parts of Minneapolis into “no-go” zones, where Minneapolis police fear to enter. Minneapolis officials said there is no substance to the claim.
If there’s a hot spot in the state for tensions, it’s been in and around St. Cloud, where a series of divisive messages recently surfaced:
A billboard on a local highway said resettling Muslims was either evil or insane. A Minnesota vanity license plate that displayed profanity directed at Muslims was seen in the city and photographed, with the photo circulated on social media.
More recently, an anonymous note left on the windshield of a U.S. military veteran who served in the Middle East said “U KILL R BROTHERS” and told him he should leave town.
Each has given rise to more name-calling and anger on the Facebook page of #UniteCloud, a local organization that uses social media and conversation to bring people together regardless of their religious beliefs.
St. Cloud State University student Barwaaqo Dirir, 21, sported a hijab with a patriotic twist for a talk by Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR-MN.
“The people we are concerned with are people who have never met a Muslim and are nervous, and they don’t know how to separate fact from fiction at this point,” said Natalie Ringsmuth, one of the #UniteCloud founders. Ringsmuth said she regularly hears of people yelling “Speak English,” or “Get out of our country!” to local Somalis.
In an effort to address concerns about the rise of Islamaphobia in Minnesota, the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney last week hosted a panel discussion on the issue. Attendees included former Vice President Walter Mondale and members of the legal community, including U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, who said that, left unchecked, “Islamaphobia is going to destroy the social fabric of the state.”
Fiery speech
A few minutes before delivering his speech on a late winter night at a restaurant in Avon, Branstner greets his audience as it trickles in. A powerfully built man with a firm baritone, Branstner says he only wants to inform people, not incite violence, and has reached out to Muslims and their supporters in nearby St. Cloud.
A recent Facebook post shows him posing arm-in-arm with a Muslim man.
“Not every Muslim is a bad person,” he says. “I would never say that.”
On this night, Branstner’s audience is largely white, male and middle-aged or older. As with a similar presentation by another speaker in St. Cloud a few weeks earlier, Muslims are absent. Branstner said he’s comfortable with them attending, but at talks by other speakers, they’ve been discouraged from showing.
Taking a small stage in the restaurant’s banquet room, Branstner uses slides to walk his audience through a two-hour talk delivered without notes.
Ron Branstner wore a button that says “ ‘Kafir’ Americans know” (the word kafir means a person who is not a Muslim) to attend a talk by Jaylani Hussein.
He says the transition to an Islamic state is already underway, funded by American corporations hungry for cheap labor and condoned by the Obama administration, which, he adds, is staffed by the Muslim Brotherhood.
CIA Director John Brennan, he maintains, is a devout Muslim. Hillary Clinton is an “evil, evil lady” who will take away First Amendment rights if elected president, and a “third wave” of immigrants will soon inundate the United States as those already here bring in relatives, he says.
“None of you are prepared for this,” Branstner tells them.
Muslims have derided his talks as inflammatory. The St. Cloud Times fact-checked one speech and found it riddled with errors.
But in a community settled largely by German Catholics, Branstner draws a steady stream of residents struggling to understand their new Somali neighbors. His speeches sometimes pull in 200 to 300 people, many of whom donate money to help him defray expenses.
Last year, his fans nominated him for a Difference Maker award bestowed by the Times’ editorial board. He was one of 14 people to win it.
“Ron does have a big following in this community,” Ringsmuth said. “We can’t just dismiss people like Ron.”
Ringsmuth and Haji Yusuf, another #UniteCloud founder, attended Branstner’s speech last fall at the Granite City Baptist Church in St. Cloud. At one point, Yusuf raised his hand hoping to correct Branstner on a point about the Qur’an.
Ron Branstner during his talk at the Landing last month in Avon, Minn.
Someone hollered “assimilate” and cursed Yusuf, while someone else “said things under his breath,” Ringsmuth said.
While Branstner told the heckler to stop and chided him for being disrespectful, a rattled Ringsmuth and Yusuf left the church early to avoid a potential confrontation with others in the parking lot.
‘Shariah 101’
Earlier this year, Ringsmuth tried, but failed, to get invited to an anti-Islam presentation by Jeffrey Baumann, a doctor from Coon Rapids. The speech, titled “Shariah 101” and held at a St. Cloud restaurant, drew about 100 people who had been vetted by the event’s organizer, former Catholic bookstore owner and St. Cloud resident Kathleen Virnig.
Baumann, who has delivered the presentation for the past five years, cited several Qur’an verses, articles from an oil company magazine and letters written by Muslims to support his contention that Muslims here are on a path to throw out the Constitution and institute sharia. Unless Muslim immigration is stopped and Islam is no longer recognized as a religion deserving of First Amendment freedoms, the country, as it’s known today, will be lost, he said.
Those changes are already taking place in Europe, he added, with an Islamic state soon to take over the democracies of the European Union.
While Baumann suggested several times that Muslims consider themselves justified in killing Christians, he said later he wouldn’t want his audience to react violently.
“I hope there was nothing in my presentation that suggested that I wanted violence in any way, shape, or form,” he said.
What is Sharia? A guide to daily life for practicing Muslims, sharia is generally defined as the Islamic law revealed by God to the prophet Mohammed. Its interpretation and practice vary around the world. Not all Muslims agree on whether sharia should apply in modern states or whether it should hold sway over nonbelievers.
As Baumann finished his speech, Virnig stood up and encouraged people to act.
“Your voice is needed seriously and deeply to move our country,” she told the crowd. “Minnesota is being watched by many, many other cities and states. If we can do our job and be successful, we will be a model for many other states. Right now everybody thinks we’re just going Muslim.”“Rawls' work, which avoids discussing possible Marxist objections, nevertheless provides Marxists with a serious and sophisticated challenge."
Norman Daniels, Reading Rawls (Introduction)
“Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.
We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realisation in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that the bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being as a democratic bourgeois republic.”
Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring
"But what counts is whether the conception of justice as fairness, better than any other presently known to us, turns out to lead to true interpretations of our considered judgements, and provides a mode of expression for what we want to affirm." (p.452)
"The infinitive notion here is that (the basic) structure contains various social positions and that men born into different positions have different expectations of life determined, in part, by the political system as well as by social and economic circumstances. In this way the institutims of society favour certain starting places over others. These are especially deep inequalities. Not only are they pervasive, but they affect men's initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert. It is these inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society, to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply." (p.7).
"The one party, by tracing up government to the Deity, endeavoured to render it so sacred and inviolate, that it must be little less than sacrilege, however tyrannical it may become, to touch or invade it in the smallest article. The other party, by founding government altogether on the consent of the people, suppose that there is a kind of original contract, by which the subjects have tacitly reserved the power of resisting their sovereign, whenever they find themselves aggrieied by that authority with which they have, for certain purposes, voluntarily intrusted him."[9]
First principle: Each person to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.
Second principle: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both:
(a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the first savings principle, and
(b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity." (p.302)
"The inability to take advantage of one's rights and opportunities as a result of poverty and ignorance, and a lack of means generally, is sometimes counted among the constraints definitive of liberty. I shall not, however, say this, but rather I shall think of these thing4as affecting the worth of liberty, the value to individuals of the rights that the first principle defines... Freedom and equal liberty is the same for all... but the worth of liberty is not the same for everyone." (p.204)
"This sphere that we are deserting [that of the market - JM] within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour - power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free-will. They contract as free-agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality,".because each enters into relationwith the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, andthey exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, becauseeach disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, becauseeach looks only to himself. The only force that brings themtogether and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about therest, and just because they do so, db they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.
On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes, the "Free-trader Vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physio of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front of capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows on hislabourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking intenton business; the other timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but - a hiding." [28]
A systematic Marxist theory of justice has yet to be elaborated but it is clear that it would contain, indeed take as one of its starting points, the idea that principles of justice are always historically and socially conditioned: that the conception of justice dominant in the twentieth century could not help but be radically different from that dominant, or even conceived of, in, say, the fourteenth century. Moreover it would take the view that in class divided society conceptions of justice are essentially class conceptions: they formulate not the interests of humanity as a whole, but the interests of definite social classes. In short, just as there are no universal moral principles there are no universal principles of justice[1]. Since Rawls claims into have discovered and substantiated precisely such principles, that his work presents a challenge to Marxism, and the nature of this challenge, are both clear.This essay is an attempt at a Marxist response to this challenge. But how should a Marxist reply to Rawls? He or she could, like any other political philosopher, seek to show that, on logical or other grounds, Rawls' theory does not work. But such an enterprise, even granted its total success, would have nothing specifically Marxist about it, nor would it in any way strengthen the Marxist theory except in the purely derivative sense that it was a Marxist who had achieved the refutation. An alternative approach which, superficially, might appear distinctively Marxist, is to contrast Rawls' conclusions with social reality as Marxists see it and thereby demonstrate their impracticality. But this method also remains negative and fails to exhibit or enhance the credibility of a Marxist interpretation of justice, as well as failing really to engage with Rawls' theory.The approach which remains, and the one I shall adopt here, is to use the Marxist method itself to analyse Rawls' theory and show that what he claims to be a view of justice, p 587) is in fact reflective of a specific social and historical situation and of specific interests in that situation. In other words to show that what Rawls has produced is an ideology of justice. One obvious model for this procedure is Marx's analysis of religion where his principle concern was not to contest arguments for the existence of god but to demonstrate that man had made god, that religion was a social product.[2] My main aim therefore, will not be to prove that rawls is illogical, but to reveal the "hidden", shall we say "social" logic, that underlies his arguments even where he is illogical. I shall focus on contradictions in his arguments only where these derive specifically from the attempt to give his temporally limited theory an atemporal universal character.Clearly should this project succeed it will not only yield a more complete and thorough refutation of Rawls than any amount of piecemeal criticism, but it will also serve as an illustration of the power of the Marxist theory of justice. Clearly for this project to succeed my examination of Rawls' theory must be comprehensive, not in the sense of following all the highways and by-ways of his dense and lengthy book, but in the sense of dealing with all the main stages of his central argument.I shall begin with an aspect of Rawls' thought which is anterior to his theory of justice as such, namely his conception of the nature and role of moral and political philosophy. For Rawls the criterion for evaluating such philosophy is its ability to explain and justify existing considered judgements.This is not merely anstandard of judgement but is embedded in the whole method Rawls uses to formulate his conception of justice. What he proposes is an oscillation "back and forth" between our considered judgements and the original position initially described "so that it represents generally shared and preferably weak conditions" (p.20) in the course of which both undergo certain modifications until a match is achieved between the two - a state Rawls calls "reflective equilibrium". (p.20). What is crucial here is which element in this oscillation is decisive - whether in the last analysis it is our considered judgements that have priority in shaping the original position or. What immediately suggests that the former is the case, apart from the quotation we have just cited, is that if the conditions defining the original position are indeed "generally standard and weak", i.e. not open to reasonable doubt, then the oscillation back and forth to considered judgements would be unnecessary.Now if it is true, as we contend, that Rawls' considered judgements are the real beginning and end of his conception then his theory must be ideological. In the first place unless the author's considered judgements are those of a radical minority, which is patently not the case with Rawls, this procedure is inherently incapable of producing conclusions that are new or more than marginally critical of the status quo. In other words Rawls' philosophical journey is one in which the destination is already known, indeed it is rather like a pre-paid round trip, whereas real philosophy, philosophy that is important for mankind, is not mere travelling but exploration - it ventures into the unknown to discover and chart new territory.In the second place this use of considered judgements simply sets on one side a fundamental problem, namely that people's considered judgements are neither constant throughout history nor unanimous between societies or within societies at any point in time. Thus Rawls' own convictions that "religions intolerance and racial discrimination are unjust" (p.19) were shared by almost no-one before the eighteenth century, are still not accepted in many countries of the world today, and are by no means universally subscribed to in the UN. Now it is surely impossible to deny that these changes and discrepancies can be ultimately explained only by historical and social factors however broadly conceived.It is not a question of narrow self-interest distorting or blocking impartial judgement but of reality presenting a different aspect to people in different historical and social situations, no matter how disinterested they may be. In this context it is interesting to note that not only are Rawls' sure convictions typical of an American academic in the second half of the twentieth century but also that his central area of doubt, "as to what is the correct distribution of wealth and authority" (p.20) is equally reflective of his social position (neither capitalist nor worker).[3] Consequently, if the role of considered judgements is decisive, then Rawls supra-historical method, his Archimedian point, has, in fact, historical and social limitations built into it from the very beginning.At this point, however, we must remember that Rawls does not present considered judgements as playing this dominant role. He claims to begin from the original position (p.20) which in itself will be quite compelling, and eventually to arrive at a description of it from which correct principles of justice can be logically deduced. This does not entirely eliminate the social/historical factor but does appear to limit it. A central task for this essay, therefore, is to demonstrate that far from being based on generally shared and weak assumptions the original position is in fact shaped by value-laden assumptions which clearly reflect a specific historical and social position. But before dealing directly with the original position it is important to examine two assumptions made at the very beginning of the book which bear profoundly on its whole argument. These assumptions are (a) that "justice is the first virtue of social institutions", (p.3) and (b) that major social inequalities are inevitable. (p.7).It is assumption (b) that is immediately striking, and it is worth quoting Rawls in full here:The importance of this would be hard to exaggerate, for what is asserted is not merely the existence of inequalities but the inevitability of class divisions (the favouring of certain starting places over others). On the face of it one might expect the question of class to be one of the main problems considered by the parties to the original position, instead it forms an essential uniting condition on their deliberations, a known fact "to which the principles of social justice must... apply." Now the inevitability of class is hardly non-controversial even among American sociologists (let alone the rest of the world), but what is especially striking is that, in a book dense with arguments in which many pages are spent justifying secondary positions, this fundamental idea is not even argued for, but simply presented as intuitive. Thus this passage alone signifies a major ideological element in Rawls theory.By comparison assumption (a) (likewise unargued for) appears almost innocent. But this is not so, in reality it is of a piece with assumption (b). This claim obviously requires some explanation and justification. Justice, we shall argue, is not an eternal human value (not even justice with an ever-changing content), nor an eternal human aspiration. For justice as a concept, the very existence of justice as a problem, presupposes competition of individuals or social groups for scarce resources, and these are precisely the conditions that generate class society. Now scarcity is commonly considered an essential feature of the human condition but this involves considerable lack of historical imagination. Let us take the example of water. There have been, and are, many situations in which the supply of water, clean water for drinking, water for the land etc., is a matter of life and death, but in the advanced industrialised countries this is no longer a problem. There is plenty enough water to go round and the technical means to supply it to everyone are readily available. In so far as some people still lack running water in their homes this is clearly a case of specific deprivation which could easily be remedied given the will. Consequently in these circumstances the problems of a just distribution of water ceases to exist - water is distributed according to need. Now if the rate of technological progress achieved in the past one hundred years is maintained in the future (it will probably be accelerated) and if the resources currently devoted to socially wasteful or harmful projects (most notably the arms industry) are channelled to meet the needs of the mass of people, and if the political will to achieve this exists, and if the specific economic and social barriers to such a development are removed, there is no reason why what is true now for water should not become true for primary goods generally. In other words justice is not the first virtue of social institutions, but a mark of their inadequate development, a sign that they remain confined within the limits imposed by scarcity and class divisions. The solution to the problem of justice therefore lies not within justice itself, in one concept of justice or another, but beyond the very grounds of justice.[4]The argument I have put forward here parallels Marx's arguments on three related questions: wages, equality and the State. On wages Marx argued, against the notion of a fair wage, that in one sense all wages were "fair" (since labour power exchanged at its value like any other commodity), and that in another sense all wages, whatever their level, were unfair because the wage system itself was expressive of exploitative social relations. He advanced the goal, therefore, not of a fair wage but of the abolition of the wages system.[5] On equality[6] Marx argues that equal right (like "fair distribution") is "a right of inequality in its content, like every right", because it is applied to individuals who are unequal in their needs, and that the ultimate goal is not equal distribution but distribution according to need.[7] Likewise Marx rejected the demand for a "free" or "people's" state[8] holding that the very existence of the state was a product of class antagonisms, which, with the disappearance of these antagonisms, would lose as its social function and disappear.To return to Rawls it can now be seen that his fundamental concept and therefore his whole theory is rooted in a problematic which presupposes class society and takes it for granted quite uncritically. But if justice as a concept reflects class society in all its historical forms is it possible at this stage to establish for Rawls a more precise ideological location? The key here is Rawls' selection of the contractual approach to political philosophy.The development of social contract theory, through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant, was historically linked to the rise of the middle classes, and the development of capitalism out of feudalism. Moreover there is clearly an intrinsic ideological connection between capitalism and the notion of a social contract. In the first place the claim that the result of bargaining between disinterested equals will necessarily be just and fair parallels the claims made for the capitalist market. Secondly the search for a contractual basis for social ethics and government a philosophical accompaniment to the struggle to place material production on a contractual basis. In other words social contract theory was part of the long battle to replace the feudal lord with the capitalist entrepreneur and the serf with the wage labourer, and the social contract was, in the last analysis, an idealization of the contract of employment. Its main philosophical adversary in this struggle was the theory of "divine right" and against this the social contract served as a vehicle for the claims of reason and democracy. The essential democratic component in social contract theory has been neatly summarised by Hume:But this critical, even revolutionary, edge to social contract theory (developed to its furthest point by Rousseau) never transcended the limits of capitalist society and so has not, and could not have survived the passage of time to the present day, for the social contract has indeed been realised. The contract to form society finds its expression in the universal predominance of the sale of labour-power, and the contract with government in constitutional democracy. Consequently the social contract today cannot be a means to progress in political philosophy; it can yield no new insights, only ideology and apologetics for the status quo. Indeed the essential starting point for advance in political philosophy now is the critique of all notions of a social contract and of the contractual basis of employment in particular.[10] The irony, therefore, is that in his search for a suprahistorical impartial vantage point from which to construct his principles Rawls has seized upon a device which is itself profoundly a product and reflection of capitalist society and (at the present time) inherently conservative.[12]We have now completed our review of Rawls' background assumptions and can turn to the original position as he has specifically conceived it. The conditions characterising the original position can be divided into two categories: (a) conditions which aim to supply the parties with motivation for their deliberations and criteria by which to assess different principles of justice; (b) conditions (of ignorance and knowledge) whose function is to ensure that the decisions reached are impartial and universal.[13] The former, I shall maintain, continue the ideological pattern already established; the latter are hopelessly self-contradictory.In category (a) we find that parties in the original position are "rational amd mutually disinterested... they are conceived as not taking an interest in one another's interests." (p.13). The necessity of this condition for Rawls' theory is clear. In the first place the |
a warrant to search Americans’ online communications, regardless of when the email was crafted.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is a founding member of the Fourth Amendment Caucus, a bipartisan group of lawmakers dedicated to protecting against warrantless searches and seizures, close privacy violating surveillance loopholes, and champion reform efforts to protect and restore Fourth Amendment rights. She has introduced legislation in the 113th and 114th Congresses to expand the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and give the Board greater authorities to carry out its function of balancing the government’s national security and counterterrorism activities with the need to protect the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans.
###The Modi government may have succeeded in building toilets under the Swachh Bharat Mission, but a large number of them are not used by the beneficiaries.
Many of the rural folk found the toilets too small, uncomfortable and stinking, mainly due to non-availability of water for flushing them after use. Parliament’s Estimates Committee stumbled across these findings as they were reviewing the Ganga Rejuvenation Initiative of the Modi government.
The committee found that open field defecation in villages along the banks of River Ganga and discharge of untreated waste water was also a significant cause of pollution.
“... the toilets being built under the Swachh/Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan are not being used by beneficiaries as they lack privacy, comfort and generate a stinking smell forcing the family members to defecate in the open fields thereby defeating the very purpose of provision of the toilets at their homes,” the committee said in its report presented to Parliament.
A recent survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation showed that as many as 52.1% people in rural areas were still defecating in the open compared to 7.5 % in urban areas.
The nationwide rapid survey conducted between May-June 2015, found that 45.3% rural households had a sanitary toilet, while in urban areas, the figure stood at 88.8%.
The lowest percentage of households having sanitary toilets was reported in Jharkhand (18.8%), Chhattisgarh (21.2%) and Odisha (26.3%). The States with the highest numbers were Sikkim (98.2%), Kerala (97.6 %) and Mizoram (96.2%). In Karnataka, 47% households were found to have sanitary toilets.
According to the report, 13.1 % of the villages and 42% urban wards had community toilets. However, they were not being used in 1.7% villages and 1.6% urban wards. Also, in 22.6% of the villages and 8.6% urban wards, community toilets were not being cleaned.
The survey also found that only 42.5% rural household had access to water for use in the toilets, while in urban households this figure was 87.9%.
Under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan launched on October 2, 2014, poor families get Rs 12,000 for building one toilet and provision of water for storing, hand-washing and cleaning it.USC linebacker Osa Masina is currently being investigated for sexual assault in separate cases in California and Utah, according to multiple reports.
Trojans coach Clay Helton announced Monday that Masina would miss the team’s opener against Alabama for a violation of team rules.
Cottonwood Heights, Utah police confirmed that there are two active investigations and that they are working with the Los Angeles Police Department on the matter. An attorney for Masina also confirmed the investigations.
The Utah incident happened in July, and the California one prior to that.
"USC is aware of the investigation involving student-athlete Osa Masina," the school said in a statement. "USC is cooperating fully with authorities in Utah, the lead agency in the investigation. Due to privacy laws and to protect the rights of our students, we are not able to discuss this matter further."
Masina, entering his sophomore season, made 25 tackles in 12 games last season.Jury nullification, in which jurors refuse to convict defendants under laws they find objectionable or inappropriately applied, is a favored tactic of many libertarians who, rightly or wrongly perceive individual liberty as, at best, a minority taste among their neighbors. They like the idea of a tool that can be wielded on the spot to shield people from powerful control freaks without first having to win a popularity contest. But nullification is useful only if people know about. And last week, New Hampshire's governor signed a law requiring the state's judges to permit defense attorneys to inform jurors of their right to nullify the law.
On June 18, Governor John Lynch signed HB 146, which reads:
a Right of Accused. In all criminal proceedings the court shall permit the defense to inform the jury of its right to judge the facts and the application of the law in relation to the facts in controversy.
Short, simple and to the point. Nullification advocate Tim Lynch, of the Cato Institute, thinks it's a step in the right direction, though not necessarily a game-changer. Says he:
This is definitely a step forward for advocates of jury trial. Allowing counsel to speak directly to the jury about this subject is something that is not allowed in all the courthouses outside of New Hampshire–so, again, this is good. I am concerned, however, that this language does not go far enough. We don’t know how much pressure trial judges will exert on defense counsel. As noted above, if the attorney’s argument is “too strenuous,” the judge may reprimand the attorney in some way or deliver his own strenuous instruction about how the jurors must ultimately accept the law as described by the court, not the defense. I’m also afraid what the jurors hear will too often depend on the particular judge and, then, what that judge wants to do in a particular case.
So the law is an improvement over the old order, especially in an era when courts and judges are overtly trying to suppress jury independence, but one whose effectiveness is yet to be determined.
But is this faith in jury nullification misplaced? How likely are we and our neighbors to symbolically flip our middle fingers to the powers that be and free defendants charged with, say drug offenses or gun law violations? After all, the power has long existed, but you don't often hear of juries staging revolts.
It does happen, though, as a much-covered 2010 Montana case demonstrates, when a trial never even started because the court was unable to find enough jurors willing to convict somebody for marijuana possession. And a lot of nullification may fly under the radar, because it results in hung juries rather than full acquittals, and because judges and prosecutors really want to keep it quiet.
Back in 1999, the Washington Post wrote:
In courthouses across the country, an unprecedented level of juror activism is taking hold, ignited by a movement of people who are turning their back on the evidence they hear at trial and instead using the jury box as a bold form of civil protest.... The most concrete sign of the trend is the sharp jump in the percentage of trials that end in hung juries. For decades, a 5 percent hung jury rate was considered the norm, derived from a landmark study of the American jury by Harry Kalven Jr. and Hans Zeisel published 30 years ago. In recent years, however, that figure has doubled and quadrupled, depending on location.
That article featured a pre-gunrunning Eric Holder objecting that, "There is a real potential danger if this problem goes unchecked."
The article's hung jury estimate wasn't just guess work. A 2002 study (PDF) on hung juries by the National Center for State Courts found that "In 63% of cases in which the jury deadlocked, the majority of jurors voted in favor of conviction compared to 24% of cases in which the majority of jurors voted in favor of acquittal..." Such numbers are considered a strong, if not conclusive sign of widespread nullification. Two of that study's authors, Paula Hannaford-Agor, of the National Center for State Courts, and Valerie P. Hans, of Cornell Law School, penned a 2003 paper (PDF) published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review that said:
The criminal justice community has become increasingly concerned about the policy implications of jury nullification, especially as jury nullification manifests itself in hung juries. A number of communities, especially in California, report that up to one-quarter of all criminal jury trials routinely result in mistrials due to jury deadlock.
That paper also concluded that strictly defined nullification isn't always distinguishable from doubts about the strength of a case, since the two tend to run together when jurors are skeptical about the credibility and legitimacy of police and the courts.
So jury nullification may be one of those things we're already soaking in without realizing it, because people with doubts about the law stubbornly bring acquittals or deadlock juries without painting their actions in political colors. Now, in New Hampshire, maybe we'll get to see what happens when jurors are told that what they're already doing is officially OK.Dunkirk: “People Should be Hung from Lampposts, they Should be Burned Alive, for what They’ve Done to Britain”
So I went to see this movie Dunkirk at the urging of James Kirkpatrick, VDARE.com’s lead tweetmeister and our ambassador to popular culture. In the process, I made the interesting discovery that my young Texan wife had never heard of Dunkirk. For me, it brought flocking back a host of memories and emotions sternly repressed since I left Britain for U.S. in 1970. Chief among them now: lethal rage.
If you grew up in Britain in the 1950s, as John Derbyshire and I did, the myth of the Dunkirk evacuation—using “myth” in its affirming and sustaining sense—was everywhere. I remember reading illustrated stories about it in children’s comics when I was about Felicity’s age (now 6).
Of course, the British were wrong to believe this was the decisive turning point in World War II—there were, as we are incessantly reminded, far bigger battles on the Eastern Front. But it was pretty decisive for Britain: the loss (or, politically even more awkward, capture) of the 200,000-plus U.K. troops retrieved from the beaches after being cut off by the German panzers would have been devastating, perhaps fatal, for a country that could field only ten infantry divisions in 1939. As it was, casualties were very heavy—one of many arresting points made by Dunkirk is how terrifyingly quickly combat-damaged ships can sink.
Moreover, Dunkirk was in a real sense a people’s battle. Some 700 civilian craft were recruited to get the men off the beaches and (as the movie recounts) their owners sometimes went with them. When my father took charge of the municipal-socialist public transport operation in Birkenhead in the 1960s, he had Mersey ferrymen who had gone. It was an intense popular effort and it struck deep personal roots.
Although aimed at a mass audience, Dunkirk is a very sophisticated movie and a remarkable technical achievement by writer-producer director Christopher Nolan. It’s also a political achievement. Nolan’s subject is one of the Anglosphere’s great patriotic epics and thus ripe for anti-West snark, but it has actually been well received by the Leftist Cultural Establishment e.g.
Nolan seems to have flown under the radar, partly by eliminating virtually all dialog and hence minimizing the chance of jarring Politically Correct sensibilities.
Even Churchill’s sacralized “We shall fight on the beaches” June 4 oration announcing the evacuation to the House of Commons, hearing which was so much an inescapable part of growing up in England in the 1950s, like listening to Kathleen Ferrier, that I could recite it from memory and never without a thrill, appears here only as haltingly read, from a newspaper, by an exhausted, wondering survivor as his train finally reaches London.
But Nolan’s achievement goes far beyond avoiding trouble. Quietly, possibly inadvertently, he has made a movie that celebrates national identity.
Read the rest of Peter Brimelow’s article here.YANGON, Myanmar — President Trump is incidental to China’s ambitions, a mere blip on a 33-year plan. In a speech last month, President Xi Jinping set out the objectives with great clarity. By 2035 China will be a “global leader in innovation,” showing “solid progress” toward “prosperity for everyone.” By 2050, China will be a “global leader in terms of composite national strength” and a “great, modern socialist country.”
Xi gave Trump a warm welcome this week, said the Pacific was big enough for both nations and offered business agreements. Trump made nice and suggested that China and the United States could solve “almost all” of the world’s problems, “and probably all of them.” This was the noise. The real story is growing Chinese strength, steady Chinese purpose aimed at midcentury dominance and erratic American outbursts suggestive of a petulant great power’s retreat.
China is busy. It has the reserves, the surpluses and the growth to shape the world. More important, it has the pride and the confidence to think long term. America First, Trump’s ugly slogan, reeks of retrenchment. By contrast, Xi’s One Belt, One Road initiative is an enormous infrastructure project designed to use Chinese money and technology to reconnect the old Silk Road and tie nations to China. In scope and value it dwarfs the Marshall Plan, the postwar reconstruction program for Europe that was a farsighted expression of American confidence almost 70 years ago.
Xi’s speech to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China marked his apotheosis. He has joined the pantheon along with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. His thought is now dogma. His China has entered a different phase. Having grown independent and then rich, it is now “becoming strong.”“Motor Trend,” TTAC alum and occasional minor-event organizer Brock Yates once declared, “is for people who move their lips when they read.” Were Yates still with us, he’d likely be somewhat less than surprised at the breakneck pace with which MT is attempting to transform itself into a YouTube video first and a magazine-for-morons second. It’s a sound business model; why limit your content to the even vaguely literate when you can break the shackles of the written word entirely and deliver extended advertorials to the lowest possible common denominator?
Of course, it would be both crass and impolite for us to imply that Motor Trend thinks its consumers are complete idiots who will eagerly place their lips on the corporate cloaca of “TEN: The Enthusiast Network” and eagerly lap up whatever poorly digested material is splattered into their open mouths.
It would also be unnecessary, because — as of last night — Motor Trend has made that point for us.
This Tweet was part of a larger, thoroughly deceptive social-media campaign launched by MT yesterday. Several “spy shots” of a thoroughly generic-looking pod with a glowing Apple logo were tweeted and shared elsewhere:
It was patently obvious to most of us that Motor Trend was not going to reveal any sort of Apple Car whatsoever. The first clue: Most of the tweets ended with a question mark, which implies Betteridge’s Law, and the hashtag was always #MTAppleCar, not #AppleCar. The second clue was the car itself, which looked like a rejected prop from the Star Wars Holiday Special.
The folks at HybridCars quoted a commenter who said, “After tweets like that, if they don’t unveil an apple car – no one will take them seriously in the future.” Let’s take a moment to make some headlines of our own.
Will Anyone Take Motor Trend Seriously In The Future?
Is Anyone Taking Them Seriously Now?
Did The New Camaro Really Tell The New Mustang To STEP OUTSIDE?
Can The New Camaro Talk Somehow?
If It Can Talk, Is It Speaking A Language That Only Very Stupid People Can Understand?
At this point, it’s worth noting that Motor Trend’s language and behavior in its social-media campaign was more or less identical to what actual car magazines do when they are trying to shield themselves from spy-photo liability.
What do I mean by that? Well, here’s a typical example: Chris Doane or Brenda Priddy or another photographer snaps a new Acura MDX testing in Ohio. They know it’s the new MDX, because they’ve been tipped-off by a Honda employee. And when they see it driving down Route 33 outside Marysville, they can clearly tell that it’s the proper size and proportions to be an MDX. So they shoot it and then sell it to media outlets who title it: Is This The New MDX? Everybody knows perfectly well that it’s the new MDX; the question mark is there to offer a bit of legal coverage in case Honda gets frisky.
Therefore, even though MT’s Tweets appeared to be the work of some very stupid people and the “spy shots” themselves looked like they’d been stolen from an ad for the University Of Phoenix, it was probably reasonable for people to expect some sort of Apple Car news this morning. Instead, they got this:
At first glance, it appears to be a public-access television show dealing with chronic constipation, but it’s actually a 28 minute and 59 second video of people sitting around a table talking about a car that some of them made up. I have to admit that I just scanned through it briefly because after the third time MT’s Ed Loh faced the camera and croaked out his lines while flapping his hands and grimacing like his colon was under alien attack, I actually started to feel my soul attempting to flee my body. I did catch a few seconds featuring some very exciting video footage of an exotic new car; it turned out to be B-roll for the Tesla Model 3.
The video, which does not feature one thousand dollars’ worth of men’s clothing despite there being six or possibly seven participants at the roundtable, ends with Mr. Loh making a very scary lip-smacking noise before telling you to subscribe to MT‘s YouTube Channel. He doesn’t appear to suggest that you read the magazine itself; not even the rag’s own Editor-In-Chief can do that with a straight face. There’s no telling what news stories MT will feature next, but I have some possible ideas:
Is This The SR-72 Successor To The Famous Blackbird, Or Is It A Model Plane That We Made With Legos?
Is This The Apple Car For Real This Time?
Will The Next Mustang, In Its Turn, As Sure As The Stars Will Cross The Sky, Tell The New Camaro To Step Outside?
Where Are The Snowdens Of Yesteryear?
Are You Really Stupid Enough To Keep Reading, Or Watching?If you're an NHL general manager (I'm not, but I know one!), this is one of your busiest times of the year.
Make sure you have a Mophie or a portable charger handy. Be ready to cut your lunch short if someone wants to talk and be prepared to spend some time in meetings. Not only is the NHL Draft an important date on the calendar for the future of an organization, it's also the official start of hockey's "silly season," so you can expect a handful of trades, a large shipment of rumors and endless speculation.
I caught up with Blue Jackets GM Jarmo Kekalainen before heading to Buffalo for this year's draft. He's in a pretty good spot, armed with the No. 3 overall pick after jumping up in the lottery order back in April. There are some very talented players available at the top of the class, and Kekalainen's amateur scouting staff has spent the entire season working toward this weekend.
Here's what he had to say about it...
You got some good news at the Draft Lottery and you’re now in the top three. Do you like where you sit and the options you have?
JK: Yeah, we do. I think it’s a great spot. It’s a good draft and the higher you get, the better it gets. You can decide your own destiny. Obviously you want to be No. 1 and you can take (the consensus top player), but if you’re No. 2 you get the second-best and if you’re picking third, so on and so forth. It sounds silly, but that’s exactly the way it goes; we were able to move up and we’re extremely happy about it, and we’ll see where it goes from here.
Were you happy with how your amateur scouting season ended, as far as having your meetings, the discussions, and then putting the final list together?
JK: Our amateur scouts are the ones who do all the work. They watch the games and the prospects all year long, and you have to believe in them and support them in their decision-making process. Five years from now, we’ll be able to tell if we were right or if we were wrong. It’s a tough business; scouting is one of the toughest parts of the hockey business when you have to decide which guys - who are 17 years old - are going to be the best players for the next 15 years. We want to be more right than wrong, of course, but everyone is going to make mistakes – that’s how we learn. The way I look at it is the scouts scout, they put together the list and I help them out with my experience. I want to see the top guys every year so I can decide what the value of the top picks is. For me, that’s it. I’m not going to go tell our scouts that this is how it should be after watching the top guys a couple of times – that’s their job.
For me, it’s important to know if we’re sitting at No. 3, what’s the value of that pick? I’ve seen the players enough to have a pretty good idea of the value of a top-three pick in this year’s draft, and I have a pretty good idea what the value of a top-10 pick is because I’ve seen most of those guys. I think we have a very good amateur scouting staff in place. They work hard, they’re thorough and prepared, and they’ve done their homework. I have 100 percent confidence in the list they’ve put together.
This is the time of year when your phone rings a little more than normal, isn’t it?
JK: Oh yeah. But it’s good, it’s an interesting time of the year. I really enjoy this part of my job. Before (in previous jobs as an amateur scouting director and assistant GM) I had a lot of freedom from my GMs to do the amateur scouting work, and that’s why I want to pass that along to my guys here and now; I was fortunate to work with GMs who put a lot of trust into what we did on the scouting side with the amateur staff.Poet and veteran civil rights activist, Maya Angelou is the sage of black America. And for her, Barack Obama has delivered. She talks about her hopes for his-re-election – and receiving an award from his wife Michelle
There has always been something bittersweet about the life experience of Maya Angelou. Think of the literature fashioned from a harsh and tragic upbringing in racially segregated Missouri and Arkansas: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Wouldn't Take Nothing for my Journey Now. Think of her triumphs articulating the struggle of African Americans through the civil rights era. Consider that each year, her birthday, 4 April, brings with it both joy and painful memories. Who would share that anniversary with the assassination of her friend, Martin Luther King?
This year, if it progresses as Angelou expects, will exacerbate the pattern, bringing a momentous high, but not before some sickening lows. Don't worry about Barack Obama, says the chronicler of black history. He'll be re-elected. He deserves to be re-elected. But between now and November, it's going to get nasty.
"I think we are going to see a number of people who say: 'I have no racial prejudice in my heart, not in my conversation,'" Angelou says. "But in the next few months, as we wind up to the double campaign, I tell you we are going to see some nastiness, some vulgarity, I think. They'll pull the sheets off."
Obama has critics and doubters. Angelou, the sage of black America, now 83, has no time for them. "I think he has done a remarkable job, knowing how much he has been opposed," she says. "Every suggestion he makes, the Republicans en masse fight against him or don't vote at all." It's about him being a Democrat and being the first black president, she says.
Angelou worked with King in the 1960s as northern co-ordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the pair debated the possibility of a black president. King said it would happen within 40 years. Angelou told him it would not happen in her lifetime. She was wrong; happily so.
Reflecting on that presidency, what did she expect? "I was hoping for the best. And I think I have gotten the best from him." What of his detractors? "Those are people who didn't see the morass into which he stepped."
He is America's president. But he also describes himself as America's first black president. That, says Angelou, speaking from her home in North Carolina, has had an extraordinary impact on black America. "His physical self, just being there, his photograph in the newspapers as president of the United States; that has done so much good for the spirit of the African American. We see more and more children wanting to be like President Obama, wanting to go to school."
Angelou, still active despite chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), has been keen to fete Obama, and he has been equally keen to return the favour. In 2010, she was named at the White House as one of 15 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour. Obama quoted her, saying: "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
More recently, her presidential link has been via the first lady, Michelle Obama. "She's the grand dame," says Angelou. "I wrote her a note a few months ago because I was in a gathering. The president and his party were there, but I had to leave early. I know that's a gaffe because no one leaves the building before the president so I wrote and apologised. I got a letter from her in her own handwriting. She said: 'I have only one regret – that I didn't come over and hug your neck.'"
When next they met, Angelou's shock was palpable. Millions of viewers of the US channel Black Entertainment Television (BET) saw the author – recipient of three Grammys, a Pulitzer nomination and 30 honorary degrees – prepare to receive more yet recognition; a BET Honors award. She had no idea who would present it. Enter the first lady. "She talked for about 10 minutes about my work and its impact on her and her husband for the past 20 years," she says. "Calm now, but not then, Angelou told reporters: "I thought my heart would burst."
The icons of black America are prized. Soldiers of the civil rights movement especially retain an ability to speak to white and black Americans with some chance of a hearing, Angelou in particular. She has the Obama connection, but she also had a Clinton connection. She composed a poem, On the Pulse of Morning, and read it at Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration.
The landscape is different here in all sorts of ways. Angelou has visited the UK on many occasions, but she doesn't pretend to understand the intricacies of its society. Asked to compare the two, she offers a view that black people in Britain don't "have the same spirit African Americans have for a number of reasons. One is the population. Our impact on society is another."
But in the US, when she speaks, she is revered. Recently she has been, pleading, admonishing and cajoling on a range of topics. Last month, the National Park Service was forced to remove an inscription from the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington because the quote it displayed was truncated. King said: "Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter." The inscription said: "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness." That makes him seem like an "arrogant twit," complained Angelou. Against the wishes of the architect, the inscription will be changed.
She has also voiced thoughts on black history month, celebrated in the US in February. There, as here, some question the need for a yearly concentration on black history. Would it were unnecessary, she says.
"Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of US history is taught from one book. Just US history. I am trying to work myself out of a job by being so active extolling the virtues of African Americans."
Some said Obama's America would be post racial. "That was silly," she says. "That was the same thing that happened in the 60s, alas, and it set us up for some really terrible years. In the 50s and 60s, when integration was legally voted in, a number of black people stopped telling their children what they had been told, and all black children had been told in the US: that it all depends on you; you must get to school and you must go for As. After 1960 and for 10, maybe 20 years, the young people were let go. 'Go and have your own ideas and be eccentric. You don't have to go to school. Learn to dribble a ball.' It was pitiful. Grades that were fine in black schools sank to an embarrassing level." The malaise has since been addressed, she says. "People have awakened to the mistakes."
Another issue created yet more headlines. The rapper Common obtained Angelou's permission to use her voice on the opening track of his current album, The Dreamer/The Believer. She was mortified that elsewhere he uses the N-word and the B-word in reference to women. Last month, again on BET, they appeared together in a special called Soulmates. The pair have cordially agreed to disagree.
"It is terrible," she says. "Europeans, or whites, used the N-word; and it is as if the black people say: 'You hate me and show you hate me by using that word. Well, let me show you how to hate me. I can use that word. I can hate myself more than you can hate me.' It's a most vulgar and senseless attitude. My prayer is that young men and women who use that word will rethink."
Angelou wears many labels. With the books and screenplays, her film work and stints in Egypt and Ghana – where she first worked with Malcolm X – she has been called a "global renaissance woman". But she calls herself a working mother and an optimist. And not just for the president. That is despite the racism and the inequalities. The beauty of 83 years and a clear eye is an ability to see the big picture. "I see how far we have come," she says. "We live very short lives. Even at 100 we live short lives. We hardly see the magnitude of our progress. A little over 150 years ago, all blacks in the US were either slaves or escapees and people were legally lynched in the city centre."
And now one of them is the president. In November, perhaps, he will get a second term.
The Fifth Annual BET Honors will be screened on Saturday on BET Sky Channel 191 and Freesat 140 at 8pm.Aaron Rovenstine is out as sheriff of Kosciusko County after being sentenced Tuesday for a single count of intimidation, a felony.
He will serve one-year probation and 250 hours of community service.
In February 2016, Rovenstine was accused of threatening a Warsaw police officer who was investigating allegations that the sheriff accepted bribes to grant an inmate special privileges.
Rovenstine originally faced 10 counts, including bribery and misconduct, but a plea deal struck just before his trial dismissed nine of them.
Rovenstine pleaded guilty to intimidation, a Level 6 felony.
In court Tuesday, Judge Stephen Bowers said if the circumstances were different, he would have put Rovenstine in prison and that he certainly considered it.
Judge Bowers of Elkhart County was appointed to this case as a special judge.
Tuesday, Detective Paul Heaton took the stand.
“I think a lot of times, people forget about the victims. I’m saddened for the community that this even had to take place,” said Detective Paul Heaton, Warsaw Police Department.
He testified that Rovenstine made him feel threatened.
“A threat to back off of the investigation or World War III would break out and it would be ugly, because I’m the sheriff and I have investigators too,” said Nelson Chipman, the special prosecutor in this case who is describing what Rovenstine allegedly told Heaton over the phone.
Heaton expressed the emotional pain he and his family have suffered throughout this process.
“I’m sure you all sensed what we've sensed, which is what we've been dealing over the past couple years, which is a bit of intimidation,” said Scott Whitaker, Chief of Police, City of Warsaw.
In court, Judge Stephen Bowers recognized the rift that's been created between the Kosciusko County Sheriff's Department and the Warsaw Police Department.
“There will be a rebuilding process.That's going to take place really from the new sheriff and from the sheriff’s department,” said Whitaker.
Prior to making his decision, Judge Bowers weighed the mitigating and aggravating factors. He recognized that Rovenstine has no prior criminal history and that it is unlikely he will commit a crime again; however, he said he believes this case created an immense distraction and took a great deal of resources from the community.
The judge also said that because any jail time Rovenstine received would be served at Kosciusko County Jail, he felt nothing good would come out of incarcerating him.
Rovenstine is now a convicted felon; the judge did not lower his sentence to a misedemeankr.
He has been stripped of his badge and position and will no longer be allowed to possess a firearm.
Special Prosecutor Nelson Chipman says it's something that is long overdue.
“As of the last 41 years, 27 of those years, either Aaron Rovenstine or his father have been sheriff. It is that atmosphere that culture that is problematic,” said Chipman.
Rovenstine is forbidden from running for sheriff ever again.
As part of his sentence, he is not allowed to complete any of his community service hours with the Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Department or his church.
In court Rovenstine gave a brief but tearful statement just before Judge Bowers handed down the sentence. He said he is "sorry for this whole mess." He also said he wished he could have lived by the Golden Rule, and that this time he failed.
Chief Deputy William ‘Rocky’ Goshert has taken over as acting sheriff.
Prosecutors say the earliest a new sheriff could be appointed would be about 30 days from now. Currently, it is unknown who Kosciusko County's newest 'top cop' will be.Actor Wendell Pierce declared his love for St Patrick's Athletic in an interview with the Sunday World published today. The Star of 'The Wire', 'Treme' and 'Horrible Bosses' became a fan through twitter.
Wendell on discovering the journalist was from Dublin;
"A lot of my boys are Dublin boys, did you know that? I'm a huge St Patrick's athletic fan. I can't wait to get over to a game in Inchicore"
How did this fandom come about then?
I'm a New Orleans man, so I support the Saints here and after I sent a few NFL tweets a few years back a whole load of Supersaint fans in Dublin tweeted me, Now I'm an honorary Supersaint, although I'm embarrassed to say that as yet I haven't been to a game, but I will. We chat on twitter all the time and I follow the teams results
The journalist, Daragh Keany, explains how such was Wendell's desire to talk about St Pats that his PR person had to steer him back on topic of Treme.
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As you'd expect with social media, St Pats were quick off the mark with an invite;
Hi @WendellPierce delighted to hear you're a fan. Drop us a line when you're coming over pic.twitter.com/9b33e9IOJj — St Patrick's Ath (@stpatsfc) March 24, 2013
Bunk responded to internet claims he wasn't a true League of Ireland fan
h/t Paul O'MalleyU.S. President Barack Obama's ongoing trip to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania is his best -- and perhaps last -- chance at Africa policy redemption. After the five disappointing years of false starts, inattention, and policy drift that I wrote about below, this visit could set the stage for a strong finish.
The trip itself might be merely symbolic, but symbols can say a lot about whether the United States is finally taking its partnership with the continent seriously. It is a chance for Obama to make the case to the American people that Africa is strategically important, not just a target for charity. (Many Americans still hold the outdated view that Africa is the land of AIDS and civil war, not the home of emerging entrepreneurial dynamism and six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies.) Further, a strong set of new policy ideas from the administration could blunt the sharp contrast between China’s active engagement in Africa and the United States’ (so far) lame response to Africa’s economic resurgence.
In that respect, Obama’s June 30 announcement of an African electricity initiative, which would target six countries with billions of dollars in private and public investment, is potentially game changing. Some 85 percent of Tanzanians still have no regular access to electricity (in Senegal, the figure is 58 percent; in South Africa, 25 percent). Possible announcements on trade or other investments in Tanzania would also signal the start of a more modern business relationship.
If the new power initiative does help increase access to electricity and spur new private investment, Obama’s trip will be viewed as a turning point in the U.S.-African relationship. If the United States fails to follow through on it, though, the country risks being left behind -- and missing a critical opportunity to lead in a region on the rise.
A Madiba mosaic portrait |
ready to go.
“Obviously I’m going to take it light today,” James said, “Training staff said I should take it light today. Give the body another day to recover, tomorrow I should be back on my feet full go, and I got all day Sunday to get ready for Sunday night.
“Don’t worry, you guys can talk about me as much as you want. I’ll be there on Sunday as well. I’m not hiding.”Reggie Miller enjoyed an incredible career on the hardwood.
He played 18 seasons for one team, the Indiana Pacers. You don't see that too often in the world of sports these days. Miller scored more than 25,000 points, hit more than 2,000 trifectas and was a flat-out superstar.
What a moment coming this weekend, when he is inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. Who could ever forget those classic battles with the New York Knicks and his clutch shooting down the stretch? His verbal battles with Spike Lee were legendary!
It is appropriate that he will be presented at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony by three legends -- Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson and Miller's sister, Cheryl.
Reggie and Cheryl were such special competitors on the court. It is great to see the siblings both will be in the shrine at Springfield. Cheryl shined in college at USC while Reggie excelled at UCLA. They attended rival schools but both were so special, so talented.
The dynamic duo certainly brought a lot of pride and thrills to the Miller household. They now work together in the world of television. They have a great deal of admiration and love for each other.
I always enjoyed watching Reggie Miller's velvet touch. I loved his personality and attitude, as he was such a fierce competitor. The five-time NBA All-Star also won a gold medal at the 1996 Olympics. It was great to hear people talking about Miller Time! He really should have been in as a first-ballot Hall of Famer, but he missed out last year. The second time was a charm, baby!
It is going to be a special night. The class coming in has some big names, including Ralph Sampson, Don Nelson, Chet Walker, Phil Knight of Nike fame, Jamaal Wilkes and several others. Just hearing about the list of presenters gave me goosebumps. Names like Michael Jordan, Bob Cousy, Dr. J., Billy Cunningham, Chris Mullin, Magic, Barkley, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Rick Barry, Bill Walton, Earl Monroe, Teresa Edwards and others. Wow, it is a who's who of hoops, baby!
I am sure there will be some tears shed when Reggie Miller is inducted into the Hall with his sister standing right there on the stage in Springfield.A tax on football tickets could help the UN fund its aid operations (AFP Photo/Adrian Dennis)
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - A UN study of new sources of financing for its multi-billion-dollar aid operations is recommending a voluntary tax on football matches or concerts as one option to raise funds.
The report released Sunday in Dubai also recommended tapping into Islamic social finance and mandatory alms-giving, or zakat, as well as improving the transparency of relief operations to cut costs.
More wars and natural disasters in the past decade have sent the cost of global UN aid efforts skyrocketing, from $2 billion in 2000 to $ 24.5 billion in 2015, according to the nine experts who drafted the report.
At the same time, the United Nations is struggling to meet its funding appeals.
Last year, a funding shortfall forced UN agencies to cut food rations to 1.6 million Syrians living in refugee camps, a move now seen as having partly triggered the mass exodus of refugees to Europe.
"The world has never been so generous... and yet never has our generosity been so insufficient," said European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva, who chaired the panel along with Sultan Nazrin Shah of Malaysia.
Helping victims of catastrophe and war is "morally right and also in our own self-interest as the migrant crisis has shown," she told reporters ahead of the release.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented the report by the high-level panel on humanitarian financing during a visit to Dubai on Sunday.
"This is an age of mega crises. Three out of four UN appeals for humanitarian funding for more than a billion dollars are in the Middle East and North Africa region," Ban said in Dubai, adding that more than 125 million people need humanitarian assistance worldwide.
"Despite the generosity of many donors, there still remains a gap in the financing of humanitarian aid estimated at $15 billion," he said.
The UN panel is proposing a three-pronged approach, starting with a fresh focus on reducing demand for humanitarian aid by beefing up conflict-prevention.
Also, the circle of donors must be broadened to find new donors -- only five countries provide two-thirds of all public humanitarian aid.
- Micro-levy for aid -
One of the most concrete proposals from the panel is a new "solidarity levy" that countries would agree to apply to certain goods or services.
The new tax is modelled after Unitaid, a non-governmental organization that persuaded 10 countries to impose a small tax on airline tickets to generate funds to combat malaria and AIDS.
A tax on airline travel or fuel could help fund medical services in refugee camps or in areas hosting displaced civilians, said the report.
Georgieva said "a micro-levy on a massive volume is possible" on an array of transactions such as fuel, concerts, movies or sporting events.
The Bulgarian economist and EU budget commissioner said there had been exchanges with the scandal-tainted FIFA football federation on a possible contribution.
"My sense is that it is not impossible," Georgieva told reporters ahead of the release of the report.
Another option would be to tap into the billions generated annually in the Muslim world from alms-giving.
Those donations amount to between $232 billion and $560 billion annually, according to estimates quoted by the report.
Just one percent of zakat would made an enormous difference in global funding, it added.
The report will be a key topic of debate at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in May.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Stephen O'Brien, said in Dubai that the international community should "secure bold collective agreement for political solutions to crises" and focus on preventing such conflicts from breaking out.
Georgieva headed EU humanitarian operations before becoming budget commissioner and her name is often floated as a potential successor to Ban, who steps down at the end of this year.I don’t know much about Malawi. I know they had a fuel shortage recently. So when I heard they were banning gas, I thought, “Well, that’s an elegant solution.”
But Malawi isn’t banning gas, it’s going to criminalize passing gas. Yeah, because of all the things going on in Malawi, I’m sure farting is a primary concern. I’m sure the Malawian ambassador to the U.N. is going to love hearing fart jokes in 50 different languages. (And yes, the French guy is going to be obligated under international law to say: “I fart in your general direction.”)
In any event, let’s all point and laugh at another example of terrible sub-Saharan leadership…
The Daily Mail — which can’t be bothered to name the specific “African country” in its headline — has the story:
The government of Malawi plans to punish persistent offenders ‘who foul the air’ in a bid to ‘mould responsible and disciplined citizens.’ But locals fear that pinning responsibility on the crime will be difficult – and may lead to miscarriages of justice as ‘criminals’ attempt to blame others for their offence.
Are we witnessing an international outbreak of legislation that really stinks? This comes on the heels of China’s proposal to require children to visit their parents.
The anti-farting provision won’t be the only silly law fouling the Malawian code:
The crime will be enforceable in a new ‘Local Court’ system which will also have powers to punish a range of other crimes in the bill set to be debated in the country’s parliament. These include insulting the modesty of a woman, challenging to fight a duel, and trespassing on a burial place. It also outlaws pretending to be a fortune teller, according to local press in the country.
You know, these laws seem funny, but they’re actually silent but deadly. It’s not so much that the code shows a complete lack of respect for freedom and personal liberty, it’s that these laws mean that the Malawian government can arrest you for any reason or no reason at all.
So if Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika and his ruling party doesn’t like what you think, bang, the international press has a story about how a man was “arrested for farting.” It’s always political protesters, religious leaders, and opposition candidates who get arrested for “farting,” “trespassing in a graveyard,” or “challenging somebody to fight.” Laws about farting just mask the scent of totalitarianism.
Which is not to say that wa Mutharika is some kind of evil genius. For all I know, the man really does think he has control over the sphincters of his people. But these kinds of laws aren’t harmlessly funny; they are proactively dangerous. They’re an illustration that the leadership is completely detached from reality. You have situations like this all the time, all over the world, but the international community only really notices when the people start rioting or killing each other. You’ve got to nip these things in the bud (which doubles as my entire argument against Rand Paul). This isn’t an international fart joke, it’s a travesty waiting to happen.
… And it’s a little funny. I mean, the next time Hillary Clinton visits Malawi it’ll be to work out a deal for cheap shipments of Subtle Butt or Gas-X. Customs will be telling Malawians that they can’t bring unreleased farts into America. [I’ve got ten more of these but I’ll stop now.]
Better in than out: African country set to make breaking wind a crime [Daily Mail]
Earlier: Career Alternatives for Attorneys: Fart Fighting?
‘Tiger Mothers’ Hoping to Sue the Children Who Grow Up to Hate ThemAngela Merkel told German broadcaster RBB that companies should integrate refugees into the job market quicker. On Wednesday, the chancellor spoke with German executives in Berlin about their lack of hires and exchanged ideas with them about how they might do better.
"Many are in integration courses or waiting to get into them," Merkel said of refugees. "I think we will need to show some patience, but must be ready at any time to develop viable solutions."
Companies have blamed refugees' lack of proficiency in German, an inability to prove credentials and precariousness while awaiting decisions on their status for the lack of hires. Merkel said the government could develop provisions to speed up the integration of refugees into the workforce - but she acknowledged that this would still take time.
'Loan program'
About 346,000 people with asylum status sought jobs in August, the Federal Employment Agency reported, up from 322,000 in July and 297,000 in June. When large numbers of refugees began arriving in 2015, officials expressed optimism that Germany could use their labor to boost growth and plug the social security revenue gap.
The lack of hires, however, has delayed this. Merkel seemed to offer at least one solution to that in her interview with RBB on Thursday.
"We recently discussed in the cabinet that transliterating a Syrian driver's license into German costs 500 euros ($560)," Merkel said. "And, naturally, a refugee doesn't have 500 euros right away. So maybe a loan program could help. When the person starts earning, he can pay the 500 euros back. Professional drivers are especially sought out."
On Thursday, Germany's national rail carrier, Deutsche Bahn, announced that it was all aboard with Merkel's intentions. Over the next two years, DB will create 150 additional spots for refugees in its qualification program, a spokesman said Thursday in Berlin, adding that DB chief Rüdiger Grube had pledged the carrier's help when speaking with Merkel at the meeting of executives. DB had created spaces for 120 refugees in its qualification program starting in 2015; the training includes German-language courses.
Deutsche Post DHL employs about 100 refugees to sort and deliver parcels. National internet service provider Deutsche Telekom has announced plans to hire about 75 refugees as apprentices this year, but has not made a permanent hire from the million people who arrived in the past year, Reuters reported.
mkg/nm (Reuters, AFP, epd, dpa)Star Wars collectibles fans worldwide are filled with excitement for the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi! After his debut in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren has trained to grow more powerful in the dark side of the Force and is now determined to hunt down those who caused his defeat at Starkiller Base.
Sideshow and Hot Toys are thrilled to expand the highly anticipated Star Wars: The Last Jedi series with the all-new sixth scale collectible figure of Kylo Ren! The highly-accurate collectible figure is specially crafted based on the appearance of Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. This collectible figure features a newly developed head sculpt with a stunning likeness, an expertly tailored outfit with magnetically attachable cape, Kylo Ren’s signature crossguard lightsaber with LED light-up function, Kylo Ren’s helmet, and a specially designed character theme figure stand!
Let the dark side of your Star Wars collection grow by adding the new Kylo Ren collectible figure!Discussing the murder of Moses Cannon, a transgender woman, Minneapolis radio host Chris Baker suggested that "some of the blame lie[s] with the American media who enables this fraud" and who "push this false reality." He also stated: "I believe the media and the rest of the enablers out there, they have this guy's blood on their hands because they create this false sense of reality and they enable people who need serious psychological counseling."
During the November 18 broadcast of his Minneapolis radio show, Chris Baker said of the November 14 murder of a transgender woman who reportedly went by the name Latiesha Green: "I believe that the fault, and I know, 'cause already I'm seeing quotes and comments and, 'Oh, it's hate. It's a hate crime. It's a horrible hate crime.' Doesn't some of the blame lie with the American media who enables this fraud?" Baker added: "I would say a majority of the blame does not lie with the nitwit that shot him, other than the fact that he's a nitwit and a guy who should have been in prison in my opinion, who shot him. But to me, this is the -- this is an example of how, by enabling people and trying to push this false reality, leads to horrible crimes like this."
Later in the show, Baker discussed the case again, stating that "this guy is a murderer and should go to jail.... But I personally believe that by the media and all these other people out there enabling these people that they put people like this at risk, because they give them the boldness, the confidence, the -- to decide, 'Well, you know what? I'm a girl. Even though I'm not a girl, I'm a girl. And the media will call me a girl, so, therefore, I can walk into any party I want. I can go anywhere I want.' " Baker also stated: "I believe the media and the rest of the enablers out there, they have this guy's blood on their hands because they create this false sense of reality and they enable people who need serious psychological counseling."
Syracuse's WSYR-TV reported on November 17 that Dwight DeLee had been charged with the crime, which occurred after Green attended a party, and that "Syracuse Police say they believe DeLee's motive was a dislike for [the victim's] sexual orientation."
During the show, Baker also discussed the appearance of Thomas Beatie, a pregnant transgender man, and his wife, Nancy, on the November 17 edition of CNN's Larry King Live. During the interview, King asked the Beaties: "Did he get pregnant right out of the box?" Baker repeatedly aired the audio of this portion of the interview, responding, "It's a she, Larry.... It's a she." Moreover, Baker called the Beaties "mental cases" and referred to Thomas Beatie as a "mutilated lesbian."
As Media Matters for America documented, Baker also called Beatie a "mutilated lesbian" on the November 14 edition of his show. He also stated: "If a lesbian gets pregnant, I'm fine with it. I'm OK. Just stop alternating reality and trying to force me to buy into your psychosis."
From the November 18 broadcast of KTLK's The Chris Baker Show:Competitive, credible, and fair local elections in Jakarta and the province of West Kalimantan in 2012 underscored the ongoing transition from decades of authoritarian rule in Indonesia. The government’s willingness to accept numerous recommendations from United Nations member states during the UN’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Indonesia’s human rights record was another hopeful sign of a growing commitment to respecting human rights.
However, Indonesia remains beset by serious human rights problems. Violence and discrimination against religious minorities, particularly Ahmadiyah, Bahai, Christians, and Shia deepened. Lack of accountability for abuses by police and military forces continues to affect the lives of residents in Papua and West Papua provinces.
Freedom of Expression
Indonesia’s vibrant media routinely reports on crucial social and political issues including corruption, environmental destruction, and violence against religious minorities. But a rising climate of religious intolerance and an infrastructure of discriminatory national and local laws deny freedom of expression to Indonesia’s religious minorities.
In May, the Indonesian government dismissed recommendations during its UPR to release more than 100 political prisoners, the majority in the Moluccas Islands and Papua. These activists are serving sentences of up to 20 years for acts of peaceful protest including staging protest dances or raising separatist flags. In January, the government refused to accept the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s determination, issued in September 2011, that Papuan independence activist Filep Karma is a political prisoner. The working group called on Indonesia to immediately and unconditionally release Karma.
Indonesian police and government authorities failed to adequately protect artists, writers, and media companies targeted with threats and protests by militant Islamist groups. In May, neither police nor government officials intervened to prevent Islamist groups from disrupting the book tour of Canadian-Muslim writer Irshad Manji in the capital, Jakarta, and Yogyakarta. In June, Jakarta police bowed to pressure from the militant Islamic Defenders Front organization protesting the planned concert of US pop star Lady Gaga and revoked the permit to the concert organizers, prompting its cancellation.
Military Reform and Impunity
Impunity for members of Indonesia’s security forces remained a serious concern, with the military courts having a poor prosecution record and no civilian jurisdiction over soldiers who commit serious rights abuses. On June 6, over 300 soldiers from the 756th Battalion rampaged in the Papuan village of Wamena as a reprisal for an incident in which villagers beat to death two soldiers involved in a fatal traffic accident. Soldiers randomly fired their weapons into shopping areas, burned down 87 houses, stabbed 13 villagers, and killed a native Papuan civil servant.
Although military officials on June 12 apologized for the incident and promised compensation, victims said military investigators failed to question them about the incident. They said rather than paying any compensation, the military has limited its response to the violence to a traditional Papuan “stone-burning” ceremony and declared the case closed.
Freedom of Religion
In 2012, incidents of violence against religious minorities were frequent and occasionally deadly. Islamist militants mobilized mobs to attack religious minorities with impunity. Light prison terms imposed on those prosecuted sent a message of official tolerance for such mob violence. Dozens of regulations, including ministerial decrees on building houses of worship, continue to foster discrimination and intolerance.
Throughout 2012, dozens of minority Christian congregations, including GKI Yasmin church in Bogor and HKBP Filadelfia church in the Jakarta suburb of Bekasi, reported that local government officials arbitrarily refused to issue them permits required under a 2006 decree on building houses of worship. Both churches had already won Supreme Court decisions to build such structures. Senior government officials, including Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali and Home Affairs Minister Gamawan Fauzi, continued to justify restrictions on religious freedom in the name of public order. They both offered affected minorities “relocation” rather than legal protection of their rights.
Suryadharma Ali has himself inflamed tensions by making highly discriminatory remarks about the Ahmadiyah and Shia, suggesting that both are heretical. In September 2012, he stated that the “solution” to religious intolerance of Shia and Ahmadiyah was their conversion to the Sunni Islam that most Indonesians follow. That same month, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called for the development of an international instrument to prosecute “religious blasphemy,” which could be used to restrict free expression and the religious freedom of minorities.
According to Indonesia’s Setara Institute, which monitors religious freedom, religious attacks increased from 216 in 2010 to 244 in 2011. In the first nine months of 2012 there were 214 cases.
On December 29, 2011, Sunni militants attacked a Shia village in Sampang regency, Madura Island, burning houses and the madrasa, causing around 500 Shia residents to flee. Police arrested and charged only one of the militants for the arson attack. On August 26, at the end of the holiday following the end of Ramadan, hundreds of Sunni militants again attacked the same Shia village and burned down around 50 Shia houses, killing one man and seriously injuring another. Several police officers at the scene failed to intervene to stop the attack.
In March, a court in Central Java sentenced Andreas Guntur, the leader of the spiritual group Amanat Keagungan Ilahi, to four years’ imprisonment on charges of blasphemy on the basis of allegedly improper teachings of certain verses of the Quran.
In June, a West Sumatra court sentenced Alexander An, an administrator of the “Minang Atheist” Facebook group, to 30 months in prison and a fine of 100 million rupiah (US$11,000) for “inciting public unrest” via Facebook postings espousing atheism.
In July, an East Java district court sentenced Shia cleric Tajul Muluk to two years’ imprisonment for blasphemy against Islam. The East Java high court later increased his sentence to four years and two months for causing “riots” in August.
In November, Acehnese villagers attacked a Muslim sect in Bireuen, Aceh, targeting the house of Muslim teacher Tengku Aiyub Syakuban. Mainstream Muslim clerics accused Syakuban of disseminating “heretical teachings.” Hundreds of villagers burned and killed Syakuban and his student Muntasir. One attacker, Mansyur, also died in the melee.
Papua/West Papua
In March, a Jayapura court convicted five men—Selpius Bobii, a social media activist; August Sananay Kraar, a civil servant; Dominikus Sorabut, a filmmaker; Edison Waromi, a former political prisoner; and Forkorus Yaboisembut, a Papuan tribal leader—and sentenced them to three years in prison for statements made at a Papuan People’s Congress in October 2011. The security forces had brutally attacked the congress, leaving at least three people dead.
In May, more than a dozen UN member countries raised questions and made recommendations during Indonesia’s UPR in Geneva about human rights problems in Papua including impunity for abuses by security forces, restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, and excessive restrictions and surveillance of foreign journalists and human rights researchers. In September, Indonesia rejected all the Papua-related UPR recommendations. The government instead denied that Indonesia has political prisoners and asserted that there is no impunity in Papua and that “national journalists” could travel freely in the region.
From May to August there was a marked upsurge in violence as Indonesian security forces apparently sought to crackdown on Papuan activists. Forty-seven reported violent incidents in this period left 18 dead, including one Indonesian security officer, and dozens of wounded, including a German tourist.
On June 14, police shot and killed KNPB deputy chairman Mako Tabuni, triggering riots in the Jayapura neighborhood of Wamena, over perceptions that Tabuni was the victim of an extrajudicial execution. Papua police suspected Tabuni of involvement in numerous shootings.
Aceh
In June, former Aceh guerilla leaders Zaini Abdullah and Muzakir Manaf took the offices of Aceh’s governor and deputy governor respectively after winning an April 9 election.
In May, the Singkil regency closed down 19 churches and one house of worship belonging to followers of Pambi, a native faith among the Pakpak Dairi ethnic group, after protests from the militant Islamic Defenders Front who asserted the structures were “illegal.” Governor Zaini refused to intervene in the dispute, blaming religious tension on unnamed “outsiders.”
Aceh's provincial government continued to implement a repressive Sharia-inspired dress code and law on "seclusion," banning association between unmarried men and women in “isolated” places. The provisions are enforced primarily through a Sharia police force that harasses, intimidates, and arbitrarily arrests and detains women and men.
In September, a 16-year-old teenage girl arrested by the Sharia police in Langsa regency committed suicide after two daily newspapers reported that she was a “prostitute.” In her suicide note, she denied the allegation and said she could not bear the shame.
Migrant Workers
More than four million Indonesian women work abroad in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Middle East as live-in domestic workers. These women often encounter a range of abuses, including labor exploitation, psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, and situations of forced labor and slavery-like conditions. The Indonesian government has become an increasingly vocal advocate for its workers abroad, successfully negotiating the pardon of 22 Indonesian women on Saudi Arabia’s death row, calling for improved labor protections, and ratifying the Migrant Workers Convention.
However, Indonesia has consistently failed to rein in abusive recruitment agencies that send workers abroad. Many agencies charge workers high fees that leave them heavily indebted and give them deceptive or incomplete information about their work conditions. Revisions to its migration law remain pending.
Within Indonesia, an important draft law extending key protections to domestic workers has languished in parliament. The country’s labor law excludes all domestic workers from the basic labor rights afforded to formal workers, such as a minimum wage, overtime pay, limits to hours of work, a weekly rest day, and vacation. Hundreds of thousands of girls, some as young as 11, are employed as domestic workers. Many work 14 to 18-hour days, seven days a week, with no day off. Many employers forbid child domestic workers from leaving the house where they work and pay little or none of their salaries. In the worst cases, girls are physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by their employers or their employers’ family members.
Refugees and Asylum Seekers
Indonesia detains and mistreats thousands of asylum seekers, including children, from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Burma, and elsewhere. Asylum seekers face detention, abuses in custody, limited access to education, and have little or no basic assistance. In February 2012, an Afghan asylum seeker died from injuries allegedly inflicted by guards at the Pontianak Immigration Detention Center. There are at least 1,000 unaccompanied migrant children in Indonesia, approximately 200 of whom remain in detention with unrelated adults. Indonesia is not party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, and does not provide most migrants opportunities to obtain legal status, such as to seek asylum. Many migrants consider traveling on to Australia on boats arranged by smugglers a viable option, despite the risks of drowning in the dangerous sea crossing.
Key International Actors
In April 2012, British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Jakarta. Cameron applauded Indonesia’s political progress, but challenged the government to stand up against “despicable violence and persecution” of religious minorities.
Much of US policy towards Indonesia has focused on cementing military ties, including with Indonesian special forces, which have long been implicated in serious abuses. In September, the US announced the sale of eight Apache attack helicopters to Indonesia.
In November, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay visited Jakarta and asked the Indonesian government to address “increasing levels of violence and hatred towards religious minorities and narrow and extremist-interpretations of Islam.”Oksana Shachko, a girl with a doll-like face, is supposed to go to prison for five years.
It's a cool spring Thursday in Ukraine as the 24-year-old walks through the streets of Kiev with her attorney. She is wearing a leather jacket and black boots, and dangling an almost-finished cigarette between her fingers. Five years, because she bared her breasts in public once again.
The hearing at the Interior Ministry is at 5 p.m., and they are in a hurry. They walk past tall, brown and gray buildings from the Stalin era. They discuss ways to put a positive spin on the expression "kiss my ass," which is what Oksana said to the Indian ambassador. "It was a happy protest. A happy protest for the rights of Ukrainian women," Oksana finally says. She's decided it's what she will say in the hearing at the Interior Ministry.
Shachko is a Ukrainian women's rights activist, and her weapons are attached to her pale, petite body like the two halves of an apple.
Her weapons are the symbol of femininity, motherhood and sexuality, and filmmakers and marketers have used them millions of times to sell everything under the sun, from yogurt to vacuum cleaners. They have put Oksana and her fight onto cover pages around the world, and they've made her and her fellow activists into the cover girls of an international protest movement -- the icons of a naked rebellion.
Their supporters believe that by using these weapons, the women have invented a new feminism. Their critics say that they are turning themselves into pornography with these weapons.
Marxism Instead of Marriage
They were in their late teens, the oldest in her early 20s, when it all began, says Oksana, and their parents hoped that they would get married early. The creators of the movement are Oksana, Anna Hutsol and Sasha Shevchenko. At first, they lived in Khmelnytskyi, a city with 300,000 inhabitants and two nuclear reactors.
There were hardly any jobs to be had, and the men drank. The girls, for their part, spent long evenings discussing philosophy, Marxism and the situation of women in post-Soviet society. They decided that instead of getting married, they would bring about change.
There were only three of them at first, but now the movement, whose ranks include students, journalists and economists, has spread throughout Ukraine and includes more than 300 women. Calling themselves "Femen," they have started a movement that has also caught hold among women in Tunisia and the United States. It's a movement that even encourages experienced women's rights activists to undress.
"Maybe I'll need political asylum," says Oksana. "What they're accusing me of is absurd." She and her attorney have arrived at the Interior Ministry.
Accused of Hooliganism
Oksana is a professional icon painter and lives in a run-down studio apartment in Kiev with greenish mold on the ceiling. In other words, she has a profession and is living an ordinary Ukrainian life of poverty and turmoil. But her apartment is full of protest signs, and she has drawn a picture of a Femen activist, with flowing hair and bare breasts, on the wall. It's a self-portrait of a woman who is causing a lot of trouble.
She was released from a Moscow prison a few days ago, after having tried -- topless -- to steal the ballot box containing Russian leader Vladimir Putin's ballot during the March 4 presidential election. The stunt got her two weeks in a prison cell.
Now she stands accused of hooliganism and occupying the Indian Embassy to protest a claim by the Indian Foreign Ministry that women from post-Soviet countries are going to India to work as prostitutes.
Although the Indian Embassy denied the claim, this didn't stop Oksana and three other women from storming the building. They waved the Indian flag and banged it against windows and doors, shouting: "Ukrainian women are no prostitutes" and "kiss my ass."
Using the Body to Sell Ideas
Such protest campaigns usually begin at the Café Kupidon. While Oksana is making a statement at the Interior Ministry, Anna Hutsol is sitting at a table in the café, working on her next campaign. Café Kupidon is in the basement of a tall townhouse on Pushkinskaya ulitsa, or Pushkin Street. The windowless café serves as the headquarters, office and press center of Femen. It's where the activists recruit new members, although some don't need to be recruited. The group already includes 30 nude activists, attractive, idealistic young women. They meet at the café, where they drink apple juice and chain-smoke.
The image of the Ukrainian woman is colored by the cliché that she is beautiful, poor and easy to get. Trafficking in women and prostitution are rampant in Ukraine, which is co-hosting the upcoming European football championships. Everywhere in Kiev, in the subway and in classified ads, women are recruited with spurious promises of employment. A phrase like "waitress in a club" is often code for prostitute in a brothel.
Many fall for these offers because they are poor and have no prospects. Almost 9 percent of Ukrainians are unemployed, and many of the jobless are women. "If the female body can sell all kinds of things, we also have to use it to sell social ideas," says Hutsol, as she puts out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. They staged their first protest in the summer of 2008, when they took to the streets in prostitutes' clothing. "Ukraine isn't a brothel," they shouted, as they held up their signs. The protest attracted media attention and promptly triggered a debate. Suddenly the women realized that producing scandal translates into power. That, at least, is their hope.
They staged their first nude demonstration in 2009 on Khreshchatyk, Kiev's main shopping avenue, to protest against Internet pornography. "It was embarrassing at first," says Hutsol, "and we covered our breasts with our hands." But the public response was good, and so they did it again the next time. Eventually they came to see their breasts as nothing but a uniform.
Sought-After
The issues they protest about can be found in the news. They don't just demonstrate for women's rights, but for issues like the economy and corruption, and against politicians like Putin and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. They aren't, however, protesting over the prison conditions endured by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who seems to have caught the attention of much of Europe at the moment. In fact, say the Femen women, Tymoshenko is part of a clique of oligarchs who are fighting with other oligarchs, and they see no reason to do anything for the jailed politician.
Today they are planning a trip to Paris, in response to an invitation by a group of French feminists. "I have to fly to Moscow tomorrow, for a TV show," says Anna. Oksana was originally scheduled to appear on the program, but now she has been barred from entering Russia for the rest of her life.
Anna Hutsol has become a sought-after face. She doesn't look like most of the Femen girls, who put their beauty on display with peroxide-blonde hair, heavy eye makeup and high heels. Anna is petite and serious, wears red rubber boots and keeps her hair cut short and dyed red. At 27, she is the oldest member of the group and, together with Oksana and Sasha, is in a sense its chief ideologue.
When they began the movement in Khmelnytskyi, she was 21 and just starting to read August Bebel, the founder of the social democratic workers' movement in Germany. She read that Bebel had introduced a bill in parliament on equal rights for women at the end of the 19th century. After reading that, she thought about her own life and that of her female friends, and concluded that nothing had changed.
Not a Typical Movement
She told everyone about what she had read. She found supporters and, together with Oksana and Sasha, founded a group they called "New Ethics." They organized discussion groups at the university, where Anna was studying economics, and soon they held their first demonstrations -- fully clothed, at first. They didn't start baring their breasts until two years later in Kiev.
"I knew from the start that I didn't want us to mutate into a typical feminist organization," says Hutsol. "I didn't want an organization in which women talk, talk, talk, while the years go by and nothing happens. We have brought more extremism into the women's movement."
Starting in 2008, the three women moved to Kiev -- first Anna, then Sasha and, finally, Oksana. They began campaigning for the rights of female students. But soon the fight against prostitution and sex tourism became their central concern. "The issue was in the air," says Anna, explaining that it was annoying to them that they, as normal women, couldn't even walk along Khreshchatyk street without someone asking them for sex.
That was when they began calling themselves Femen. Anna had read that there was a part of the female femur that is called "femen" in Latin. This isn't entirely correct, though. "Femen" simply means femur, both in women and men. But it sounded good and, most importantly, it evoked an image of strong women.INTERACTIVE: Science's gender gap Female scientists have made steady gains in recent decades but they face persistent career challenges. US universities and colleges employ far more male scientists than female ones and men earn significantly more in science occupations. Gender breakdown: 1973-2008
Median annual salary: 2008 Gender breakdown by field of study for US scientists and engineers with PhDs employed in academia 100 thousand Male
Female All positions Full-time senior faculty Full-time junior faculty Other full-time positions Postdocs Part-time positions All fields Physical sciences Mathematics Computer sciences Life sciences Psychology Social sciences Engineering Adjust scale: Data source: National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/append/c5/at05-17.pdf Median annual salary of US scientists and engineers employed full time in 2008 All occupations S&E occupations Scientist Biological |
the phrase, “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that traditional Christians and other conservatives will suffer a single thing from the expansion of LGBT rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.”
Here’s a good example, from today’s headlines. If I told you as recently as a year or two ago that people were about to start gender transitions in kindergartners, and that any objection to this would be seen as cruel bigotry, you would have thought me an alarmist. Well, look at this piece from ThinkProgress, titled, “It Takes A Village To Bully A Transgender Kindergartner.” Excerpt:
When Dave and Hannah Edwards were lucky enough to win the lottery to enroll their child at Nova Classical Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota, they were excited about the charter school’s small classrooms, the kind teacher they’d met, and the special attention their kid would receive. What they didn’t anticipate was an entire community rising up against their family as they became the latest victims of an anti-transgender backlash sweeping the country. Over the course of the school year, the kindergartner would transition from a gender non-conforming boy to a transgender girl. At every step of the way, the Edwards sought accommodation from Nova to help protect her from bullying and make sure her classmates understood who she was, and at every step of the way, a growing force of anti-transgender parents shut them down, creating a public spectacle and only increasing the harassment their daughter experienced. The Edwards have since pulled their daughter from the charter school and enrolled her in a different public school where she is a happy and healthy little girl. But they have also filed a complaint against Nova for the way she was treated in hopes of protecting other trans kids from enduring the same treatment. “Now that we’ve had to move and now that we’ve had this potential harm that’s been inflicted on our family,” Dave told ThinkProgress, “we’re invested in making sure this doesn’t happen to any kid again.”
Let me state up front that bullying is wrong and should not ever be acceptable, full stop. But read on, and see if this is merely a case of bullying — and see who was bullying whom. Halfway through kindergarten year, the Edwards child began to identify as female:
Classmates would make fun of her for her shoes, backpack, or other preferences that were more associated with girls than with boys. The Edwards, both teachers themselves, approached Nova to discuss ways to minimize that bullying. “We came from a place of both being educators and really believing in children having the educational tools and language to talk about things and how that might make a difference.” Hannah explained. “Kids, when they’re given the opportunity, can really learn and grow and they want to be good people.” Their first impression was that the school was on the same page. In fact, administrators agreed to incorporate the book My Princess Boy into an anti-bullying lesson about gender diversity. But when they emailed the school community on October 14th to inform them of this lesson, the backlash began. “Once parents knew, things changed completely,” Dave said.
Behold, the voice of the savage mob:
Just because the student deserves to be safe and respected, wrote parent Vince West in October, “that does not mean, nor does the law imply, that we have to celebrate gender non-conformism (or any controversial moral difference) in school (or anywhere).” “Given the current climate at Nova, we are opting our children out of any teaching that goes against the natural order of gender identity on the 16th and any other teaching on this topic on some future date,” wrote parent David Bursey. “We all have differences. We recognize them and respect them but we don’t need to call attention to them and celebrate them as a school.” In another email, he explicitly opposed allowing transgender students access to bathrooms and sports teams that match their gender, adding that he even thinks respecting their preferred names and pronouns “is treading on murky territory.”
The debate grew really heated, but the Edwardses could not discern between truly abusive, out-of-bounds commentary and simply objecting to what they want and believe:
Hannah’s sense was that the school was “trying to please this other side so they felt like they were heard, because they thought it was important to bring the community along with us by letting them speak their minds, but it just ended up being unsafe for my child because they were allowing this discriminatory discourse to happen.”
Got it? If you disagree with them, and speak your mind, then you are guilty of making a school unsafe for a child because of your “discriminatory discourse.” More:
After the Edwards’ daughter socially transitioned, they sought more education from the school so that students could better respect and appreciate her as their classmate. The complaint explains that these requests were summarily dismissed in a February 29th meeting: We were told that the school was not willing to use effective materials like I Am Jazz; would not ever conduct gender education, whether proactive or corrective, without first introducing delay and inviting or encouraging families to “opt out”; and would not even — as a bare minimum — simply inform our child’s classmates of her preferred name and pronouns, without first delaying for days and inviting or encouraging families to “opt out” of this information.
And so, one set of parents of one confused child get to overrule the convictions and wishes of most other parents, and feel entitled to dictate the curriculum to other elementary school students. And if anybody resists, well, they’re haters and bullies.
Nova is a classical school, and one whose core principles include a “strong school-family partnership.” The Edwardses and their supporters frame this as the administration leaving decisions up to the mob, when in fact they are trying to honor their own principles. The Edwardses believe that they should dictate to the school and the school community how to think and how to run the charter school that they chose for their son/daughter.
The bathroom wars are entirely connected to this greater debate. It’s not really about where people get to pee, but something far more fundamental — and it’s a wonder that it eludes someone as intelligent as Krauthammer. It’s about reality and identity.
Dale Kuehne, who teaches politics at St. Anselm College and who studies and writes on issues of gender and sexuality, had this to say at a Q Ideas conference. Excerpts:
No wonder journalists are noticing that this is a significant time. But most are still missing what’s most important: while today’s conversations push the boundaries of how we understand gender, they don’t understand that this brave new world of identity is about more than gender. The students with whom I associate—from middle school to college students—have understood for several years that we now reside in a world beyond gender. The youngest of them probably don’t realize that TIME’s article announced anything “new.” For many of them, gender discussions, even of the transgender variation, are just so yesterday. When we talk about personal identity, we don’t include the mundane questions about being male and/or female. A person can certainly identify as male or female if they wish, but there is little expectation that one would do so. After all, today Facebook gives us over 50 “gender” identities to choose from. (Conversations about this can involve questions about why there are so few options.) And rather than looking to gender or variations on a gender, more and more young people are seeking to discover their identity by widening the options to include “otherkins” (people who consider themselves to have a non-human identity, such as various animals, spirits, mediums, and so on). Young people today are much less binary when it comes to understanding identity because “male” and “female” as categories don’t express a unique or comprehensive identity. When I tell this to many adult audiences, they laugh, believing that young people will grow out of this “stage.” They’re surprised that I don’t share their sense of the immaturity of our youth. That’s because the young people with whom I interact are extraordinarily perceptive, compared to adults. As one high school student recently asked me, “Why does our school demand that we figure out if we are male or female or some variation? How could we figure it out even if we cared about gender? Can you tell me what it feels like to be woman? Can you tell me what it feels like to be a man? Of course not. No one knows.” Precisely.
More:
We don’t live at a tipping point; we already live beyond the tipping point. Whether adults realize it or not, the most important conversation today is not about gender, but about identity, as released from the confines of gender. We have entered an era of liquid identity. One’s chosen title may express something, nothing, anything, or everything—but as a result, all these designations lose meaning, rather than gain it.
Again: this is about reality. Charles Krauthammer simply does not understand what is going on — and he’s not the only one. And even though Dr. Krauthammer and others think this is about nothing more than arguing how many transgenders can pee in the head, these ideas have consequences, these ideas have far-reaching ramifications. As I wrote earlier:
Kuehne, I should say, thinks this is a very bad thing, because it is part — indeed, perhaps the end point — of the total deconstruction of the relational bases of society and its refashioning to serve the needs of the sovereign Self. (His book about the Sexual Revolution and identity is here.) … [This is] also a frontal challenge to the natural order, and beyond that, it’s a metaphysical challenge. Is reality nothing more than what we choose to call it? Does the Self have the power to re-order reality to suit its desires — and, in our deracinated culture, does it have the power to compel others to live by its illusions at the risk of being denounced as bigots, or even sued? I notice this morning that TAC publishes a rave review of The Crisis of Modernity by the late Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, translated by our own Carlo Lancellotti. In the book, Del Noce recognizes the Sexual Revolution as primarily a metaphysical one intended to destroy the basis for traditional morality. In an essay first published in 1970, Del Noce wrote: Indeed, [Wilhelm] Reich’s thought is based on the premise, which of course is taken as unquestionably true without even a hint of a proof, that there is no order of ends, no meta-empirical authority of values. Any trace not just of Christianity but of “idealism” in the broadest sense, or of a foundation of values in some objective reality, like history according to Marx, is eliminated. What is man reduced to, then, if not to a bundle of physical needs? … Having taken away every order of ends and eliminated every authority of values, all that is left is vital energy, which can be identified with sexuality, as was already claimed in ancient times and it actually difficult to refute. Hence, the core element of life will be sexual happiness. And since full sexual satisfaction is possible, happiness is within reach. More Del Noce: The idea of indissoluble monogamous marriage and other ideas related to it (modesty, purity, continence) are linked to the idea of tradition, which in turn presupposes (since tradere means to hand down) the idea of an objective order or unchangeable and permanent truths (the Platonic True in itself and Good in itself). On top of everything else, the affirmation of these themes is one of the glories of Italian thought, because what else is Dante’s Comedyif not the poem of order viewed as the immanent form of the universe? … Interesting. In the Commedia, the Inferno is where individual souls are trapped for eternity, isolated from communion with each other, in worlds they fashioned for themselves, because they preferred their own “truth” to the objective truth of the divine order. Del Noce: But if we separate the idea of tradition from that of an objective order, it must necessarily appear to be “the past,” what has been “surpassed,” “the dead trying to suffocate the living,” what must be negated in order to find psychological balance. The idea of indissoluble marriage must be replaced by that of free union, renewable of breakable at any time. It does not make sense to speak of sexual perversions; on the contrary, homosexual expressions, either masculine or feminine, should be regarded as the purest form of love. … Sexual liberation, as Del Noce saw, is based on the denial of metaphysics — that is, the denial of the claim that there is an immanent order in the world. Del Noce said traditionalists can’t even have a dialogue with the sexual liberationists because they deny the very foundation of tradition: belief in an unseen order. The normalization of transgenderism requires the denial that gender and gender difference have essential meaning. It requires us to believe that truth is whatever the willing individual wishes it to be. And it greases the slippery slope to the loss of our very humanity. Ever heard of species dysphoria? You will. It’s anarchy, and it can’t last. There will be an immense amount of destruction before this passes, and the natural order reasserts itself. Point is, the craziness in these two stories I posted at the top of this blog are hilarious, in a way, but deep down, not funny at all. The profound disorder within those people is, and is becoming, valorized by our culture, a political act that is undermining the basis of political and social life.
Do not let the Krauthammers dismiss your concerns, and don’t let the progressivist bullies make you think that you are insane or wicked for having them. There’s a very great deal at stake here. We are talking about the disintegration of the Western mind. Camille Paglia says, of today’s college students:
They have no sense of the great patterns of world history, the rise and fall of civilisations like Babylon and Rome that became very sexually tolerant, and then fell. If you’ve had no exposure to that, you can honestly believe that ‘There is progress all around us and we are moving to an ideal state of culture, where we all hold hands and everyone is accepted for what they are … and the environment will be pure…’ – a magical utopian view that we are marching to perfection. And the sign of this progress is toleration – of the educated class – for homosexuality, or for changing gender, or whatever. To me it’s a sign of the opposite, it’s symptomatic of a civilisation just before it falls: ‘we’ are very tolerant, not passionate, but there are bands of vandals and destroyers circling around the edge of our civilisation who will bring it down.
Whole interview here:
UPDATE: Isidore the Farmer speaks truth:
One thing this is demonstrating is that the activism of the LGBT movement is about much more than what people do in the privacy of their homes. An assurance given in recent years regarding gay marriage is that nothing being pursued actually impacts anyone else. Now, this was always a lie (whether they were also deceiving themselves I’m not sure – that may vary from activist to activist, citizen to citizen). And the Trans Offensive of 2015/2016 is demonstrating this perfectly, because it actually is having an impact on how people, in public settings: schools, locker rooms, restrooms. And, it is impacting children and adults alike. While it is true that this is only a very small percentage of the population, it is increasingly obvious that this small percentage is seeking to impact the public interactions of all of society. It never was about the privacy of one’s bedroom. It was always about coercing everyone to affirm their behavior, in public. However, the goal posts have now shifted enough that the LGBT activists and their supporters no longer really deny it, as even many commenters on this forum would have as recently as 18 months ago.
This. This is the key to understanding this entire thing. Whatever is demanded today will not be enough. There will always be more demanded, and the assurances that it will only go this far, no further, are worthless. Reason has nothing to do with this. It’s entirely about power. You will learn this now, or you will learn this later, but you will be made to learn it.Rebuilding the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s electric grid will require over 50,000 utility poles. With enough cable to stretch from San Diego to Boston and back. And then some.
Hurricane Maria made a direct hit on the island as a Category 4 hurricane on September 20th with winds up to 155 mph. The 3.4 million United States citizens that live on Puerto Rico have had little or no power since then. Along with almost no drinking water and food, the situation is dire.
Work crews from the public power utility in Jacksonville, Florida, and the New York Power Authority, are now in Puerto Rico working with PREPA to assess the damage and determine the repairs needed to restore the grid. That includes electricity generating facilities, transmission lines and substations. The New York crews have completed assessment work on approximately 120 substations on the island.
Only about 16% of these Americans have power, according to the Department of Energy. Working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it could take 6 months or more to restore power to normal.
Maria destroyed so much on the island, but the main hit to the electric grid came from the destruction of most of the transmission infrastructure, not the generation facilities. Before Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Rico’s power mix was about 48% oil, 30% natural gas, and 18% coal, all imported at significant cost. There are less than 3% renewables.
The power in Puerto Rico is the most expensive electricity next to Hawaii, and one of the most carbon-intensive in America. Puerto Rico has been replacing coal and oil with natural gas, and has set a goal to be 20% renewable by 2035. But that will take a lot of investment.
But renewable systems are susceptible to extreme weather, especially on an island that cannot take advantage of surrounding grids like we can on the mainland. Many solar arrays on Puerto Rico made it through the storm fine, but many didn’t.
This is one reason why Director of Emergency Response and Recovery at DOE, Ken Buell, thinks it’s time to think about a total rebuild of the power system, not just a repair. Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello, agrees, saying there is no way to fix the grid, it’s too dilapidated, adding that the grid was so feeble it would have collapsed even in a much weaker storm.
Judith Enck, former EPA Administrator for Region 2, said, ‘Even if you had a modest wind storm, people would typically lose power for days at a time.’
In fact, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority declared bankruptcy in July amid mounting maintenance problems, years-long battles with creditors, a shrinking workforce, 40-year-old power plants and frequent management turnover. So it was completely unprepared for Maria.
These systemic problems follow the overall bankrupt state of the Territory and the fleeing of qualified workers to the mainland. As many as 4,000 employees have left PREPA, in key jobs such as linemen, power plant operators and mechanics, exactly the kind of workers the utility couldn’t afford to lose.
The power system needs to be redesigned and built to withstand future Category 5 storms. That means things like putting the power lines underground - the few underground lines weathered Maria quite well – and making poles that can’t be subsurface out of high-strength concrete.
It also means installing power systems that are resistant to extreme weather events, like nuclear, especially small modular reactors. A set of SMRs, with distributed solar, could power the entire island cheaply and reliably, even with hurricanes. A new report this week from the Nuclear Innovation Alliance outlines ways to accelerate this process.
Puerto Rican solar arrays were pretty roughed up but can be emplaced to withstand fierce winds.
While efforts have been hampered by poor management and a sluggish federal response, the White House did increase the federal government’s share of costs to 100% for funding for debris removal and emergency protective measures, including direct federal assistance, for the next 180 days.
We could rebuild Puerto Rico into an energy leader and show how to build smartly for a specific geographic region with specific energy problems. Renewable investments, debt-forgiveness, government loan guarantees, whatever it takes to rebuild the infrastructure and give the island an optimal energy mix.
But we have to get them food and water first.
Post-post: If you want to help, the Hispanic Federation (www.hispanicfederation.org) is pledging to send 100% of donations directly to hurricane relief in Puerto Rico.For wealthy people like myself, we'd have more customers to buy our goods so we'd make more money, but for just about every other Sydneysider it would be all downhill. We could end up like Mumbai or Tokyo. How is it that leading world cities such as Geneva and Amsterdam, with just half a million people, stay the same size and maintain a great quality of life, yet we are told Sydney has to keep growing? Sydney is now at a population sweet point where we have a very good quality of life. We can consolidate now to provide better transport and infrastructure. If we raise the population, we'll never catch up. One day we have to stop growing before we only have one square inch each. We should do it now.
Taxing times James Allnutt: director, Deloittes Access Economics, with interest in demographics NSW's population growth is below the national average, rising just 1.4 per cent in the last year, and has been for a long time. Since the population stopped growing, NSW - and therefore Sydney - has consistently struggled economically. The main reason people are against population growth is that they see more people means more crowding. But a broader view might say that having more people provides a base for more economic growth, more opportunity and, on another level, a more cosmopolitan attitude. Last year marked 65 years since the start of the baby boom. That generation is starting to enter retirement age. We are getting to the point where the taxpayer base will not grow as fast as the population base.
You will have more people to fund services but fewer people paying for it. __________________________________________________ Of course Sydney isn't full. We are in fact quite thinly populated for a major world city of our physical extent. Very liveable cities with about our population at higher densities include Berlin, San Francisco and Barcelona. We could double and double again, without paving over another single field in the Sydney basin, and still not be in the top 20 most densely populated cities. There may be good arguments against further growth, but being ''full'' is not one of them. Andrew Taubman, Queens Park Bob Carr and Barry O'Farrell are both correct. Carr is correct that Sydney cannot support a much larger population; O'Farrell is correct that the problem is poor planning. The ridiculous road system and laughable public transport create congestion; many suburbs lack adequate green space or adequate services; new suburbs are built without decent telecommunications; and the general effect is a shambles where the detritus of slaughterhouses flows unhindered down the roads, covering everything in offal. The problem with O'Farrell's position is that he wants to boost the population before fixing the problems. ''Chuck another couple of million into Sydney,'' cry the population-boosters, ''and planning problems will take care of themselves!'' It's going to be harder to fix the problems if the population increases.
James Pearce, Cuernavaca, Mexico (originally from Drummoyne)
Sydney is not full - it has a great hole in the middle of it, big enough to build another city. Town planners, the government and real estate agents will be over the moon with this audacious plan to fill Sydney up. The first step is to fill in the polluted harbour with rubbish and fill from building sites and motorways. The Parramatta river can flow through pipes out to sea carrying the new city's sewage. This will create a large expanse of land ready for building. I can't wait to buy a townhouse next to the Opera House and take advantage of the Botanic Gardens and city shops. The Coathanger can stay for fireworks displays. Anthony York, Rooty Hill
Sydney is full until the government bites the bullet and borrows to construct a second rail harbour crossing, completes the F3, M4 and M5 extensions and the Epping to Chatswood Rail Link. Increasing immigration before the necessary housing is built, and before the transport links are put in place, will only exacerbate the population pressures we are already subject to. Deficit is not a dirty word when it removes transport bottlenecks and increases our quality of life. Tim Casey, Ultimo
From another perspective the question might be: ''Is the bush empty?'' Concentrations of population can have some advantages in terms of economy of scale in providing a wider range of services. Or so the myth goes. But when the result is that Sydney has the highest accommodation costs on the continent, you have to ask: is adding to an already crowded city economically justified? As a refugee from Sydney who ''went bush'' to a regional city I have found that the range of services is almost as good as in Sydney and much more accessible and cheaper. Not to mention the lower cost of living. Some facilities are better, not to mention the lifestyle. Peter Hitchcock, AM, Cairns
Deep in the bowels of a grimy state government hive, a soot-blackened drone sweats nervously over a glowing red spreadsheet. Grubby, desperate fingers check and review the figures. Spin, tweak and arithmetic massage are liberally applied - but with a racking sob and squeal of capitulation, the analysts surrender to the perfidious looming truth: NSW is in deep economic trouble. Howls of fury reverberate down the black halls as word reaches the antechamber of the Premier. The man himself stands swollen with rage, every pore radiating menace into the trembling forms of his hastily marshalled employees - puffing ever larger with the threat of violence. A calming, spidery hand alights on the Premier's shoulder. The Deputy - his voice liquid reassurance: ''Don't worry, we'll create a diversion - something divisive. Yes, and sensational.'' For a second his black, shark-cruel eyes light up with inspiration and the word escapes like a hiss: ''Immigrantssss.'' And all across Sydney, from the marbled east to the gardened west, Sydneysiders, tired of the rhetoric, ask themselves not so much whether Sydney is full, but what its government is full of. Dan Watson, Chippendale
Consider a balloon as infrastructure. Fill that balloon with water (the population) and the infrastructure automatically grows with it to contain and service that water. In Sydney, our infrastructure is not a balloon, but rather it is the internal wax, watertight lining of a small cardboard box. We keep adding water to the box, but the box cannot grow and when water is added to the box, it overflows above the wax lining, down the uncoated outside of the box. Eventually the unlined cardboard breaks down and can no longer support the water it holds. Until we build a flexible infrastructure, we need to protect what little we have and the population it miserably serves.
Justin Ibrahim, Abbotsford
The current NIMBY-ism of Sydneysiders and the pandering of the O'Farrell government (in switching development to greenfields rather than building up in the inner and middle suburbs) simply perpetuates our congestion, pollution, distance from our jobs and lack of decent public transport. Taking prime farming land and turning it into ''McMansion'' subdevelopments simply repeats the errors our previous governments made in the past 30 years which left us with the public transport-starved and car-dependent north-west. Until the approach changes, we should all shout from the rooftops: ''WE ARE FULL!'' Matthew Skinner, Georges Hall
Is Sydney full? It's a leading question along the lines of how long is a piece of string, leaving the airwaves open to all manner of xenophobic diatribe. In truth, however, Sydney is too full - not enough rental properties reasonably priced; not enough jobs for qualified professionals, driving salaries down; and an overabundance of highly qualified and experienced people in less than satisfying jobs. Wouldn't it be against human rights to subject or actually invite people into this miasma? However, come and visit, we need the tourist dollars. Ramona Blaquiere, Lavender Bay
Sydney isn't even close to being full. ''Full of it'' maybe, but not full. Alison Fowler, Alexandria
As a recent immigrant – in other words, part of the problem – I can only agree with the sentiment "Sydney is full". When I arrived here in early 2010, I was shocked by Sydney's awful infrastructure and public transport, unbelievable congestion and appalling rental prices. Unfortunately, I had to work one year in a company's CBD office. Luckily, last year I was able to land a decent job in Parramatta, so I no longer have to use terrible Sydney transport. Since then, I've never been to the CBD and have no intention of going there. "CBD? Sorry, not interested," became my first line when I talked to job agents – being a highly skilled and sought-after IT engineer, I can afford that little whim. I will consider moving to Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane or even Alice Springs rather than getting back to the skyscraper hell of Sydney's CBD. Egor Kolesnikov, Westmead
The issue is not about evermore immigrants. It is about evermore population growth, which also comes from natural increase. At the present time when births (300,000) are double deaths (150,000), the Australian government is using taxpayer funds to subsidise large families. The latest research shows that 73 per cent of Australians prefer a stable population over a big Australia. This demonstrates that Barry O'Farrell is out of step with the community. The newly federally registered Stable Population Party was formed to give all Australians a choice on population and the quality of life we pass on. If our community party is successful, population growth-addicted premiers like Barry O'Farrell will have to focus on a smart economy strategy based on high value productive innovation. At present he's hooked on a dumb economy mantra that promotes bigger quarries and endless housing overdevelopment and sprawl. We deserve much better. At the next federal election, all Sydneysiders and all Australians will have the choice for a stable and sustainable Australia. William Bourke, Founder, Stable Population Party, Wollstonecraft
Whether Sydney is full or not is a moot point. Barry O'Farrell should remember that he is the Premier of a state, not a city, and the best way to grow the economy is through strategic decentralisation. Many people would gladly escape Sydney's urban sprawl and high land prices for the clean air, lower housing costs and short travel times if good jobs were available. With smart planning this state could tap into the markets offered by Queensland and Victoria, without abandoning the Sydney and offshore markets, by developing businesses and services in key locations. The end result would be economic growth and a better quality of life for everyone. Ted Reedy, Bathurst
Seemingly, most of our politicians are delusional and blinkered about a sustainable population. Greg Hunt, shadow federal minister for the environment, inter alia, can't see the impossibility of adding hundreds of thousands to western Sydney while at the same time preserving our remnant prime farm land and conservation areas. Now the state government is driving the same crusade, yet decries the infrastructure deficit. Neither they, nor their predecessors, understand that, at our current rate of population growth, about half the infrastructure requirement is for future residents. No wonder the providers of infrastructure can't keep up. Who benefits from this growth? Largely big business, with more customers, and developers. Who loses? Those who suffer the increased congestion, high-rise imprisonment, thinner sharing of natural resources, longer queues, longer commuting and more crowded open spaces. So too, our natural systems, that provide us with clean food, air and water. Peter W Green, Faulconbridge
Most of the current infrastructure in Sydney in the form of rail, roads, water, electricity, was planned for a city half the size of Sydney today. Without the increase in the capacity of the infrastructure the answer to whether Sydney is full must be an unequivocal “YES!” However, with the appropriate planning and expansion of the infrastructure, and encouragement to take advantage of technology to decentralise, rather than crawl like snails to the central business district every day, then Sydney could probably support more people than it does now. A “smart” city. But given our government's track record in planning and then effectively implementing such improvements, then the likelihood of that is slim indeed. Imants Dute, Forestville
I'm in support for Barry's vision to bring the good quality and skilled migrants. At the moment in Sydney we have got too many unskilled, unemployed migrant and dole bludgers, so how are we going to make Sydney a safer environment to attract these skilled migrants to want to live here? Illegal immigrantd are also another issue due to Sydney businesses tending to hire cheap labour in order to make more profit. The cost of living in Sydney is much higher than other cities, with less quality for what you paying for, and the public transport and infrastructure are shocking. For example, in Melbourne and Brisbane there are freeways for motorist to use - Sydney has none (taxpayers get a better run for their money in other states). VIC Road in Melbourne vehicle registration green slip is included so total registration of a car is around $400 to $600 per year. In Sydney we have to pay RTA $400 for rego, then Insurance Company around $400-$800 for green slip depends on the type of use of the vehicle so total car rego is between $800 to $1200 per year. If our state is not competitive enough then skilled migrants would not want to invest their money here in Sydney. Jeanny Morris, Baulkham Hills
Yes, of course Sydney is full. I grew up there in idyllic circumstances in the 1950s and 60s, between harbour and ocean. But as I brought up my children in the inner western suburbs in the 1970s and 80s, the roads were becoming increasingly congested. It would take an hour from the city to Annandale on the bus. I left, relieved to escape, 25 years ago. Now, on visits, it's so crowded the city has lost most of its appeal. The harbour and ocean are there but only really accessible to that fraction of the population who can afford to live east of the bridge. It was cosmopolitan and exciting enough in the 1970s – further growth has only been negative. Jenny Goldie, Michelago
If we consider the idea that the roads are congested, why not consider the possibility of making cars half the width? I know a bloke in Winterthur, Switzerland who makes very efficient vehicles basically along the lines of an enclosed motor cycle which is a really sensible idea. Not so long ago, I had two small cars in which the passenger sat behind the driver and the whole thing ran on a two stroke motor. Only about a metre wide! They were quite sufficient for many purposes. The attitude change that we need is to make it easier to get such ideas approved for road usage. If we think that suburban housing needs to be redesigned, lets look at the real practicality of houses in which you can't do much except watch TV. Living in a large open space, ie a shed, gives me so much more flexibility at very low cost. Why are commercial buildings built so much more cost efficiently? Why do houses have to be the way they are? Better still, its so easy to build a home out of recycled materials, including earth, and avoid crippling yourself with a mortgage. The whole solution to whether Sydney is full, is that we simply need to reconsider our fixed ideas about what should be the way things are. Most houses have to be renovated, or are substantially obsolete in 30 years or so, anyway. Divorce quickly puts an end to grand ideas about permanency. These ideas might be a bit lateral, but surely that's better than pursuing the same old solutions. Rod Yates, Arcadia
I don't know that it's full but it's definitely pretty close to it, judging by the traffic. What the state government needs to do is encourage migrants to move to regional areas. Initially for the government, this is as simple as relocating public servants outside the CBD, which in turn will promote the movement of plumbers and electricians and hairdressers etc etc which in turn will revitalise the towns. In the world of the Interweb, you don't need to be in Sydney to work. Less traffic in Sydney, more jobs in the regions, what's not to like? There are large numbers of people who commute from Wollongong and the Central Coast to Sydney to work every day, to do work that they could just as easily do in Wollongong or the Central Coast. Peter Butler, Balgownie
So what if Barry O'Farrell blames "poor planning by governments - not immigration - for population pressures". Pointing his finger at poor government does nothing to solve those population pressures. Neither does his apportioning of blame justify further increasing those population pressures with immigration. Indeed, just the opposite applies! Sydney IS full and as since Barry O'Farrell has acknowledged existing population pressures, he must turn his government's attention to alleviating them, not adding to them. Enough said.
Irene Buckler, Glenwood
NSW's pro-immigration Premier wants to open the door to more skilled business migrants and international students with the misconstrued aim to "help revive the state's economy". It's a pyramid, Ponzi-like economic model, that adding more people will bring in economic benefits, and the multi-faceted costs of growth are non-existent. Ageing population, perceived lack of skills, funding for infrastructure etc? Solution - just add people! Planners can not magically provide the silver bullet to create space for human-friendly environments, and a balance with natural resources, under the pressure-cooker stress of rampant population growth.
Australia should be leading the world with sustainable population policies, and ensuring quality of life on a global level. There is no necessary connection between bigger and expanding populations and economic growth. With respect to per capita GDP, 8 of the top 10 nations in per capita GDP have populations less than 10 million. Vivienne Ortega, Heidelberg Heights, Victoria
As a recent immigrant – in other words, part of the problem – I can only agree with the sentiment "Sydney is full". When I arrived here in early 2010, I was shocked by Sydney's awful infrastructure and public transport, unbelievable congestion and appalling rental prices. Unfortunately, I had to work one year in a company's CBD office. Luckily, last year |
around the league from players and coaches who have to live with a rule most of them don’t care for.
"Shootouts are prettying exciting. They’re a lot of fun for the fans, I guess," said Florida coach Gerard Gallant, the ex-Wings star. "When you win them, you love them. I just wish we’d win more of them."I am a child of Sesame Street. My afternoons in daycare began with “Sunny days. Sweepin’ the clouds away. On my way to where the air is sweet. Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?” I had my favorite characters. Oscar the Grouch made me giggle as he told everyone to “scram!” Grover’s silly antics brought smiles to my face on the gloomiest days and I always counted along with the Count. I cannot say I was ever a huge fan of Bert and Ernie, but I did like it when Ernie got on Bert’s last nerve. I was a fan when Mr. Hooper and Kermit the Frog were regulars, and I became a fan again, when Elmo’s cuteness made my kids’ eyes light up. But there was one character who was always a favorite and that was Big Bird. His gigantic proportions never overshadowed his kindness So, when Mitt Romney said during the first debate, “I’m sorry Jim. I’m gonna stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m gonna stop other things,…I like PBS, I like Big Bird, I actually like you too,” I instantly thought I had heard it wrong, but then I quickly realized that Romney did indeed say Big Bird was on menu for Thanksgiving. Romney’s comments are incredibly sad because Big Bird, and everything he stands for, such as kindness, honesty, toleration, sharing, generosity, hope, and curiosity, are all the qualities that we, as Americans, supposedly value. So, in many ways, we all are Big Bird because he represents the best of America and by making him a political target, Romney essentially places the bull’s-eye on the backs of most Americans.
Openness, Toleration, and Kindness
We all are Big Bird because when Sesame Street began in 1969, it represented a changing America, one on the precipice of accepting its diversity. It was not a street you found in the middle of suburban American, but an urban landscape where children, adults, and Muppets interacted, regardless of race, gender, creed, disability, size, and shape. The show’s creators believed that to engage urban children, they had to create a world to which these children could identify. However, Sesame Street never alienated suburban children who found as much enjoyment in this one show as did their urban counterparts. Every child was welcomed to watch Grover fly through the air, to laugh as Cookie Monster stuffed a gazillion cookies in his mouth, and to sing or goof around with one of the many special guests who visited 123 Sesame Street.
Curiosity
We all are Big Bird because when the creators painstakingly developed the show’s curriculum and outcomes, it was geared toward the millions of children unable to go to preschool, while at the same time reinforced the lessons learned by the children who did attend. Sesame Street’s main goal was to educate future generations, but to do so in an intelligent, fun manner that respected and fostered children’s curiosity. The incorporation of Jim Henson’s Muppets engaged children by bridging fantasy with reality. Its popularity for over 40 years, as well as its global reach, reflected the show’s ability to shape children’s perspectives and insights. Children may have been learning their ABCs and 123s, but little did they know that they also learned the meaning of friendship and compassion, even from the very cranky, but lovable Oscar the Grouch.
Honesty
We all are Big Bird because when Mr. Hooper (Will Lee) passed away and Maria (Sonia Manzano) married and became pregnant, producers took each event to expand the show’s storyline. Real life presented an opportunity to teach children about about death, love, and family. By incorporating and addressing real life circumstances, Sesame Street expressed a willingness to deal with issues that were not always “child-friendly.” Like with all of their other educational content, they took an age-appropriate, honest approach that ended up teaching millions of children about the realities of life.
Sharing, Generosity, and Trust
We all are Big Bird because on Sesame Street, sharing is what friends, neighbors, and good people do. Throughout the past 40+ years, numerous characters learned the lessons of sharing and generosity. But at the same time, human and Muppet characters shared their feelings and learned that honesty was the best policy and that also trust was just as important. Jim Henson’s Muppets were able to garner a child’s trust and they taught children that they could trust their feelings and be honest about them. So when they introduced Mr. Snuffleupagus (Snuffy), Big Bird instantly wanted to share his best friend with everyone on Sesame Street. The problem was of course, he was invisible, and adults did not believe he existed, particularly when something went wrong. I’ll be honest, I loved the episodes with Snuffy because I had imaginary friends. Snuffy and Big Bird’s friendship was endearing to a young girl like myself, but by the 1980s, his invisibility and the adults’ disbelief in his existence raised some concerns. During this time, the rise in awareness of sexual abuse (and all child abuse) influenced the show’s producers to admit that children might be learning the wrong lesson with Snuffy’s invisibility. Big Bird’s frustration over the adults disbelief regarding Snuffy’s existence mirrored many children’s exasperations when adults do not believe them, especially when it is about something like abuse, which does not always leave visible marks. It was not a message that they wanted to send, because Sesame Street always encouraged (and still does) children to speak out and to silence the littlest of voices was unacceptable.
Hope
We all are Big Bird because Sesame Street has always implied hope as a message. Hope in our children, our community, and in our world. I learned from Sesame Street that all children, regardless of their situations, were very much like me. They were curious, playful, kind, tolerant, and liked to share. It is probably why I packed my bags one night and announced to my mother that I was running away to Sesame Street because I wanted to live in a place of hope, tolerance, sharing, honesty, and openness. (I was crushed when I learned it was not real. I mean really crushed). Sesame Street gave (and gives) millions of children hope that the world could be a better place if they lived like the characters on 123 Sesame Street.
Romney’s plans to cut off PBS is very much like his “those people” remark. It demonstrates greed, selfishness, arrogance, pride, and ignorance – values that are the antithesis of what Sesame Street espouses. If Romney wins and Big Bird is indeed silenced, then who else is silenced?
Romney’s contempt for the 47% (and really for most Americans) is why I choose to stand for Big Bird, because I am Big Bird.
___________________________________
For more on the history of Sesame Street: Michael Davis, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street (New York: Viking Press, 2008)I have to admit, I enjoyed David Montgomery’s riff on Barack Obama, The Matrix, and Star Wars — especially the really bad recent trilogy — in today’s Washington Post. Taking a cue from staffers on John McCain’s campaign who have taken to calling Obama “The One”, Montgomery gives us a series of flashbacks to these movies to see how well being The One has worked out, as well as in real life:
It’s a smart bit of political jujitsu by the McCainiacs. Try to turn an opponent’s potential strength into a potential weakness. Have they concluded their guy may become the next president, but he’ll never be the One? There have been so many Ones. The human imagination seems inclined to think in terms of them: King Arthur, Superman, Anakin Skywalker (or Luke, depending on your cosmology), Bobby Kennedy, John Galt, the Who’s Tommy, Frodo, Bob Dylan, Siegfried, Harry Potter, Mighty Mouse, Godot, Joe Gibbs, Storm, Wonder Woman. The One is the one who has the Answer. He will fix a fallen world. He will bring … change we can believe in. The One is usually young, and he speaks inspiringly. A second coming is nice but not always advisable. (See Gibbs, Joe.) Being the One means passing lots of tests, because at first no one believes in you. King Arthur had to pull Excalibur out of the stone to prove he was the One. Being the One means being tempted by your dark side. Anakin Skywalker succumbed — the One can be fallible, if not always human — transmogrified into Darth Vader, and only at the end managed to sort of live up to Obi-Wan’s anguished declaration: “You were the chosen one! It was said that you would … bring balance to the Force!”
Montgomery has this all wrong. Bill “Tuna” Parcells is The One, not Joe Gibbs. Oh, sure, Washington thought Gibbs was The One, but that shows how being in the same town with Congress for so long can screw up your judgment. (They thought Heath Shuler was The One, too, and he’s now in Congress. It’s almost a Zen thing.)
But Montgomery gets to the heart of Obamania this cycle. We have a candidate with no executive experience, no military experience, no foreign policy experience, and only three years in the Senate — and yet a major political party passed over several more qualified people to nominate him for the Presidency. Why? What long string of legislative accomplishment has lifted him to these heights? None; in fact, his legislative track record in the Senate is shorter than his tenure, not uncommon for freshmen in the upper chamber. His track record in Illinois is mostly remarkable for the scores of abstentions he submitted instead of actual positions. And on the most important decision on the war in the past two years, he got it flat-out wrong — and refuses to admit it.
But that goes along with being The One. The One cannot admit error. The One has to remain a perfect vessel for our redemption, and like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, so flexible that his spinning and twisting can dodge whatever rhetorical bullets get launched at him.
This isn’t really so much about Barack Obama, who likes to flirt with this messianic tone, but about the people who eat that up. These movies speak to a deep need within many for some kind of Messiah to lead them out of their confusion. They are popular because they touch that nerve — and Obama does as well. And in order to really serve that need, The One has to be free of any real history in order to allow his followers to project on him whatever they themselves believe.
It’s escapism, on the political front. Obama has tapped into a palpable impulse to shed responsibility for tough choices and instead look for a savior who will set the world aright. As Montgomery notes, though, The One almost always disappoints when it turns out that he’s just a man after all.
Well, except for Bill Parcells. He usually delivers.A New York City councilman debated a pro-Israel activist on the legitimacy of Linda Sarsour, a controversial women's rights activist, speaking at City College.
Sarsour is a Palestinian-American activist and organizer of this year's women's march, Martha MacCallum reported.
She has been reported as calling Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu a "waste of a human being," saying Sharia law is reasonable, and that Ayaan Hirsi Ali should have her female parts removed because she came out against Sharia.
Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein called on Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) to intervene in the planned event at City College's School of Public Health.
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Klein said the fact Sarsour praised the anti-Israel Intifada and allegedly supports radical Islamic terrorism should be enough for Cuomo to step in.
Brooklyn Councilman Jumaane Williams (D-Flatbush) said Sarsour was one of the "Time 100" people and accused Klein of mixing religion and politics.
He questioned whether Sarsour's criticism of Netanyahu was indeed religion-based.
"I heard nothing against the Jewish religion," he said.
Williams said attacks on Sarsour are typical of the "alt-right" and said Klein has been silent on White House Adviser Stephen Bannon, who he said was similarly controversial.
"That's irrelevant," Klein said.
Watch the full debate above.
Judge Pirro: Ask American Workers, Not Liberal 'Snowflakes,' About First 100 Days
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Schumer Responds to Trump Saying He's 'Leading the Democrats to Doom'TEHRAN, May 2 (Reuters) - Iranian state television ran a report on Monday saying Israeli military aircraft were massing at a U.S. air base in Iraq for a strike on Iran.
The report, for which there was no immediate corroboration, appeared on the website of Press TV.
It quoted what it said was a source close to the movement of Moqtada al-Sadr, an Iraqi Shi’ite cleric who opposes the U.S. presence in Iraq and who has close ties to Iran’s leadership.
Washington’s ally Israel accuses Tehran of using its declared civilian nuclear reactor programme to conceal a plan to develop atomic bombs that would threaten the Jewish state. Israeli leaders have not ruled out military action against Iran.
However, there has been no recent indication of increased tensions and no other information on Monday to corroborate the Iranian television report.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said she had no knowledge of any such report and said the military did not comment on operational matters.Hyper Offense Analysis – BadIntent’s Evil Thoughts
This is BadIntent’s Evil Thoughts, a VGC series where I will explain advanced tactics or take a stance on controversial issues concerning the VGC Circuit. Today I will be covering Hyper Offense. I have included a video version of this article to go along with this article. Today’s article goes slightly more in-depth, but the video provides visuals on pins better than the article. Both versions will cover the same information. For a quick overview, I’ll be covering:
What is Hyper Offense? How to utilize pins Examples of Hyper Offense teams The benefits and drawbacks of Hyper Offense
What is Hyper Offense?
Hyper Offense is a play style and team building archetype that focuses on relentless, high-powered attacks. Some properties of hyper offense include:
–Hyper Offense emphasizes offensive synergy and high damage output. A team with good offensive synergy utilizes many spread moves of varying types to hit as many Pokemon as hard as possible. Spread moves eliminate the guessing-game involved with single-target attacks such as predicting the Protect or the switch. This ensures that you get off significant damage every turn. In addition, spread moves generally do more overall damage than maximum accuracy single target attacks. Max accuracy single target attacks such as Ice Beam, Flamethrower, Iron Head usually cap at 90 base power. For example, let’s take a look at Thunderbolt vs. Discharge. Thunderbolt has a base power of 90. Discharge has a base power of 80 and that power gets reduced to 60 in double battles due to the 0.75 spread damage modifier. However, since Discharge hits both opposing targets, it effectively has 120 base power due to the damage it does to both Pokemon. In addition, it still does damage even if one of the targeted Pokemon Protects or switches out. Unfortunately, Discharge also hits the partner Pokemon, but Protecting with the partner erases the damage output advantage gained by using spread moves in the first place since we would lose the potential for combination attacks. Hyper Offense wants both Pokemon attacking whenever possible. Therefore, offensive synergy consists of the liberal use of spread moves AND pairs of Pokemon that are immune to each others’ spread attacks. The classic example is Zapdos and Garchomp. This pair of Pokemon complement each other with immunities to Earthquake and Discharge respectively, allowing them to take advantage of the increased offense without taking collateral damage.
–Defensive pivots such Aegislash, switching, and other passive plays are eschewed in favor of simply overpowering the opponent’s team. I will contrast defensive play with Hyper Offense at the end of this article, but the motto for this playstyle is that “the best defense is a good offense”.
–Paramount to the success of a Hyper Offense team, is the effective use of pins. The pin is a concept I came up with back in 2011, and is extremely effective, but sadly most people don’t utilize well, or at all.
What is a Pin?
A pin is the combination of a high-powered single-target attack (a “nuke” move) and spread move that covers the types that resist the first attack. It is similar to the concept of a pin in chess, because this combination of attacks essentially pins the targeted Pokemon into its position since there is no way to switch it out safely.
A few examples of pins include:
Charizard-Y’s Overheat in the Sun is one of the strongest single-target attacks in the game and it usually takes more than 50% damage from anything that it hits and is used as a ‘nuke’ move. Barring abilities like Flash Fire, Overheat is only resisted by Rock, Fire, Water, and Dragon. To go along with such a strong attack, we need a spread move that can hit all those types for at least neutral damage. One example would be Sylveon’s Hyper Voice, which hits Dragons for super-effective damage, Waters and Rocks for neutral damage, and Fire,sadly, for resisted damage. Not bad.
Let’s try another spread move. The goal is to create a perfect pin. A perfect pin is the combination of a nuke move and a spread move that hits every type in the game, or at least every type your opponent has on their team. Let’s combine Charizard’s Overheat with Garchomp’s Earthquake. Earthquake hits Rock and Fire for super effective damage and hits Water and Dragon for neutral damage. Unless your opponent has a Levitate user like Rotom, this might be your perfect pin of choice.
Below is an example of a perfect pin in action in a tournament match.
Houston VGC 2013-14 Fall Regional Final
Utilizing pins is the true hallmark of Hyper Offense. Now that we’ve taken a look at the properties of Hyper Offense, let’s look at some examples of the team style over the years.
Examples of Hyper Offense Teams
VGC 2010
Paul Hornak (makiri) used this team to win the first 2010 Regional Championship in Seattle. The team hits incredibly hard and utilizes spread moves efficiently. Even Abomasnow is more of an offensive switch-in tool than a defensive pivot. makiri used Abomasnow to transition from Water Spout assaults to Blizzard assaults.
VGC 2013
This is the team I used to win the 2013-14 Fall Houston Regional. I also used it to get second place in the 2013-14 NorCal Fall Regional. This team has good spread options along with fast and heavy hitters. The spread moves on this team are specifically designed to take advantage of pins, such as Hydreigon’s Draco Meteor and Mamoswine/Landorus-T’s Earthquake as well Tornadus’s Flying Gem Acrobatics + Earthquake. Tailwind Tornadus adds speed control to set up sweeps with the aforementioned pins. Mamoswine’s Ice Gem Ice Shard provides priority to KO Landorus-T before it can flinch the team with Rock Slide. Three of the six Pokemon are holding gems to further increase their damage output.
VGC 2015
Southern California is known for its plethora of strong players who have mastered the Hyper Offense style of play, such as Alberto Lara (CaliSweeper), however, many of them do opt to use one steel type defensive pivot like Ferrothorn or Aegislash in order to get an edge against other overly-aggressive teams.
Sweeper won both the 2015 SoCal Regional and 2015 Utah Regional with different variants of this team. In his tournament report, Sweeper mentioned how the combination of Charizard’s Heat Wave and Sylveon’s Hyper Voice created an almost inescapable blitz. We don’t use the same jargon, but Heat Wave and Hyper Voice is basically the pint that we looked at earlier. This one just utilizes two spread moves instead of one. Some other pins on this team are Mega Salamence’s Double-Edge + Landorus-T’s Earthquake, and Charizard Y’s Heat Wave + Landorus-T’s Earthquake.
VGC 2014
This last example is from 2014. This is one of the last Hyper Offense teams I created and it won the Winter 2014 Long Beach Regional Championship. It is s a Sun team that pressures the opponent with the Overheat + Earthquake pin and maintains speed control with Chlorophyll Venusaur. This team was extremely successful, but over the last year and a half, I’ve been experimenting with other styles of teams to try to mitigate luck. After experimenting with almost every style of team, however, I’ve finally gone back to Hyper Offense because I think does the best job of reducing luck, which brings me to my next point.
The Benefits (and Drawbacks) of Hyper Offense
Benefits
-“Hax” Prevention. One of the qualities of Hyper Offense is out-speeding and knocking out opponents before they can hit you. This means you will take less hits and therefore have less opportunities to get harmed by secondary effects such as Scald burns and critical hits. Speed control or priority moves get around Rock Slide flinches proactively unlike Wide Guard. Unfortunately, Prankster Thunder Wave and Swagger cannot really be contained by any style of team. Hyper Offense can at least drop Thundurus in one hit to stop the spread of status early.
–Hyper Offense also creates consistency by shutting down setups before they start. Instead of trying to figure out all the different strategies your opponent can possibly have and attempting to adjust on the fly with very limited information, you can bypass that game altogether. Just knock everything out! Less overall practice time and match-up knowledge is required, and even for experienced players this is good because there are so many different variants of teams, it is impossible to have match-up experience against everything. With Hyper Offense, your powerhouse threats can knock out so much of your opponent’s team so fast, they have to abandon their strategy and play defensively against your strategy, which you are thoroughly familiar with, forcing them to play your game.
Problems with Defensive Play
In contrast to Hyper Offense where you want to hold your ground whenever possible, defensive play relies on switching which leaves you vulnerable to secondary effects. There are not many things that are more irritating than switching in your Aegislash into Ice Beam just to have it freeze. Defensive set up moves are also prone to secondary effects and critical hits since the Pokemon are taking repeated attacks.
Defensive play is also vulnerable to read-heavy players. By playing reactively, you extend the invitation for your opponent to choose what angles they want to attack you from. Certain players make a living off of hard reads and predictions and tend to snipe switch-ins or double-target the Pokemon they don’t think will Protect. Reads based players can only get away with this if you allow them the breathing room to make these decisions. Hyper Offense pigeonholes them into a narrow line of options or they will eaten alive by your pins.
Drawbacks of Hyper Offense
The biggest problem with Hyper Offense is that if you don’t have an aggressive attack combination on the field at all times to stop a set up, you are left helpless. Set ups like Calm Mind Cresselia and Perish Trap are naturally built to wall Hyper Offense teams. Diligent team building and match up mapping are required to ensure that you always have an offensive threat on the field to KO those Pokemon as soon as possible.
Extra bulky offensive Pokemon are also an issue, Sylveon is an abnormally bulky Pokemon people have trouble defending against because of its powerful spread move, Hyper Voice. It is very hard to stop when paired with a heavy hitter like Mega Kangaskhan. Simply knocking it out in one hit is very difficult. The most common defensive pivot players resort to is Aegislash, because its unique typing and stats make it one of the only Pokemon that can switch into both Kangaskhan and Sylveon. Hyper Offense, however, has no room for defensive pivots. Stance Change also really slows down the pace of the game which is another negative trait for this style. You’ll need a more offensive way to knock out Sylveon such using Metagross or Scizor which can be much harder to fit onto a team.
Summary
Hyper Offense is a very powerful play style and team building archetype. The strength of Mega Evolutions, the 45 second and 15 minute timer, all discourage defensive play and make Hyper Offense the most viable play style in VGC right now. Have fun building your own Hyper Offense teams, and remember to use pins and consider anti-set up tactics like Taunt to your advantage. This has been BadIntent’s evil thoughts. Thanks for reading!While a lot of our recent articles lately have gone into manipulating photos in Photoshop, some are still doing it the old fashion way, in camera.
The photo above, as well as the photos below, were taken in camera, using knowledge and ingenuity. We reached out to Felix Alejandro Hernández Rodríguez to ask him how he made those:
Felix shared his process with DIYP:
Intro:
… I remember. Since I was a kid I used to spend hours alone in my room playing with my toys. I also remember that the best part was creating for them a environment and “weathering” them to match the scene in my head… Now that I’m a “grownup” I realise that I never stopped playing and that the only difference is that now I have a camera on my hands. Photography and digital art just gave me the possibility to brig alive those scenes that since I was little had inside my mind.
Toy photography is not so different from other kind of photography, but it has It’s own particularities, most of all because the scale. There are some subjects that must be taken into consideration and here they are:
Scale:
Scale is one of the most important. If what you want is to give the sense of “realism” to your scaled models (toys) you will need in many case to get close with your camera. You could think that taking a Macro lens would do the job, but the problem with Macro lenses is that they have a shallow depth of field, that meaning that you will only have focus in a small area of your subject and the rest of your subject and scene would be out of focus, and that would be a downfall for our purpose in making them look “real” these is because the way our brain has been taught to see the things in our human scale.
So one solution for using a Macro lens and achieve focus in all of our subject is to use the technique of “focus stacking”.
Focus Stacking means to take different shots of your subject, focusing from the very first plane (the closer part of the subject towards your lens) to the farther plane of your subject and in between. At the end you will have “X” amount of individual shots of all the planes of your subject in focus. Individual images that you will process in softwares like Photoshop to get a final image with all it’s planes in focus.
Some important notes for scale.
Focus stacking on camera can be done with any king of lens, no necessarily has to be a Macro lens.
When your scene is wide enough a Macro lens won’t help. Use a wide angle lens.
I normally use a 24-105mm lens. The focal length that I choose will depend of your scene and composition.
You don’t have to do focus stacking if your models (toys) are big enough and you are using a f.stop between f.11 and f.32
Light:
I shoot my models at studio with studio flashes. It could be similar to shooting a product, but again, if you want to give the sense of realism you have to think in the scale. Is not the same shooting a real human model with an “octabox” than to shoot a “scaled model” with the same “octabox”… The quality of the light would be softer due is a huge modifier for a scaled model. So all the basics of lighting in studio will apply but take them to a smaller scale.
I normally shoot with a beauty dish and / or a snoot for the models and two more lights for the background if I want it to be pure white.
The Scene:
I love photo manipulation and digital art… But what is really cool, is to do all you can in camera. It is not only fun, it also gives the image a more realistic look.
So if your model is in the snow, use your imagination and create a snow scene… I use wheat flour to do snow and I use corn flour to do deserts. If I want to add some atmosphere I use smoke from a cigaret (you don’t have to smoke, but I have found that is the best way to control small amounts of smoke and put them where you want). or spray water for a rainy day… If want to make droplets I use corn syrup or if I want to freeze something I use butane gas (Be aware, butane gas is strongly flammable so don’t make smoke with a cigaret at the same time.)
The possibilities are endless and there is no recipe, only use your imagination and try different things. Most of the things you will need are at home or at the corner of your superstore. Be creative.
Post Production:
Post will give the final “punch” to your image.
In post you can insert images to your background, elements that complement your story telling, effects that could be complex to do in camera, adding sense of motion, color grading for adding the “mood”, etc… All of these tasks are done in Photoshop.
Conclusion:
At the end, toy photography is just a mix of playing and technical photography aspects. The technical side can be learn and it’s “easy” but the “hardest” part of toy photography lies in our minds and in our hearts, and that is staying childish, foolish, dreamy… Learn how to play again. If you have forgotten how to… just spend some time with your boys… If you don’t have boys, then grab some memories when you were one!
To see more of Felix’s work, you can visit his Faebook Page, agency site, 500px stream, and Youtube channel.On the morning of April 9, around 11.30 am, a group of young men in Kashmir’s Gundipora village, about 20 km from Srinagar, sat in the front of a row of shops, exchanging gossip. They did not pay much attention as an army convoy appeared in the distance. They assumed that the security men were on patrol because of the bye-election for the Srinagar Lok Sabha seat being held that day.
However, as the convoy went by, the young men sprang on their feet in surprise: tied to the front of the first olive-green vehicle was a young man in blue jeans with a piece of paper pinned to his chest. He would soon be identified as Farooq Ahmad Dar, a resident of Chil Bras village, 10 km away. The convoy went by too quicky for anyone to be able to read the sheet of paper. But Dar’s brother, Ghulam Qadir, told Scroll.in, that it stated Dar’s name and declared him to be a stone pelter,
As the patrol passed through Gundipora village, soldiers warned people on the streets that this “would be the fate of stone pelters”.
A young man from Gundipora filmed the patrol on his mobile phone before running into a lane. Five days later, when mobile internet services were restored in the Valley, the video was uploaded on social media sites. On Friday morning, it spread quickly through the country, drawing condemnation from some quarters and enthusiastic approval from Army supporters.
Here's the video as well. A warning can be heard saying stone pelters will meet this fate. This requires an urgent inquiry & follow up NOW!! pic.twitter.com/qj1rnCVazn — Omar Abdullah (@abdullah_omar) April 14, 2017
Officer’s defence
The Indian Army’s Srinagar-based 15 Corps, which is responsible for the Kashmir Valley, immediately instituted an inquiry and preliminary details accessed by Scroll.in confirm that the incident actually took place. According to senior military officials in Srinagar, the incident took place in Beerwah tehsil, in Budgam district, which comes under the purview of the Victor Force of the Rashtriya Rifles. The officer who allegedly made the decision to tie the young Kashmiri man to the vehicle hails from Assam. He was originally commissioned into the Army Service Corps, a non-combat unit, and is currently on deputation with the Rashtriya Rifles.
In his defence, the officer is said to have stated that he was “rescuing 12 election officials, 9 ITBP [Indo-Tibetan Border Police] jawans, 2 constables from the Jammu & Kashmir police along with a convoy of one bus and two mine-protected vehicles”. According to his preliminary statement, said officials familiar with the situation, the convoy was being pelted with stones by demonstrators when he decided to catch one of them and tie him up on the hood of the car to be used as a human shield.
But senior security personnel in Srinagar dispute this version. According to them, if a mob was pelting stones at the security forces, it would have been almost “impossible to reach into the crowd and grab a man and then get the ropes to tie him up on the hood of the vehicle”. Clearly, the officials said, “this was a premeditated case and the army team had planned the move”.
Brother’s version
The Rashtriya Rifles officer’s purported version of events also fails to square with the account Dar’s brother Ghulam Qadir related to Scroll.in.
Qadir said that the army patrol was attacked by stone pelters in Utligam village as the election was underway. The personnel then intercepted Dar, who was riding a motorcycle to Gampora village along with his brother to attend a condolence meeting at their sister’s house.
The soldiers, Qadir said, insisted that Dar was a stone pelter. “We told them we were riding a bike [and asked] how could we pelt stones at the same time,” Qadir said.
The security personnel frisked both brothers and allowed Qadir to go after he showed his government service card. But Dar was beaten up and tied to the army vehicle, Qadir said. The army personnel, Qadir alleged, injured Dar’s left arm besides damaging the motorbike and seizing his mobile phone.
This is Farooq Ah from Beerwah who was tied with ropes & was used as a human shield by 53 RR Indian Army. #Kashmir pic.twitter.com/BKYNwMth1U — Irshad Nabi (@kashmir_rise) April 14, 2017
Dar’s relatives said that women from Utligam had gathered to seek his release. However, the army men did not relent. Qadir said that Dar was paraded in at least seven villages during the day.
The incident angered bystanders. Aijaz Ahmad, a shopkeeper, said the army aimed to “terrorise the people” by using Dar as a human shield. “The army patrol, being attacked with stones in Utligam, were angry and frustrated,” he said. “They did this thinking we would not pelt stones at them.”
A messy situation
In February, army chief General Bipin Rawat warned “over ground workers”, a euphemism for protestors and stone pelters, that the army would take action against them and treat them as “armed terrorists” if they hampered military operations. General Rawat’s threat was bound to complicate operations on the ground, with young military commanders interpreting the statement as a diktat to take any measures they thought fit to quell protesting mobs.
Army officers of the rank of captain and major are considered the backbone of the Indian Army’s junior leadership in counter-insurgency operations. As this incident demonstrates, some of these on-ground commanders have taken General Rawat’s dictum to heart.
In many ways, this was bound to happen, as Kashmir continues to spin out of control. The protests that followed the killing in July of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, leading to thousands being injured, blinded and some being killed, is evidence of the deep resentment in the Kashmir Valley. The dismal voting turnout of 7% during Sunday’s bye-election shows how precarious the political situation in the Kashmir Valley is. The image of a man being used by the army as a human shield has added further fuel to a raging fire.
Winning hearts and minds
Officially, this move also goes against the official doctrine of the Indian Army. It clearly states that popular support is key to the success of counter insurgency operations. Nearly two decades ago the Indian Army launched Operation Sadbhavna, a scheme that was intended to “win hearts and minds” of Kashmiris. This included a slew of welfare projects covering education, health, sports and livelihood schemes.
But this effort, known in army circles officially as WHAM, is defeated every time images emerge of excesses by the armed forces, besides the cases of forced disappearances, encounter killings and allegations of sexual violence against women. The army’s court martials against accused soldiers have also been opaque, giving very little visibility into whether those accused of excesses ever get punished. When the official inquiry into this incident concludes, the government needs to quickly move in to ensure justice for Dar.This week’s announcement that two wealthy individuals have bought their way into what could be the first lunar mission involving humans in 45 years couldn’t have been better timed for Jaroslav Kalfař. Not only does his debut novel lean heavily on the romance of the mid 20th century space race, but it transplants it to an era in which big capital, rather than state investment, is powering cosmic ambition.
“Spring of 2018. On a warm April afternoon, the eyes of the Czech nation gazed from Petrin Hill as space shuttle JanH |
-SACK WILL BE STANDING RIGHT THERE! And he always just needs to be 10 feet further to the left, or to have moved more quickly, or taken the other guy, or been quicker on the puck.
And you know what makes it worse? Often - really often - you'll be right. That's why they call them 50/50 plays. Because you lose them a lot. And as a defenceman, it's tough to be both faster than all the fast forwards coming at you, while ALSO being stronger than the big guys they park out front of the net. Plus there's the problem that some D-men read the game well, and so, position themselves well beforehand. Which means they get the puck before it becomes a 50/50. Or they move the guy out front so the goalie gets a good look, and thus, no rebound. But who's keeping count of those? The events that don't happen. The dangers that don't arise.
All this... is incredibly hard for us to see, for all 6 defencemen, all through a game, 82 times a year.
*****
Which is why stats people try to use numbers. To try to check what they see against what's been counted. To try and sort out how well, overall, things are coming together for a player. But. It's statistically incredibly hard to do for an individual D-man. So. Today's exercise.
I'm going to grab some stats that have been applied to the Leafs defencemen - OVER THE 1ST 31 GAMES - and we're going to have a look, to see what we can see. Some of them aren't likely to show much. Others will, I suspect, show us a surprising amount. I'm gonna plunk those ones down in the stream, to see if we can't use it to make more sense of our defence.
I've structured this post so you can treat it as a quiz if you like, and test yourself against the numbers. Lemme know how you do. No way I would have passed before researching this stuff.
Somebody go!
*****
1. PLUS/MINUS
I know you think this stat sucks. Still, we're gonna look at it. Now, I know you all know that Dion leads the Leafs D with a +12, which is pretty stellar. But - according to NHL.com - which Leaf D-man has an appalling -11? Worse than Luke Schenn. Or Ladislav Smid. Or Luke Schenn. It's name and shame time, folks. Which Leaf D-man has the worst Plus/Minus?
Answer? Sure, he's a teenager. And yes, he gets back into the play really quickly. But young Rielly hasn't always made it back into the play this year. With 24 Even-Strength goals against in just 22 games, he's running a nasty -11.
Put another way, when Rielly's on the ice, the team's GAA is 4.11. With Dion and Gunnar and Ranger and Jake, it's under 2.00.
So. People can talk all they like about how the kid's offence makes up for his defensive errors, but think about that 24 goals against in 22 games. Then match it up against 13 goals for while he's been on the ice. They don't actually equal up.
Admission. I know I've felt like Rielly's been playing better lately. I think other people have too. Well, just as a heads up, plus/minus says that's nonsense. Because Rielly's entire -11 has come in his last 10 games. Maybe irrelevant, but maybe not.
2. POWERPLAY
Ok, in terms of goals scored per 60 on the PP... Behind The Net says Gunnar and Ranger are the Leafs best two D-men. But. While those two should maybe get a pinch more PP time, that's likely just a SSS thing. So let's focus on the Big Guns - Cody, Jake, Dion and Rielly. Starting with Cody, you and all of TV-land know he has a lot of assists on the powerplay, as in, 11. Which is amazing, and tied for the lead with Erik Karlsson, and ahead of PK Subban. But after Cody, which Leaf D-man has the 2nd most PP points?
Answer? Pretty easy to guess, really - Dion has the 2nd most PP points. Only problem is that that second best total is only 5. And kid Rielly's already got 4. Now, since Dion's had 108 minutes on the PP, while Rielly's had just 39, that doesn't look so great. Yes, the Leafs score equally well with either at the point, the fact is that Dion's PP point-scoring is down to just 1/2 its rate from last year.
And he's only gotten 11 PP shots through on goal. In 31 games. That's about 1 shot getting through every 10 powerplay shifts.
Now. If I asked you who'd be the best future replacement for Dion on that 1st PP unit, a lot of you would suggest Jake Gardiner. But again, facts are facts. In Jake's 3 years, he's been at the bottom of the Leafs PP scoring table every year. Jake is incredible off the rush, but on set-piece powerplays... it's not clear he's found his groove. Whereas young Rielly... leaky though he may be 5v5... seems to be firing pretty well at 5v4 well already.
3. PENALTY KILLING
Lately, we've had endless blah-blah about our collapsing PK. About how our goalies are regressing, how Smithson sucked, how McClement sucks, how JVR gets tired, how much we miss Bolland, how nobody misses Bozak, etc. Hell, we've even heard rumours of the return of "fronting." To which, may I just say... The Horror.
What we haven't really heard jack about are the defencemen who play the PK. [Surprise!] I mean, are the Leaf D-men any damn good at the PK? Well... I didn't know. Sure, I knew Dion and Gunnar played a lot [3:45 a night], that Fraser used to be good at it, and that Ranger and Franson have been playing more [now >2:00 a night.] But who is the best Leaf defenceman on the PK?
Answer. Turns out to be... Paul Ranger. And not just by a little bit. He's better, and by a lot.
For starters, we all know how the Leafs PK has collapsed and is now allowing 60 shots against per 60 minutes. Which is true, according to BTN, for Gunnar and Cody and Dion. But not for Ranger. He's allowing just 45.
Let's look more widely, at Corsi Against - i.e. Shot Attempts Against. You can see that Dion, Gunnar, Franson and Fraser are all dead bottom of the NHL, allowing an insane 102 to 108 shot attempts per 60 minutes. But not Ranger. He's allowing just 77.
As a result, his CorsiRel is +40, Gunnar and Dion are around -18, and Cody and Fraser around +0.
Now, these are huge gaps, equalling at least 5 goals less on the PK per year. Which we can already see in the Goals Against rate, with Ranger at 5.16, Gunnar a 6.59, Cody 7.19, Dion 8.13, and Fraser at 10.79. And all in all, Ranger's ranking in the Top 25 D-men in the league on the PK, in Goals Against, Corsi, QComp, etc. - while the rest of the Leaf D-men are league bottom.
Sure, there may be other possible explanations. But we're 31 games in, and Ranger has got as much PK time in as Kulie and JVR and MayRay and Cody. And 80% of his PK time has been with Cody or Fraser, whose numbers collapse away from Ranger. And he's had the same forwards as everyone else - MayRay, McClement, JVR, Kulie etc. in that order. And the PP line-ups he's faced has the same or harder Quality of Competition.
Ranger may simply be quite good at this. As he was in Tampa Bay. It's just that, in Toronto, nobody's noticed.
4. LUCK
Sometimes defencemen get to play in front of great goaltending, or behind forwards running hot. Roll lucky on both, and you get a whopping fat PDO. Last year, Franson and Fraser benefitted from just such a huge PDO. This famously fattened up Fraser's plus/minus - and Cody's point totals. Was this reality though? Could Cody become the Leafs Larry Robinson? I know I sure hoped so. Still... this year's return to Earth, both of Fraser's plus/minus, and of Cody's scoring (ouch) gives us pause.
This year, there are two Leaf D-men getting exceptional luck. One of whom appears to have gotten ALL the luck. He's had a Top 10 On-Ice Shooting %, as well as goal-tending that's been out of this world. These have combined to give him a PDO that is so fat... I said, his PDO is SO FAT... ok ok. Basically, there's never been a defenceman this PDO fat, this far into a season.
So tell me true, who is the Luckiest Defenceman since PDO record-keeping began?
Answer? Well, earlier this week, Dion Phaneuf was running a 1078 overall PDO, with an On-Ice Sh% over 11% and an incredible.971 Save %. Think about that for a minute.
And now... think about what would happen as that starts to fall. Because it will. All those times you see Dion standing in the crease, and the goalie covering the puck, and nobody remembers any errors that led to it getting there, because... the puck stayed out. Well... more and more of those are likely to turn into scenes of Dion standing amidst the wreckage, front and center, camera on his face, a million Leaf fans groaning and looking for someone to blame.
Guess who they'll blame. Go on. Guess.
Now, I wrote that a week ago. Dion's PDO is already deflating, down to a mere 1069, with a poor, lowly.960 Save% behind him. So, even though I don't believe his PDO will necessarily fall to 1000 right away or anything, it is gonna deflate somewhat. And that's not gonna be pretty, when you think about what the media is gonna say, and all those freak-show Dion-hating fans.
However. I'd still like you to ask yourself, with this fairly powerful little fact in front of you - and in the name of your future sanity, your credibility as an analyst and your deep, personal commitment to Borje-love - is Dion actually playing that well this year? I mean, we love him and all, but... has he really been that much better than last year? Has he even been as good as in prior years? Because he has certainly been the beneficiary of incredible good luck. And once the good ship PDO turns.... look out.
5. GIVE-AWAYS + TAKE-AWAYS
Another stat you think is stupid. And it is. Because it's counted badly across arenas. And it doesn't apply very usefully to high-skill forwards who take risks, etc. But. Amongst defencemen, you really don't want that many turnovers. And we'll just compare Leafs to Leafs. And we'll look at the NET of their give-aways and their take-aways, ok? So, which Leaf defenceman coughs it up a lot, but takes it back much less?
Answer? By some quite clear distance, the winner [actually, loser] is... Gunnar. NHL.com has him down as a -26 so far, followed a long way back by Rielly with a -13, then another long yard to Dion and Cody at -6. And Ranger with the fewest, at -5. But, for what it's worth, our man Gunnar appears to be throwing up a lot more duds this year than the other D-men. and in fact, far more than he has in the past.
6. PENALTIES
This one I mention because some fool of a Took started floating the idea a while back that minor penalties are a great tool for evaluating defencemen. That is, taking a lot of minor penalties means you suck. In particular, the kinds of penalties that are caused by being "too slow." You know, you're behind your man, and so you hook, hold, trip or interfere with him. I admit, I hadn't really looked into before. But, you know me, I thought it'd be worth 60 seconds effort. Which - as it turns out - was more than some had put in.
So, which Leaf has taken the most minors this year, and in particular, the most "Slow Boy" penalties? [To be fair, I thought it worthwhile to include forwards in my research, just in case they had the slowness problem as well, right?]
Answer. Well, in terms of minor penalties, Dion's on top, with 16 minors this year. Ranger's 2nd amongst the D-men with 12. Up front, Kadri has 13, JVR 11, Bolland 9 and McClement 9. And since the NHL.com site actually keeps game logs, we can look at the penalties and count up the "slow" ones.
And it turns out that the guy with the most Slow Boy penalties is... Jay McClement, a forward, with 9. Followed by Kid Kadri at 8. Followed by JVR, with 7. Who knew these guys were so slow? In fact, even if you just look at the D, poor old Ranger doesn't win. Gunnar has 7, while he's tied with Dion, with 6.
It turns out that some folks saw Ranger had a bunch of penalties, and assumed they were caused by him being slow. They didn't actually go back in look at the logs. Because in their minds, Ranger was.. like Fraser. And so, his penalties must have come because he was slow. Except the logs show that 2 of Ranger's early penalties were for shooting the puck over the glass. [Not surprising perhaps, given a return after 3 years out of the NHL. But no more slowness-related than his 4 penalties for roughing, slashing, high-sticking, cross-checking and general rough play.]
Like I said. Once a visual impression catches hold, even the best amongst us tend not to want to run those impressions hard up against the stats. Anyhow. That kid from Hamilton said it best.
Facts are simple and facts are straight,
Facts are lazy and facts are late,
Facts all come with points of view,
Facts don't do what I want them to.
7. SCORING
All defencemen love getting powerplay time. That's an iron law of hockey. Why? Because you get loads of points on it. Much harder to score during 5v5. It's a different skillset - less time to tee your shot up, fewer forwards wide open, 200 feet to cover just to get a shot, etc. And yet, last year, the Leafs came up with 3 D-men near the top for ES points - Cody, Dion and Gunnar. But who leads the Leaf defence this year in points... excluding points on the powerplay?
Answer. Well, oddly, Ranger and Dion both have 7 non-power-play points [including 1 each on the PK], and with Ranger having done so in 60-80 fewer minutes. In a previous post, we saw some of Ranger's break-out passes, and Dion has had 2 great goals from jumping up into the rush. And it has to be said, Rielly has also shown strong play during 5v5, and has 5 points there already.
But the other 4 D-men aren't - or rather, weren't - scoring at 5v5. Nobody much expects it from Fraser, and while Gunnar can be seen ramping up his offence [and wowing us with his "Crazed Viking" break-away moves], he's most likely looking at that 10-20 point zone this year.
And for some time, young Jake was in the same category. Until he was shifted back to his old side, and apparently began watching films of how he played last year in the playoffs. Anyway, at Game 20 he was on par for a 14 point year at ES. But then, in just his last 8-10 games, he's begun running hot, at a 40-50 point pace - and has now jumped up to tie Ranger and Dion with 7 points away from the PP.
Cody, however, is still stuck on 3 Even Strength points, after 30 games. And 0 goals. Now, when he DOES get a point, you remember what he's capable of. Gorgeous point shots for tips. Jumping into the rush, like in OT against Edm. But at last year's pace, he would have had 10 points by now. So this is a significant drop-off.
Why? Well, maybe it's the slightly tougher Competition. Or uncertainty around his partners. But his overall ice-time is up. And he's playing with higher-scoring partners like Rielly and Gardiner - not Fraser. Yes, his zone starts are slightly tougher, but ExtraSkater shows it's the equivalent of shifting less than 1 face-off per game from the Ozone to the Dzone.
So a mystery, perhaps. Though here are two other odd stats I found. 1st, last year, Cody drew far more penalties than he took, a +5 over the year. While this year, he's a -5 already. So he may be rushing less with the puck, or lagging more coming back. I donno. But it signifies a change in his style of play, I believe.
And 2nd, according to ExtraSkater, Cody is taking wrist-shots only HALF as often as last year, while he has DOUBLED the percentage of slapshots he's taking. Plus, his average shot is from about 10 feet further out. To me, this looks - again - like he may be joining in the rush less, sitting back at the point more. Which would also explain why more of his shots are being blocked this year - at times with dangerous results.
Maybe this is just SSS and his game will come around. Maybe it's his pairings. Sometimes I actually think he's not well. But maybe the best advice would be to do as Jake has done... and go study film of when he was playing great. There's lots of it.
8. HITS + BLOCKS = SUCKS
What they're saying is that a lot of old-time hockey guys liked to see hits and blocked shots. But see, back in the day [i.e. before you lil bastards arrived with your giffery and your cat lolling sites], blocking shots was more of a specialist skill, where a defenceman would slide across the ice and take a shot in the gut. In other words, it was manly as hell, and to be saved for the playoffs.
Nowadays, everybody and his idiot half-brother is doing it, and the media mouthpieces seem to think it's just the thing for real defencemen to do. All the damn day. Same as what they've taken to calling "hitting." Most of which bears as much resemblance to Bobby Baun as Ava Gardner. [Or some other equivalent young actress you all might relate to. That Basinger girl, maybe.]
Anyway, I know you hotshot Advanced Stats guys are with me on this. These two modern stats suck. Look, face it. They're useless for measuring defencemen. Anyway, some of you guys hate this stat so much, you've taken to arguing that it's a better measure of suckiness than it is of ability. Because if you're blocking a shot or hitting a guy... you don't have the puck. So, I'm going with your new anti-equation.
Hits + Blocks = How Much You Suck
And yes, we all know ahead of time that Mark Fraser is going to have the highest rate of Hit + Block = Suck. But in his absence... who stepped up, or down, or into that pit and filled in with some quality hits and blocks and suckiness?
Answer. The answer is, of course, Cody Franson, 2nd in the NHL in hits now. Cody's been listening to Randy, it seems, and I know it surprised me that he was ahead of Dion. But facts is facts, and Cody rang up a right proud combined score of 5.0 Hits + Blocks per game. More than Dion's 4.7 and Gunnar's 4.4. And light-years worse than such non-suck defencemen as Paul Ranger (3.5), Rielly (3.2) and Jake (2.2.)
9. TOUGH COMP
We often hear that Dion and Gunnar face harder competition. Which - especially with a coach like Carlyle - seems likely to be true, and in an extreme form. However, the serious students of hockey stats tell me that QComp doesn't really tell us much. Same with the Quality of team-mates. They say it's a touch more important than QComp, but ultimately, not a huge deal. Now, I gotta say, I'm not yet convinced by this. So I looked at it anyway.
Leafs-wise, it's a plain and simple truth that Dion and Gunnar face the offensive monsters of other teams. I just now took 10 top names - Crosby, Ovie, Thornton, Tavares etc. - and looked at Dion's time against them this year, versus Jake's (though it could have been any of the other Leafs D.) 150+ minutes for Dion to ~40 for Jake. And it's the same for Ranger and Cody and Rielly and Fraser. Carlyle uses Gunnar and Dion harder than any D, by far.
But Carlyle does the same with team-mates, only in reverse. It's less-commented upon, but Carlyle likes to match his D-men up with certain forward lines as well. So. Which Toronto D-man gets to spend the most time with the bottom end of Toronto's forwards? By which I mean, Orr and McLaren and the AHL'ers so far, plus Jay "Bad Corsi" McClement?
Answer. Pretty obviously, even if you're just watching, Ranger gets the worst team-mates. And on the other end, Carlyle simply does not like to send Dion and Gunnar out with guys like Orr and McLaren. So, yes, the #1 pairing gets the tougher Comp. But at least they get to attempt their break-outs with Kessel and JVR and Kadri and Lupul, and with Clarkson and Bolland and Kulemin.... rather than Orr and McLaren and the latest raft of AHL'ers.
Time-wise, Ranger gets 1.2 Goon + AHL'er forwards for every 3 he has on the ice with him. Dion gets just 0.6. [Cody and Rielly are near 0.8, and Jake just over 1.0.] Which means, when you think of Ranger trying to break out, do remember that on average, he's trying to do so with 1.2 of his 3 forwards being dysfunctional. [I made a more systematic check on this through ExtraSkater, which weighs the calibre of opponents and team-mates by their ice-time. It confirms that, once again, Dion and Gunnar face the toughest competition. But again, Ranger gets the most ice-time with the worst forwards. And has had the most time alongside Fraser.]
10. THE CORSI CUP
And finally, the Grand Prize... the Corsi Cup. Pretty obviously, the Corsi winner, for Toronto defenceman, is Jake Gardiner. He's got a whopping +15.7 RelCorsi [from BTN], his Corsi On is way ahead of any other D. Jake helps the Leafs take 4 more shots per 60 when he's on the ice, while keeping opponents to 2.5 shots fewer against.
Yes, he's had some incredibly bad nights. No way around that 37 shot attempt against disaster, or some of those goals against where he's off checking clouds. But Corsi-wise, he has rocked the vets, and he's stretching out his lead in recent games.
So. Which Leaf defenceman is the Corsi Cup Runner-up? And who, pray tell, finishes dead bottom last?
Answer. Paul Ranger is 2nd in CorsiOn, a whopping 10 points up on Dion, Gunnar and Fraser, and 4 up on Franson and Rielly. His RelCorsi is also 2nd, a +5.5, as compared to, for instance, Gunnar's -11.2. Looking at shots against, Ranger gives up 3 fewer shots/60 than Cody and Rielly, Gunnar and Dion. And he generates more Shots For than Dion or Cody or Gunnar.
You might think this is because he rode Jake's coat-tails. Except that the stats say that Cody has now spent 41% of his year with Jake [vs Ranger's 49%], but without magically raising his Corsi. And in fact, Ranger has actually had a better Corsi over his last 10 games [without Jake], than in first 10 [with him.]
Now. The hardest award to hand out all day. The award for the defenceman who lags in these shot and Corsi categories.
Carl Gunnarsson.
Basically, this is not what I had hoped to see. Or expected to see. Like I said, I was repeatedly surprised as I did this. But I can tell you this. If you think the Leafs Corsi failures mean they are going to give up more goals against, and if 1070 PDO's eventually deflate, then a whole heckuva lot of these goals are going to come pouring in with Dion... and Gunnar... on the ice.
Now, I'm expecting the cognitive dissonance to be kicking in pretty hard right now, as it did for me, but let's just walk through Gunnar - and Dion's - figures.
Starting with BTN's numbers, Dion shows a nightmarish -23.1 CorsiOn. But Gunnar comes in even worse, at -24.8. That's Korbinian Holzer territory [who had a -27], and marks truly disastrous puck possession. League-wide, Dion and Gunnar are in the Bottom 10 or 20 of almost every important possession measure - CorsiOn, ShotsFor, ShotsAgainst, etc. Sometimes they have company from Cody Franson and Mark Fraser, but usually, it's these two on the lowest rung.
Switching over to ExtraSkater, same thing. Dion and Gunnar with a CorsiFor% of 39.4% and 39.9%. [And since the media apparently doesn't quite get this yet, this means that when those two are on the ice, they get less than 40% of the shot attempts against.] This makes them the 2nd and 3rd worst of all D-men, after Ladislav Smid. Same with ShotsFor%, 5v5 Close, Fenwick, whatever - the picture doesn't change. They're near league bottom.
And yes, all the other Leaf defencemen have bad Corsi and possession numbers [Rielly and Cody, for instance, are ALSO only at 40% in shots taken.] But. Dion and Gunnar are now clearly at the bottom. And the gap between Dion and Gunnar versus Jake and Ranger is pretty huge, 18 and 10 Corsi points respectively.
At this point, what do we have as explanations? Dion and Gunnar have reasonably good defensive partners. Namely, each other. And their forwards are, most commonly, the players we argue vociferously should get the most ice-time, etc. Kessel and JVR primarily, plus lots of MayRay and Kadri, Lupul and Kulemin, and time with strong Corsi guys like Clarkson and Bolland. And as we saw in the section on Competition and Team-mates, Dion and Gunnar already get the least time with the Orr's and McLaren's and AHL'ers.
So how do we explain these awful numbers? Obviously, we have to look at the effect of Carlyle's systems, which my [brief] analysis the other day of traded Leafs suggested could cut 8-12 points off your Corsi. But still. That only brings these -24's down to a -12 to -16, compared to the rest of the league. And it in no way closes the gap with other Leaf D-men. Even including QComps and Zone Starts and such, the experts say these factors can't explain more than a few points of this Corsi gap.
For me, personally, I guess I simply don't believe that the stats we have in hand today can adequately account for the impacts of extreme roles and systems, as applied by coaches like Carlyle. Neither the way he uses players in extreme roles, nor his particular methods of playing in one's own end. I actually think Dion and Gunnar have done incredibly well, considering what they face.
But. I do think it's also likely that their play has been less stellar than we've tended to say this year. But that PDO has covered up a fair multitude of sins. For instance, Dion and Gunnar have both seen their CorsiOn decline this year, and substantially so. And their shots against are now over 34 per night. Remember how Holzer allowed 34.8 shots against last year? Well, they're in that territory. Their only salvation this year has been a whopping crazy,.960 save% behind them.
Think if that changed, falling just to a.920. That would have been another 12 goals against so far, just with that duo on the ice. Think of the waves of blame that would be pouring down on them right now.
Even on offence, even with an incredibly happy 11% on-ice scoring %, Dion is scoring at his lowest rate.... ever. He's on pace for 32 points, after averaging 46 over his career. And Gunnar? Gunnar is on pace for 5 points this year. Just 5. Shots-wise, Dion is taking fewer shots than he ever has. Ever. Both during 5v5, and on the PP. And Gunnar is also taking fewer shots than he ever has.
We don't have to like it. But.
THIS. IS. WHAT. THE. STATS. SAY.
*****
SO HERE'S THE SKINNY.
So.Here's our take-way. You know, the Skinny.
Jake Gardiner is pretty damned good, maybe on his way to great. Pick of this litter, and not just in terms of his scoring, he's the Corsi Cup winner as well. A bit prone to getting blown out defensively, and not yet nearly as good on the PP as we might like, but overall, a pretty damned fine turn up to his year. So, Mr Nonis, think hard if you're gonna trade him. And if it's not a Top young center coming back, just say no.
Mark Fraser has been bad, by pretty much every measure - and good by none. And now he's hurt, which makes it hopeless. The Leafs should sit him til he's better. Then maybe sit him some more. Good guy. But in 2013-14, it's not happening.
Morgan Rielly can score, both at even strength and on the PP. But he gives up a lot of shots, and sooner or later, that means goals against. So either pair him up with someone solid, or don't even think about putting him out on NHL ice. The WJC beckons.
Cody Franson is troubled. He is great on the PP, but his 5v5 scoring stinks, his Corsi's awful, he's giving up Holzerian numbers of shots, and there are no obvious excuses - not ice-time nor partner certainly. And he's clearly playing differently this year - fewer wrist-shots, fewer rushes. Maybe he needs to do a Jake, and watch some film of when he was successful. Then pair him up with someone to settle him down. Turns out, that can't be Fraser this time. Also, maybe give him a physical. He may not be 100 %.
Paul Ranger has been the best D-man on the PK, he's scoring well enough in 5v5 play and his Corsi's relatively good. That's a reasonable first 30 games back, nothing All-Star though. Worth noting, though, that he's done this playing the most time alongside Fraser, plus he's had a bad set of forwards. His mistakes - the bobbled pucks and holding penalties being the two most prominent [edit: and the frigging badly-timed pinches ]- definitely exist, and need to come down. But the numbers - pretty much across the board - say that these visible errors are being outweighed by another side of his game, better positioning perhaps. Facts is facts, and there's something there. Looking ahead, Carlyle should stop pairing him with Fraser. Run him out with Liles, or with Rielly if they insist on running the kid into NHL competition. But either way, try Ranger with some forwards who can skate now and then.
Dion Phaneuf and Carl Gunnarsson. They look good right now, but their underlying numbers are not good at all. Not on the PP. Not on the PK. Not during 5v5. Not in creating shots or stopping them. So an awful lot is depending on that inflated PDO. I would say, it's unlikely they are at fault for all of the bad numbers, however. They're highly-skilled, and actually pretty damned courageous, to go out and do as Carlyle asks, night after night. But it needs to change. Otherwise, when their PDO turns, the Toronto media and fans will turn on them, their reputation will plummet, and their trade value will be slashed. The Leafs can change the coach, change the system, change the match-ups, change the pairings. But they need to change something, right now, or these two are gonna get ground to bits, which would be a huge loss.
Oh yeah. J-M Liles has some chops. Always has had. Work him into the line-up. And you know, Potato-man, if you sent Rielly to the WJC and then back to Junior, it'll let you give a few games to Brennan and Percy and Granberg and co. Just sayin'.When it comes to work, you might think the higher your position, the higher your pay.
Not at the Honolulu Fire Department.
Currently, assistant chiefs make more money than deputy chiefs, even though they're lower in rank, and the department wants to change that.
It's asking the city's salary commission to bump up the pay for deputies and the fire chief to establish a 5-percent pay gap between the positions, so deputies would get paid about $10,000 more and the fire chief would get paid $11,000 more.
Salary Fire Chief $176,304 Fire Deputy $168,144 Employees (3) $170,100 Employee (1) $169,330
We did some digging and found out the Honolulu Fire Department isn't the only city agency where department heads are getting paid less than the people under them.
Honolulu Mayor Caldwell leads the city, but at $164,928 a year, he's not the city's highest-paid employee.
That honor goes to the medical examiner, Dr. Christopher Happy, who makes $247,464 a year. Even the deputy medical examiner gets paid more than the mayor at $219,600.
Honolulu's police chief, fire chief, and their deputies also make more than the mayor.
Even within the city's departments, some employees make more than the department heads and we're only talking about base salaries, which does not include overtime pay.
In the Department of Planning and Permitting, which handles building permits, there's are three employees making more than the department's head and deputy director.
In the Department of Environmental Services, which is in charge of the city's waste system, there are three employees making more than their higher-ups, including one who makes $20,000 more.
Salary Director $147,360 Deputy $139,824
Environmental Services % more than director % more than deputy Employee (1) $166,484 12.98 19.07 Employee (1) $156,171 5.98 11.69 Employee (1) $144,589 -1.88 3.41
Planning and Permitting Employee (1) $158,357 7.46 13.25 Employee (2) $152,936 3.78 9.38
In 2015, the salary commission approved pay raises for department heads and deputies to take care of this imbalance, which it calls salary inversion. Even with directors and deputies getting a roughly 5-percent pay raise last fiscal year, it's still an issue.
As for HFD's request, we'll follow up to see if that gets approved.
The Honolulu Police Department had that issue in the past in which assistant chiefs made more than deputy chiefs, but that's no longer the case. According to the city, the highest paid civil service subordinate makes $170,000.For every person who seeks out the perfect sunset over the Pacific or a quiet stay in the wilderness, there is somebody who swoons over a vast trove of books. For those people—the Hermione Grangers, the Rupert Gileses, the Lisa Simpsons—we recommend adding the British Library in London to your bucket list. Why? Though it may not be the most historic or the most beautiful library on the planet, it is the largest, defined by the number of items cataloged.
Related: What to See at the World's Largest Church
With over 170 million books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, sound and music recordings, magazines, and drawings, it’s no wonder the library attracts over 1.75 million visitors per year. Luckily, there's lots of space on offer too—enough room to accommodate more than 1,200 readers and 625 kilometers of shelves.
Related: Where to Find the World's Biggest Spider
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Related: This Is the Biggest Museum in the World
The library boasts that, if a visitor were to see five items every day, it would take a whopping 80,000 years to see the entire collection. But before your lifetime is up, you’ll surely want to check out the Diamond Sutra, otherwise known as the world’s earliest dated printed book, which |
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Kentucky police are investigating a gruesome assault that left a 26-year-old woman badly beaten, missing an ear and with three-quarters of her scalp removed.
They allege a deranged ex-boyfriend attacked her and sic’ed his pitbull on her when she tried to defend herself with a knife.
Investigators with the Boone County Sheriff’s Office say Marilyn Stanley was having dinner with her ex-boyfriend, Zachary Gross, at a home in Walton, Kentucky the night of September 14 when he flew into a violent rage.
“She says she’s about four French fries in and he socks in the face. And then [throws] four or five more [punches],” Boone County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Tom Scheben told WKRC News in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Police say a Facebook post may have provoked Gross’s assault, which escalated when Stanley tried to use a weapon to defend herself.
“At one point she gets a knife in defense, he says put the knife down or I’m going to sic the dog on you,” Scheben said.
“She didn’t and that’s where the real injuries came in.”
The man’s pit bull assaulted Stanley and ripped one of her ears off, police say.
Meanwhile police allege Gross used the knife to scalp her, removing more than 70% of her scalp.
“When he’s finished he praises the dog for the work he did. Then makes her stand in front of mirror to make her look at herself,” Scheben said.
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Police say Gross dropped Stanley off near her mother’s house after the beating, where she was discovered by her sister and mother later that evening. They quickly phoned police and rushed her to hospital.
Stanley was treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center for several days before being released, hospital officials confirm to Global News. They understandably could not provide any details on her care or condition due to the rules governing patient privacy under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
According to a GoFundMe page set up to help pay her medical bills, she’s already undergone three surgeries to place a cadaver’s scalp over her skull until her tissue is strong enough to support a skin graft.
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Gross was arrested the night as the alleged attack and is facing charges of assault and harboring a vicious animal.Ardent Leisure's chief executive Deborah Thomas at the company's annual meeting on Thursday. Credit:Louise Kennerley We live with this reality daily, the most obvious example being the risks we take every time we get into a motor vehicle, or climb a ladder, or go under a general anaesthetic, or have a swim, or step barefoot on a bee. Sometimes each of those things end up killing people and each of them is statistically much more lethal than Dreamworld's rides. Part of the reason for our collective sorrow over the Dreamworld deaths is that they are rare. It would also be sad if four people are killed in a car crash tomorrow, but if we don't know the individuals or there is not some particularly newsworthy circumstance – newlyweds, a young family, lottery winners – their deaths would barely register, if at all. A bigger reason for the Dreamworld mass sorrow is the incongruity of tragedy at a fun park, and at a particular park that so many millions of us have visited, on a ride that so many millions of us have ridden. I have, with my children. There is an emotional reflex that says "it could have been us". That's understandable, but not rational. We rarely think it as we hurtle past the crucifixes and bunches of wilted or plastic flowers that have become the commonplace background of our roads. If you are the CEO of a fun park or in senior management or sit on the board, you should know all that. If you don't, you are incompetent and don't deserve your pay.
Dreamworld... a fun park that so many of us have visited. Credit:Glenn Hunt And if you do know it, you would have comprehensive plans in place to handle the very public tragedy. The first step would be to devote every resource at your disposal to the survivors and the families of the victims. You would wrap them in cotton wool. You would be at their service at the highest level. You would have learned from Qantas' captain Richard de Crespigny who, after landing QF 32 against all manner of odds, still shepherded his passengers, addressed them with calm reason about their experience and gave them his phone number in case they wanted to talk further. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and police assistant commissioner Brian Codd pay their respects at Dreamworld. Credit:Glenn Hunt Ardent did not. The chairman was left mouthing platitudes at the AGM about concern for the families of the dead, only to have the façade blown away by his CEO being forced to admit in a televised media conference that she hadn't spoken to them and suddenly promising that she would. It could be the PR fail of the year.
The second step would be openness. All information, good or bad for the company, would be laid bare. The usual bevy of lawyers and dubious "crisis managers" advising the company to say nothing, admit nothing, lest it subsequently be used against the bottom line, would be sent packing. If you've made a mistake, own it. You can't cover up failure and any attempt to do so has a tendency to become a greater failure. You would have learned from the former head of Australia's Jesuits, Fr Mark Raper, who put principle ahead of legal advice back in 2003 by apologising to victims of sexual abuse, proclaiming people were more important than the church's assets. Other clergy are still learning that. Ardent did not. Instead, the company retreated into the old "can't say nuffink 'cause there's going to be a coronial inquiry". Rubbish. A coronial inquiry is not a criminal trial. If Ardent already knows or thinks it knows what caused the deaths, it can tell the world. Its silence can lead the public to think either that Ardent has something to hide or it doesn't know what went wrong, which in turn questions their competence and/or casts a pall of doubt over the safety of every other ride. The third step would be to show some class by not talking about the money.
Ardent did not show class. Ms Thomas rattled on about the event having significant impact on the bottom line and promised to provide regular updates to the market. Yes, there was a scheduled AGM and stock market types speculate and ask questions about the financial impact of the deaths – but the company didn't need to answer them. This week, the bottom line should have been ignored. Let them speculate – the company admitted it couldn't really answer the questions anyway. In these circumstances, ASIC is not going to issue a speeding ticket for lack of disclosure. As for the CEO's bonus, the example has already been set by BHP when fatalities happen on your watch – forget it. But Ardent did not. Only after the bonus became a massive embarrassment did damage control crank into gear and Thomas pledged to donate the cash portion of her bonus to charity. Act with humanity, class and control and another bonus will be earned down the track. On the performance so far, maybe not.
Amidst so much failure, the desire to reopen was the right thing. That the idea of opening on Friday didn't pass muster with the police still conducting a crime scene is just another example of dud management. A half-smart operator would have checked first. But as soon as it can, Dreamworld should reopen. We all need to get back on the horse, especially the employees, I suspect. Tragedy needs to be kept in perspective, however it strikes. Amusement parks exist for fun, for laughter, for kids of all ages to be silly and take pleasure in rides that are meant to offer some tame adventure. The deaths are terrible, but the joy that many millions have had and will have should not be denied. The opening lines of a poem from high school have never left me and always resurface at such times, Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts. About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Loading Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood.This post was contributed by a community member.
Part 2 of Special Report: Death at Naval Station Great Lakes
When Kyle Antonacci walked into his room at Great Lakes Naval Station on the night of May 8, 2009, he was shocked to find a woman naked under his covers, he told a jury. The female Marine would later accuse Kyle's friend and fellow Navy seaman Michael Pineda of sexually assaulting her. Kyle was a witness during the trial. Nine months later his body was found hanging by a belt in his closet.
According to Kyle's parents, Lisa and Al Antonacci, their son's involvement in the rape trial in November of 2009 was part of a chain of events that led to Kyle's death on the military base. Authorities would not comment on the details of Kyle's death because it was still under investigation. However, for the past year and a half, Kyle's parents have claimed their son was murdered and are blaming officials at the naval station.
Earlier: Details about what authorities discovered at the scene of the crime.
Kyle first arrived at the Navy's largest training station, located 40 miles north of Chicago, in August 2007.
"He was a proud American and he wanted to defend the country and its citizens," Lisa Antonacci said. But that initial enthusiasm didn't last long.
Kyle's troubles at Great Lakes started to materialize two years after he arrived. In 2009, Kyle's fellow seaman, Michael Pineda, was court-martialed on charges of raping a female Marine in Kyle's bedroom and went on trial in November.
During testimony, Kyle told jurors that on the night of May 8, the female lance corporal came to his room uninivited. Kyle admitted to having a previous sexual relationship with her but described it as "tenuous at best" at the time of the alleged rape.
"She just let herself in," Antonacci told jurors. "She was making some, you know, passes at me, and I was trying to tell her 'no' because she was really drunk, and she kept — you know, I was trying to tell her to leave my room."
Court records show Antonacci said that's when he texted Pineda for help. Pineda, who lived in the same building, instructed Antonacci to switch rooms with him and said he'd take care of the situation. But when Antonacci returned to his room later that night the woman was still there, this time naked under his covers and crying.
Antonacci told jurors he asked the woman twice if Pineda had hurt her or forced himself on her and both times she said no. But later that night, the accuser testified, she told her superiors she had in fact been raped and Pineda was charged.
While on the stand she also described her life after the attack to jurors. "The mental anguish, the not being able to sleep, not being able to walk outside of my room without looking over my shoulder, not knowing what could happen next, not knowing if he's waiting, just not knowing," was devastating, she said.
Pineda pleaded not guilty, but the jury sided with the Marine and convicted him of aggravated sexual assault. Pineda was sentenced to three months in prison and a bad-conduct discharge but has been fighting the verdict ever since. Pineda's efforts paid off; earlier this month the charges were dropped and his record wiped clean. The Navy also agreed to an honorable discharge.
During Pineda's trial, the Antonaccis said they were concerned about Kyle's well-being.
In a statement he submitted to NCIS, which was obtained by Patch, Kyle claimed he was being threatened to testify against Pineda, align his story with the female Marine and omit details about the chain of events. He added that the accuser had visited him in September shortly before Pineda's trial started.
"She stated that her lawyer told her I'm switching sides and that I'm siding with Pineda," Kyle wrote in the statement. "She proceeded to tell me that Pineda has to burn and that I can't switch sides."
In the same statement Kyle wrote he also was hounded by another Marine whom he believed to be armed with a knife.
"He then said that he will be at the court room and if he doesn't hear what he likes it's going to be bad for me," Kyle wrote. "He also said that he will be making return trips so I better watch out."
Kyle also told NCIS that a few days later he noticed someone had carved an X into the door of his room.
Navy officials wouldn't comment on the alleged threats. However, according to Jen Zeldis, spokesperson for the Office of the Judge Advocate General, if an allegation of inappropriate conduct is brought to the attention of military personnel, they are supposed to ensure the safety of the witness and begin an investigation into their claims. If witness tampering or obstruction of justice has occurred, criminal charges can be brought against the parties involved.
According to the Antonaccis, Kyle was switched to different living quarters on the base after reporting the threats to NCIS. His parents believe he should have been better protected during the trial.
"They could have moved him to Indiana or another base and brought him back for the case. It would have been very simple," Lisa said.
Pineda said he also knew his friend was being threatened to testify a certain way.
"The first couple of months I was furious at him [Kyle] because his statements kind of supported her [the rape accuser], but not really," he told Patch in an interview. He said he realized something else was going on.
"They blackmailed my best friend in the Navy," he said referring to the female Marine and her comrades. Pineda feels NCIS agents, his legal council and military officials on the base didn't protect Kyle before or after the trial.
"He was going through a big depression," he said, and believes someone should have been watching him. "Whether he committed suicide or whether he got murdered, it's their fault," he said. "Why was he alone?"
After Pineda's conviction, Kyle's ordeal continued. He had been keeping a secret, one that could have changed the course of the trial: He also had sex with the Marine on the night she accused his friend of rape.
Next: Part 3: Navy Seaman Acting as NCIS Informant on Day of Death
Download the movieMichael Melford
I used to live in the country and go to a gun club for the skeet and trap shooting. I went there on Sundays because that was the only day the club was open to nonmembers. Like many shooting clubs, this one would only grant membership if I also joined the National Rifle Association. That wasn’t going to happen. While I like some of the NRA’s youth gun-safety programs, I cannot support its policy aims.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 13.7 million people went hunting in the U.S. last year, a nearly 5% increase from 2001. By contrast, the NRA has 4 million members. There are likely plenty of reasons why two-thirds of hunters (as well as millions of gun owners) don’t belong to the group, apathy and financial hardship among them, but politics undoubtedly play a role. And reaching out to pro-hunting moderates is perhaps our best hope for ending the national stalemate over gun control.
(MORE: When Massacres Force Change: Lessons from the U.K. and Australia)
“I don’t know anyone in the sporting or hunting arena that goes out with an assault rifle,” West Virginia Senator Joe “Dead Aim” Manchin said on Morning Joe,one of several pro-gun politicians who have started to speak out in favor of sensible reforms after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. “I don’t know anybody that needs 30 rounds in the clip to go hunting.”
Neither do I. And I’m guessing the same is true for many other sportsmen.
Unfortunately, this constituency has no organization speaking to and for it. That’s why if philanthropists and influential leaders really want to do something about gun safety, they should launch an advocacy group for sportsmen that will provide a legitimate alternative to today’s gun lobby. The solution to our gun problem is not to try to fight through the same old politics — rather, it’s to change the political landscape.
(MORE: The Myth of Second Amendment Exceptionalism)
A moderate sporting organization could oppose knee-jerk proposals like banning “semiautomatic” guns (a class that includes many legitimate sporting arms) while supporting common-sense steps to improve public safety, including the strict regulation of — or even prohibition against — the sale of large-magazine firearms that have no legitimate sporting use. At the same time, such an organization could take on all the issues of more immediate concern to sportsmen than the Second Amendment, in particular the loss of wildlife habitat. The NRA and its even more radical cousins are pretty much exclusively focused on maintaining access to all kinds of firearms and ammunition. It’s an economic agenda to preserve the interests of the companies that make these products, not a pro-sportsmen’s agenda to preserve natural resources and open space; the gun lobby frequently supports politicians with horrendous records on environmental issues. Its narrow focus, as Field & Stream columnist George Reiger observed a few years ago, could lead us to become a nation where people can have “a closet full of guns with no place but a shooting range to use them.”
It’s worth noting that hunters have tried to start a pro-gun-control group before. Ray Schoenke, who used to play for the Washington Redskins and ran for governor in Maryland, launched the American Hunters and Shooters Association in 2005; it was defunct by 2010. Monster.com founder Andrew McKelvey started a similar group, Americans for Gun Safety, that quickly fizzled (before merging with the centrist D.C. think tank Third Way). Both of these organizations were hamstrung by having close ties with traditional gun-control organizations, and that made them an easy target for the gun lobby.
(MORE: The Backlash Against ‘I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother’)
A moderate alternative to the NRA would need authenticity to succeed. And deep pockets too. It would also help if the leader of this new organization could motivate young people to help change the status quo. (Mass shootings may grab our attention, but day-to-day gun violence is the major reason why homicide is the second leading cause of death, after accidents, among young adults.) That’s why I’m nominating Mark Zuckerberg to take up this cause. He’s rich, he has tons of social capital, and in 2011 he pledged to spend a year eating only meat from animals that he had killed. He said he did this to challenge himself to be more thankful for what he has and to be more thoughtful about how we live — ideas sadly lost on today’s gun lobby.The Trump administration announced Thursday night that it will cease making payments to a subsidy that helps low to moderate income individuals purchase Obamacare health insurance plans.
The U.S. government cannot lawfully continue making the cost-sharing reduction payments (CSRs) that help prop up the Affordable Care Act, the White House announced in a statement. President Donald Trump’s decision to nix CSRs comes after several months of flirting with the idea.
WATCH: DELUSIONAL OBAMA-ERA OFFICIAL SAYS CITIZENS STOP HER TO THANK HER FOR OBAMACARE
“The bailout of insurance companies through these unlawful payments is yet another example of how the previous administration abused taxpayer dollars and skirted the law to prop up a broken system,” the White House said in a statement announcing the decision. “Congress needs to repeal and replace the disastrous Obamacare law and provide real relief to the American people.”
Trump has considered eliminating the CSRs on several occasions, but decided to pull back while an impending lawsuit filed against the president’s predecessor in 2014 made its way through the courts. Lawmakers filed suit against the Obama administration at the time, claiming that it was illegally reimbursing marketplace insurers for CSRs.
Former House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders argued that CSRs require congressional approval. Congress had never explicitly appropriated the funds for those payments, they argued, which made the administration’s actions unconstitutional.
After nearly two years of deliberation, a federal district court concluded the House’s claim had legal standing, and allowed the case to move forward in May 2016.
Trump’s decision to nix CSRs comes after he signed an executive order Thursday afternoon to begin formulating an approach to allow small businesses to join together across state lines to purchase coverage through what are known as Association Health Plans (AHPs). The executive order also expands access to short term coverage plans that don’t comply with Obamacare requirements.
WATCH: TRUMP GOES FULL-ON SUPER MARIO AND DELIVERS SOME BLOWS TO HIS ENEMIES
Follow Chris White on Facebook and Twitter.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.How the AIDS Crisis Became a Moral Debate Prof’s 2015 book, After the Wrath of God, traces the evolution
In 1993, the Reverend Billy Graham asked an audience rhetorically, “Is AIDS a judgment of God?” He then answered his own question: “I could not say for sure, but I think so.”
Graham later apologized for suggesting that the Almighty had unleashed the epidemic to punish homosexuals. Yet the fact that an influential and popular pastor echoed views, however hesitantly, of harder-line clerics reflected the perception of many Christians, Anthony Petro writes at the outset of his book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015). The book revisits the history of the disease in the United States and religious reactions to it.
Petro, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of religion, says After the Wrath goes beyond most such accounts, which focus on the religious right’s reaction, to include mainstream and progressive denominations’ handling of the crisis. What began as a public health issue, he writes, became a pan-denominational discussion of morality and sexuality. Condemnations of promiscuity, support for abstinence and monogamy, even discussion of gay marriage: all were directly or indirectly touched by the moral debates launched by AIDS, he argues.
Petro faults even gay writers and activists—such as Randy Shilts, who condemned the Reagan administration’s indifference to the epidemic in his 1987 best seller And the Band Played On—for fostering notions that promiscuity was to blame for the disease. “Shilts wrote for a broad audience, and in doing so, offered a gripping narrative,” he says, “one that featured a Canadian flight attendant as the infamous ‘patient zero,’ or antihero, of the account. Shilts characterizes the epidemiological spread of the epidemic as very much a moral failing on the part of this flight attendant, who stands in for what he saw as the problem of promiscuous gay men more generally.”
Actually, After the Wrath argues that it is the type rather than frequency of sexual encounter that puts people at risk. BU Research interviewed Petro about his book.
BU Research: What did you find new to say about this topic?
Petro: I suggest two main points about how leaders of the Christian right approached the AIDS crisis as God’s punishment for sexual immorality. First, this rhetoric wasn’t new. It comes out of much older theological and religious statements that connected sexual immorality to threats to a community or even a nation. In the medieval period, Christian writers reinterpreted biblical passages about the destruction of the city of Sodom as descriptions of sexual sin, namely, the sin of “sodomy” (which would become the sin of homosexual acts in the 20th century). Conservative Christians, in the decades preceding AIDS, worried about an epidemic of immorality tied to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
The second point is that conservative rhetoric that characterized AIDS as God’s wrath was overrepresented in the media and in national consciousness. Most American Christians, even most evangelicals, downplayed or even rejected the idea that AIDS was God’s punishment. Or they layered this interpretation with calls for compassion.
What was the response of mainstream and liberal Christian churches and of non-Christian traditions to the epidemic?
Mainstream and liberal Christians were slow to confront the epidemic. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that we saw mainstream Christian writers calling for attention to the crisis in national magazines like Christian Century and Christianity Today. By the end of the decade, though, a number of denominations had issued statements calling for care and compassion for people with HIV or AIDS, for governmental funding to fight the epidemic, and for an end to discrimination against people based on their HIV status and sexuality.
Some of the major non-Christian traditions, especially Judaism and Buddhism, had an easier time confronting the crisis and its connection to homosexuality. These traditions do not have the powerful readings of sodomy as sexual sin that have characterized Christian traditions for so many centuries. In fact, one of the very first public meetings to educate people about what at the time was called “gay cancer” was sponsored by a gay Jewish group in New York City in 1982.
What lessons should we draw going forward?
We should understand how arguments about public health are never just that. They are also arguments about human rights—about how we understand individual freedom versus community responsibility. Public health and politics can work together in productive ways, but such entanglements can also blind us to what can become moralistic arguments about who is or is not part of a valued community and about what kinds of risks we value and which we label not merely risks, but moral failings.
For instance, in the past few years, some dominant approaches to HIV prevention have focused on gay marriage as the antidote to promiscuity, and by extension, to increased rates of infection. In other words, in the fight for gay marriage equality, and even now that same-sex marriage is legal, some public health leaders and AIDS workers have championed gay marriage as a tool to fight HIV. I’m less interested in whether this logic is epidemiologically valid or not than I am in how it brings together a public health argument with a moral argument for marriage (and by extension, monogamy, which it often equates with marriage).
The history of the AIDS crisis and religion teaches us to look at such moments more critically, to pause and ask why it is that this particular reasoning appears more reasonable than emphasizing a variety of other tactics for fighting HIV.Post Title
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Additional Non-published CommentsRecent developments in Type Theory
Lectures at Mathematical Structures of Computation - Lyon 2014
Hugo Herbelin and Danko Ilik
Lecture 1. Constructive proofs in continuation passing style (CPS). The case of completeness of intuitionistic logic w.r.t. Kripke models
14/01/2014 -- Danko
The purpose of this lecture was to show that CPS can also be useful for writing proofs in intuitionistic logic. CPS is a technique of general interest, not exhausted by the connection to double-negation translations -- it is most useful if combined with other computational side-effects besides continuations, like the exception monad (corresponding to logical A-translation) and state/reader monad. In this lecture, we illustrated the technique on the problem of completeness of Kripke models.
We used the Agda proof assistant, and gave a homework to do using it. If you would like do it, but are having trouble installing Agda, we prepared for you a custom ISO image of Debian linux with Agda preinstalled, which you can copy on a USB stick and boot up from, or run in a virtual machine (using VirtualBox, Gnome Boxes, VmWare,...).
Files from the lecture:
KripkeCompleteness.agda -- NBE for minimal logic
KripkeCompletenessCPS.agda -- NBE for disjunction
Homework:
Extend KripkeCompletenessCPS.agda for conjunction. You may first want to do it inside KripkeCompleteness.agda. Extend KripkeCompletenessCPS.agda with a zero, successor and recursor (at higher types), obtaining NBE for Gödel's System T with sum types.
Lecture 3. Reifying CPS proofs: direct style constructive systems based on delimiting control operators and their meta-mathematical properties
16/01/2014 -- Danko
Lecture 4. Generalizing proving with control to proving with effects. Monotone memory access simplifies Kripke and Gödel's completeness proofs. Direct proof of Open Induction on Cantor Space using delimited control.
17/01/2014 -- DankoYour browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Jesus died for your sins. Now he’s gonna kick your ass.
Fight of Gods is an early-access fighting game that looks hilariously bad. Just look at this launch trailer, which features the likes of fighters such as Buddha, Moses, Anubis, and Zeus going toe-to-toe with one another:
My favorite part is watching supposedly peaceful deities right in the middle of the action. Sure, why not.
Here’s the Steam description, which doesn’t really explain how or why any of this is happening:
Your prayers have been answered! For the first time ever, gods, holy spirits and mythological characters from around the globe and throughout history will clash in an explosive 2D fighter where the entire world is at stake! Who will emerge victorious from the most destructive combat tournament the universe has ever witnessed?
According to Steam reviews, Fight of Gods is actually a decent fighter:
Advertisement
All I want to know is: who is the best character in the game? Because right now, Jesus sure as hell looks over-powered.CARACAS (Reuters) - Washington has expelled Venezuela’s highest-ranking diplomat in the United States and two others from its embassy in retaliation for Venezuela’s booting out three American diplomats accused of fomenting sabotage, both governments said on Wednesday.
U.S. Charge d'Affaires Kelly Keiderling talks to the media during a news conference at the U.S. embassy in Caracas October 1, 2013.REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
The flare-up appears to derail some tentative moves to improve relations between Caracas and Washington since President Nicolas Maduro took over this year from the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, whose 14-year rule was halted by cancer.
“We repudiate this expulsion,” Maduro’s government said in a statement, confirming that its acting head of mission, Calixto Ortega, and two others had been ordered out.
“This cannot be considered a reciprocal decision, if you look at the clear conduct of our officials, who have at no time dared to meet groups opposed to President Barack Obama’s government, or people interested in acting against it.”
Maduro expelled three U.S. diplomats this week on charges they were involved in promoting anti-government plots and sabotage in the OPEC nation, whose people are bitterly divided between “Chavistas” and the opposition.
The expelled Americans included Kelly Keiderling, who was in charge of the Caracas mission where Washington has been without an ambassador since Chavez kicked out the last one in 2008.
The U.S. government denied the allegations, saying the officials were conducting normal diplomatic activities, including meeting a wide cross-section of Venezuelan society.
“This action by the Venezuelan government is clearly an effort to distract from its domestic problems and is not a serious way for a country to conduct its foreign policy,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
MENACE?
Venezuelan state TV has been broadcasting video, set to menacing-sounding music, of a trip the three Americans made to Bolivar state, in the southeast of the country. It showed them holding meetings there, including with a pro-opposition non-governmental organization, Sumate.
“ |
keeping," MasterCard Canada's president Betty K. DeVita said in a statement.
"We are pleased that we will continue to be able to protect consumers from unfair or unexpected fees at checkout."
Visa also welcomed the decision, saying "The decision by the Tribunal to dismiss the Competition Bureau’s case … is a positive for consumers. This decision reinforces that Visa’s rules are compliant with the Canadian Competition Act and helps ensure that consumer choice is protected at checkout."Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
When I lived in New York after college, I suffered from depression and insomnia. So I volunteered for a 24-hour suicide prevention hotline.
That may not seem like an obvious cure, but it made sense to me. I was working the graveyard shift at a soul-numbing job; things couldn’t have gotten much bleaker. Then the company I worked for, a corporation that distributed press releases disguised as news, offered paid leave for one day of charity work. That was convenient because I desperately wanted to do something that, well, mattered.
The only number I could find for the hotline was … the hotline. I called late at night on my “day” off.
“What makes you want to do this work?” a woman asked.
“I do data entry for a living,” I answered. “On the overnight shift. In Jersey City.” But that was somehow too vague. “I guess I feel out of touch, kind of worthless,” I added.
She said, “It must be hard working nights.”
“Sure,” I admitted. “That’s why I’m reaching out. I can empathize, too; I’ve dealt with things.”
She asked me to describe these “things.”
So I told her about my brother’s recent bout with cancer. When David got sick, he was only 19, I was 22, and we lived together and attended college in Fort Collins, Colo. Eventually we relocated so he could get experimental treatment in Manhattan. We took up residence at the Ronald McDonald House on the Upper East Side. Our parents split time between New York and Denver. The volunteer asked how we coped. I mentioned that we went to a lot of movies in Times Square. We visited the Central Park duck pond like a couple of Caulfields.
David’s health took several grim turns, yet, incredibly, he survived. Somehow, though, things failed to get easier. Our parents’ marriage entered its death throes. In remission, David was guilt-stricken that his best friend in treatment was not as lucky. None of us were doing well.
“We shared a small, hotel-sized room with two twin beds and two cots for six months, and I never thought I’d say, ‘Those were the days,’” I added.
Photo
This was stuff I never talked about, and I realized then that I was in a dark place — yet suddenly less so for having voiced it. That’s when she asked, “Are you feeling suicidal?”
“No!”
“You said you felt worthless,” she reminded me. “That you wanted to reach out.”
Fair enough, I thought. I did say that. I felt that way too. And, as I was soon to learn, that’s how the hotline worked. The goal on each call was to steer toward the caller’s pain. Casual complaints, even those as banal as frustrations about work, often spring from unearthed seas of melancholy. The catharsis felt in exposing that is significant.
I did my best then to convince her I wasn’t unstable, and I guess it worked.
I trained with a diverse group of do-gooder New Yorkers. Graduate students in psychology and social work, paralegals, bankers, bartenders and people living off trust funds who dedicated their time to charity. We bonded by staging practice calls, taking turns becoming the bipolar shut-ins, bullied teenagers, terminally ill fathers and isolated divorcées we would soon meet on the phone. For homework, we read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying.” We listened to Miles Davis’s “So What” to identify each instrument’s role in the ensemble: a cerebral exercise we would apply to pace, tone, words and silence on a call.
We had to learn what it meant when there was nothing but heavy breathing on the other end. These were “inappropriate calls” — a surprisingly frequent problem. The hotline director insisted “every caller gets three chances to change the subject to their thoughts and feelings before we hang up.” More than a few of us cringed.
In the end, the only things we didn’t practice were issuing judgments or giving advice. There was a special logic to this. “You’re not psychotherapists,” we were told. “You can’t even get your own lives in order. What makes you think you can wrap somebody else’s with a nice bow?”
He had me there. And when the time came to take a real call, I sat by the phone predictably terrified I would say the wrong thing. It rang, and I lifted the receiver, my hand trembling — to an inappropriate call.
The second caller was a single mother facing eviction with her kids. Frantic, she asked for advice. All I could offer, I told her, was sympathy for a devastating situation. She vented her fears; we talked about the complications forcing her to seek help from her mother instead of her ex. By the time we hung up, she was in a calmer place.
I went on to volunteer there once a week for two years. It was difficult, draining and totally rewarding — especially compared with what I did to pay my rent. When David finished treatment and my family moved back to Colorado, I stayed behind. Alone in New York, the hotline gave me a desperately needed sense of purpose and community. In those grieving calls, I heard the voices of my family and felt more at home.
Once, hearing the youth in my voice, a man suffering from AIDS and the recent loss of a dear friend asked, “What can you possibly know about that?” My thoughts turned to my brother — hairless and frail before, mohawked and chain-smoking now. But the hotline wasn’t the place to tell my story. Not since that first time, when I’d dialed the number myself. I remembered, then, what that volunteer had told me.
“It must be hard,” I said.
Daniel Hernandez is a student in the master of fine arts in creative writing program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.The faint gap between Real Madrid and Barcelona makes for a dramatic last four weeks in La Liga, but Guillem Balague could not be more confident of where the title is heading in his weekly column…
For me, Barcelona have won it. I'm convinced that beating Espanyol and the way they did it gives them the title.
It's not just that Real Madrid showed against Celta that they sometimes open up themselves too much, expose too much, risk too much - for me, it's the sign of a team that is mentally tired, preferring to attack than do the hard work of defending as a team.
It's also not just that the calendar situation sees Real facing Sevilla and Valencia games sandwiched between the trip to Juventus in the Champions League next month.
Barcelona are nailed on for the title, says Guillem Balague
It is that, above all, Barcelona in the last few weeks, including the PSG wins, have started playing in the way that fits the players they have. Having been very critical of Luis Enrique all season, it feels to me that they finally have the perfect fit between what the players want and how they become more effective, and what Enrique wanted.
There's no doubt whatsoever that Enrique has added to the team. Physically they are stronger than anybody - they have rested more in the league, and you can tell that now.
There's only be six or seven players playing most of their games, the rest have been rotating and you can see that now. Credit to them for that.
But at the end of that creative discussion between players and manager, I think it is the players that have won. Enrique tried a style that had direct football first and control second, but what we are seeing is control first and direct football when it is needed. It is a much more balanced use of those two alternatives.
Too much direct football went against some of the players they have - Andres Iniesta, for certain - and now we have a much more balanced Barcelona at the business end of the season.
Injuries have hit Real Madrid badly at a key moment, but that could be down to overuse. The lack of trust in [Asier] Illarramendi, in [Sami] Khedira, Lucas Silva has shown, even in Javier Hernandez, why hasn't he played before? They're paying for it now.
Title run-in...
Matchday 34 - Barcelona v Getafe (currently 13th); Real Madrid v Almeria (currently 17th)
Matchday 35 - Cordoba (20th) v Barcelona; Sevilla (4th) v Real Madrid
Matchday 36 - Barcelona v Real Sociedad (12th); Real Madrid v Valencia (5th)
Matchday 37 - Atletico Madrid (3rd) v Barcelona; Espanyol (10th) v Real Madrid
Matchday 38 - Barcelona v Deportivo (18th); Real Madrid v Getafe (13th)
Watch Javier Hernandez's two goals in Real Madrid's 4-2 in over Celta Vigo. Watch Javier Hernandez's two goals in Real Madrid's 4-2 in over Celta Vigo.
Hernandez future could depend on Jese…
The situation with Hernandez has been interesting. His last four shots on goal have yielded three goals, and all important ones.
The price, 10million euros, doesn't seem a lot of money, but do they back Jese and his progression or keep Hernandez, who would be an obstacle for his progression? It's a decision Real Madrid will have to make, and it may depend on what Jese wants to do. Will he want to accept his role as being behind the front three forwards?
Ancelotti future more clear…
If Carlo Ancelotti doesn't win the league, it will mean the Spanish giants Real Madrid have won La Liga just three times in 12 years. The Champions League is always the focus, and last year Sergio Ramos' last-minute goal against Atletico in Lisbon saved his head. But this year, I don’t think even the Champions League would save him. I've got the impression the board wants a new head next season.
Carlo Ancelotti celebrates with the Champions League trophy last season
Live on Sky
(All shown on Sky Sports 5 HD unless stated)
Tuesday, April 28 - Barcelona v Getafe (7pm); Athletic Bilbao v Real Sociedad (9pm)
Wednesday, April 29 - Real Madrid v Almeria (7pm); Villarreal v Atletico Madrid (9pm)
Thursday, April 30 - Rayo Vallecano v Valencia (7pm)
Saturday, May 2 - Cordoba v Barcelona (3pm KO, shown in full via red button at 5.15pm); Atletico Madrid v Athletic Bilbao (5pm KO, shown live from 5.15pm); Sevilla v Real Madrid (9pm)
Sunday, May 3 - Valencia v Eibar (6pm); Malaga v Elche (8pm)
Saturday, May 9 - Barcelona v Real Sociedad (5pm KO, shown live from 5.15pm); Real Madrid v Valencia (7pm)
Sunday, May 10 - Levante v Atletico Madrid (11am, Sky Sports 3, second half on red button); Celta Vigo v Sevilla (8pm)
Further fixtures TBC.The sky was relatively clear, the air was warm, and the sun beat down upon my black shirt like the fury of the gods. A wardrobe mistake, one might infer. But this ebony cloth depicted three howling wolves, and I knew that with it, I would slip into the York Fair crowd seamlessly; anonymously.
As some of you may well know, I have been quite vocal about my distaste for this little money-vampire in the past and equally in the present. In 2002, I wrote an article about it that still gets brought up to me by people until this very day. But 2010 marks (what I think is) my 10th year York Fair boycott anniversary, so I thought it would be apropos to do a little follow-up text by actually revisiting the coveted, human-dignity’s-train-wreck that is America’s Oldest Fair™.
The beginning of today’s little adventure came about pretty mildly at the convenience of having a friend in the car parking business, so I got to dump my jalopy off for free and with relative ease. Free parking is essential, because to pay for both admission and parking at this event would be borderline masochism.
No, it wasn’t until I got to the front gate this time around that I ran into the first of many soul-crushing farces being levied upon Fairgoers this year. Observe the following photograph:
Pretty unassuming, right?
If you are aware of the popular slogan associated with the York Fair, “Wind it up and it runs 10 days!”, and apply this to a $6 entry fee, one would deduce that to go every day for the entirety of the Fair’s stay would cost $60. "Outrageous!“ you’d bellow. But fear not: They were thinking of you and are offering Season Tickets. Great! Surely there’ll be a price break involved!
The fuck?! That’s not a price break, that’s a price-break-you. No thanks, fellas, I’ll just pay normal admission everyday and save myself some dough, here. Oh, but who am I kidding? There really is no way to save money at the fair unless, of course, you want to spend the entirety of your stay inside Toyota Center watching shit fall out of animal asses for free (more on that later. Actually no, we’ll just leave it at that.)
But it’s definitely not in the admission cost where they fuck you; it’s the rides. As I remembered, most ticket booths would offer an all-day bracelet for the rides, costing around $25. Long gone are those days, I suppose, as the best deal they can offer you is 55 tickets for $51. A surprisingly adequate price break, given that tickets are $1.25, but those tickets are, of course, finite.
The average ride costs 4 tickets, so at $1.25 a ticket you’re going on a ride for $5. Sometimes rides are 5 or more tickets. Your kid and his friend each ride 5 rides and before you know it, you’re buying another 55 tickets.
One ridiculous looking fucker was 10 tickets. Twelve American dollars to ride one ride at the fair. Well, at least we can say with confidence that everybody gets their money’s worth riding these great machines, right?
I scoff at the thought. The average 4-ticket ride is about 2 minutes long, sometimes less. The stomach churning flying-swings ride at the front gate (5 tickets) is in the air for a whopping minute-and-a-half before the pixelated operator starts the lowering-and-slowing process. At 90 seconds, a $6.25 ride means you’re paying roughly 7 cents a second to have fun. For fuck’s sake man, you can get 15 minutes worth of enjoyment at an arcade for 50 cents if you pick the right game.
"But I go to the York Fair for the food!” Most of you shall now, ever so feebly, utter. Well, let’s go ahead and discuss the Fair’s food.
The name of the above place is totally no-frills, no-bullshit. They call themselves exactly what every other shop on this God-forsaken slab should: Fried Dough. That’s precisely what you get when you come to the York Fair with an appetite. Corn dogs, battered vegetables (for the nutritionally conscious), funnel cakes, deep-fried twinkies, breaded Oreos. Breaded Oreos. My You’ve-Gotta-Be-Fucking-Kidding-Me meter goes on the fritz and I have to go inside. Somewhere, anywhere.
I take refuge in the cool corridor that is attached to the towering stadium, where I see mostly more food stands. I start to notice a trend among all of the vendors: the $4-5 price point. Everything at this place is begging for you to break out your buddy Lincoln at every other turn.
One place boasting its Pennsylvania Dutch heritage was slapping together ham and cheese sandwiches on Holsum brand rolls straight out of the bag for $4.25 a pop. We’re talking, like, the sandwich your mom would put in your lunchbox every Tuesday morning, here. My dwindling pocket was insulted, and my eyes desired to see new, more promising things.
So now I’m back outside, looking for something to catch my eye besides every other tattooed teen mom that seemed to populate the Fair’s core demographic this year, and I come across the great tent of horrors, or the freak-museum-of-what-have-you. "No,“ I thought to myself, "you mustn’t spend your money on such frivolities.”
I was, at first, content with this decision, until I noticed something very peculiar to the far left:
Olga Hess? Why, she must be of relation to me! And science is keeping her alive? I felt that I must have a look at her condition, and I knew then that I couldn’t leave the Fair until my concerns were satisfied. I paid my $2 entry fee and walked in.
The tent featured your usual, gimmicky, schlocky bullshit. Dead goat stuffed in a jar, 2-headed turtle pattering about, replica of mummified two-headed baby. Replica. Clearly not alive, and clearly not the two-bodied, one-headed child that was advertised. Alas, I heard a brute woman’s voice coming from the back of the tent and thought for sure that it must have been the tragic bellows of Miss Olga, the headless girl. My path to her, however, was temporarily blocked by a carn-type who was meticulously pulling out grass patches that he didn’t like.
I was wholly disheartened to find that the woman on the other side of the wall was, in fact, not my anatomically unfortunate relative, but an overweight, vulgar woman in her early twenties with piercings on her upper lip, sprouting long tubes of plastic which, if I was put to a guess, were intended to look like whiskers. The horrible wretch of a creature then, without any provoking or desire from the crowd, proceeded to twist a screwdriver all the way into her nose while I winced, thinking about the anything-other-than-this-shit I could have spent my two dollars on.
The pathetic soul then briefly fluttered a top-hat in our faces, making some vague mumbling about needing insurance, but I think she wanted us to give her money. The look on her face was entirely nonchalant and uncaring, as if she knew that her morbid routine was not worth any of our hardly-earned cash, and that this “insurance dance” was just her thoughtful way of giving us another reason to despise her. I came for Olga, you bitch.
My heart was in a wreck. I was swindled out of my $2, did not reconnect with my long-lost kin, and was unduly subjected to some strumpet’s self-mutilation. Surely, I thought to myself, I can find something in this Hell-hole that is good; something that affirms this event’s very right to exist. And there, in a moment of clarity, it appeared over the horizon…
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART II"We have somebody in custody and that person has not been charged."
Kansas City Police Chief Darryl Forte spoke briefly to reporters Thursday night, but said authorities have apprehended a man believed to be connected to at least a dozen Kansas City highway shootings. (ViaKSHB)
The Kansas City Star reports about 30 officers carried out a search warrant at a residence in Grandview, Mo. Neighbors told the Star the man who lived at the home "kept to himself and would come and go at odd hours of the night."
>> Read more trending stories
Authorities also towed away a dark green Dodge Neon from the residence. A reporter for KSHB tweeted that the car matches the description of a "mysterious green sedan" seen by many of the shooting victims. (Via Twitter / @GarrettHaake)
The arrest comes a week after police connected a dozen of nearly 20 highway shootings that date back to 2013. Authorities found a pattern of cars being hit near exit ramps or road splits. (Via KCTV)
Three people sustained non-life-threatening injuries before the last shooting was reported April 6. Chief Forte reiterated the suspect has not been charged and a name hasn't been released. Authorities plan to hold a news conference Friday to divulge more information.
See more at newsy.com.Be sure to check out our store for a great collection of Muslim products!
Dr. Yasir Qadhi goes into detail on the issue of eemaan (faith) in relation to actions in this video. He points out that the bulk of the Muslim world, the mainstream, has always held the opinion that some actions are part of faith. However, the scholars differed as to what those actions are. In other words, there are some actions whose absence can lead the person to be thrown out of the fold of Islam. He/She will no longer be considered a Muslim due to the absence of these vital actions. They are a testament to the existence of eemaan in the person’s heart and their absence is a testament to the opposite.
Watch the video below to find out what are these minimum actions required to be considered a Muslim?CTVNews.ca Staff
A Calgary father is pleading with the federal immigration minister to help him get past a frustrating rule change that he says is keeping him from his youngest son.
Andy Buck came to Calgary from the United Kingdom in 2008 after landing a job with the city. His sons, who were 14 and 17 at the time, stayed back with his ex-wife.
"It was an opportunity for me to better myself, but the by-product of all that was the fact it would create opportunities for my two boys also,” Buck told CTV Calgary.
Andy became a Canadian citizen three years ago and when his older son, Alex, turned 19, Buck sponsored him as a dependent child to come to Canada. Now 25, Alex works for an engineering firm in Calgary.
In January, 2015, Buck’s younger son, Benjamin, decided he wanted to join them too, but the family soon hit a roadblock.
They learned that the former Conservative government had adjusted the rules on sponsoring adult children in 2014, changing the age of dependency from children under the age of 22, to children under the age of 19.
Under those rules, only children 19 and older who were unable to support themselves because of a mental or physical condition could be considered dependents. Young adults not considered dependents would have to apply to come to Canada on their own merits, or as foreign students.
Ben, who had just turned 19, learned he was too old to qualify as a dependent.
"It is very frustrating. I just want to follow my dad's and brother's footsteps,” he said in a video call from the U.K.
But just last month, the Liberal government announced it would be changing the policy back, and returning the age of dependency to 22. It said in the announcement that the change was “consistent with the global socioeconomic trend for children to stay home longer” and would allow immigrant children to study in Canada.
But the rule change is not retroactive and doesn’t come into effect until October 24, 2017. Ben turns 22 in July so by the time the switch is in place, he will once again be too old.
Ben’s father says it was “totally devastating” to realize he won’t be able to bring his son over. Ben’s brother Alexis is also frustrated.
"To be denied on what was a slight rule change that is now getting changed back is totally unjust,” he says.
The Buck family is not alone.
'Lost children'
Raj Sharma, a Calgary immigration lawyer who is not representing the Bucks, says several families are finding they are caught in the gap between the old policy and the new. He calls all those affected "lost children."
"I think it is unfortunate and it's completely avoidable,” Sharma said. “And I think there are other families affected and they will come forward as well. The minister will have to deal with this today or tomorrow.”
Though Immigration Canada says it’s commited to family reunification, they say the reason the new policy isn't retroactive is because it will impact wait times for those already in the queue.
But Sharma wonders why exceptions can’t be made.
“If you were the one caught up in bureaucratic mess, there should be room for you to come,” he says.
Buck tried applying for Ben on compassionate grounds, but the application was denied. The family is now appealing to Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen for help.
A representative for Hussen told CTV News he can’t comment on the case since the minister doesn't speak about specific cases.
With a report from CTV Calgary’s Kathy LePenn State University head coach Joe Paterno watches his team before the start of their NCAA football game against the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois in this file October 3, 2009 photo. REUTERS/Jeff Haynes
By Barbara Goldberg
(Reuters) - A son of the late Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno on Friday dismissed as "bunk" a new court document alleging his father knew that his assistant Jerry Sandusky engaged in child sexual abuse as far back as 1976.
In a Twitter post, Scott Paterno denied that "Papa" Joe was told about such abuse decades before the alleged incidents became public and led to Sandusky's conviction, a scandal that rocked the world of college football and cost the elder Paterno his job.
His family and many of Penn State's loyal supporters have long insisted that Paterno, one of the most revered figures in the history of collegiate sports, had no knowledge of his trusted assistant's transgressions.
The fresh allegations came in a court opinion by Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Gary Glazer in a civil case involving Pennsylvania State University and an insurer over who should pay for settlements with Sandusky's victims.
In the opinion, the judge wrote that witnesses had testified that Paterno was told of abuse at least three times before the alleged incidents that led to Sandusky's 2012 conviction.
"Because of a single sentence in a court record of an insurance case, Joe Paterno's reputation has once again been smeared with an unsubstantiated, 40-year-old allegation," the family said in a written statement.
Sandusky, 72, is serving 30 to 60 years in prison after a jury convicted him of molesting 10 boys in incidents dating back to the 1990's.
The new allegations came to light late Thursday, the same day that Sandusky was granted a hearing later this month to press his case for a new criminal trial.
The elder Paterno was fired in 2011 after revelations that he knew Sandusky sexually abused a young boy in the school's football showers in 2002 and that while he told university officials, he failed to notify police.
The new questions surfaced in Judge Glazer's opinion filed in a lawsuit involving the school's former insurer, Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association.
"PMA claims... in 1976 a child allegedly reported to PSU's Head Football Coach Joseph Paterno that he (the child) was sexually molested by Sandusky," the opinion reads.
The document also cites two other incidents, in 1987 and 1988, in which unnamed other assistant coaches saw Sandusky having inappropriate contact with boys and told Paterno.
"There is no evidence that reports of the incidents ever went further up the chain of command at PSU," Glazer wrote.
Because Paterno did not report the three incidents to top university officials or police, Glazer said, the university can legally claim it was unaware of them and thus remains insured for any settlements with victims prior to 1992, when the liability policy was changed to exclude sexual abuse.
At Sandusky's May 20 hearing, his lawyers are free to challenge the competency of his trial attorney and look into whether prosecutors and the judge who oversaw the grand jury withheld evidence.
The defense can also explore whether the state attorney general's office leaked sealed grand jury material to a reporter in 2011 to encourage other victims to come forward.
(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York; Editing by Frank McGurty and Steve Orlofsky)PA 15-4, June 2015 Special Session—HB 7103
Emergency Certification
AN ACT CONCERNING EXCESSIVE USE OF FORCE
SUMMARY: This act makes a number of changes in law enforcement agencies' (1) use of body cameras, (2) use-of-force investigations, (3) hiring practices, and (4) liability in certain lawsuits.
Beginning July 1, 2016, the act requires sworn officers of the State Police, public university police departments, and municipal police departments receiving certain state grants under the act to use body-worn recording equipment (body cameras) while interacting with the public in their law enforcement capacity. By January 1, 2016, the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP) and Police Officer Standards and Training Council (POST) (see BACKGROUND) must jointly create a list of minimal technical specifications for body cameras and digital data storage devices or services. The act prohibits officers from recording certain activities with body cameras, allows agencies to withhold certain images from disclosure to the public, and requires DESPP and POST to develop guidelines on equipment use and data retention.
The act expands reporting and investigation requirements when police use force by:
1. expanding the circumstances when the Division of Criminal Justice must investigate a death involving a peace officer (see BACKGROUND) to include cases involving any use of physical force, not just deadly force; 2. requiring, rather than allowing, the chief state's attorney to appoint a prosecutor from a judicial district other than the one where the incident occurred or a special prosecutor to conduct those investigations; and 3. requiring law enforcement units to record information about incidents in which a police officer discharges a firearm or uses physical force that is likely to cause serious physical injury or death.
With regard to hiring practices, the act:
1. requires law enforcement units, by January 1, 2016, to develop and implement guidelines to recruit, retain, and promote minority police officers; 2. requires units serving communities with a relatively high concentration of minority residents to make efforts to recruit, retain, and promote minority officers so that the unit's racial and ethnic diversity is representative of the community; 3. prohibits a unit from hiring an officer who (a) was previously dismissed from a unit for malfeasance or serious misconduct or (b) resigned or retired during an investigation for such conduct; and 4. requires a unit to inform another unit about an officer's dismissal, resignation, or retirement under these circumstances if it knows the officer is applying for a position as a police officer with the other unit.
Finally, with some exceptions, the act makes a peace officer's employer liable in a court or other proceeding if the officer interferes with someone taking a photo or digital still or video image of the officer or another officer performing his or her duties.
EFFECTIVE DATE: October 1, 2015 except the provisions on (1) police body camera use are effective upon passage and (2) grants for body camera purchases are effective January 1, 2016.
§ 1—TRAINING REQUIREMENTS
The act requires police basic and review training programs conducted or administered by the State Police, POST, and municipal police departments to include training on (1) using physical force; (2) using body cameras and retaining the records they create; and (3) cultural competency, sensitivity, and bias-free policing.
§§ 2 & 3 — MINORITY POLICE OFFICER HIRING AND PROMOTION
Guidelines
By January 1, 2016, the act requires law enforcement units to develop and implement guidelines to recruit, retain, and promote minority police officers. It requires each unit's guidelines to promote the goal of achieving racial, gender, and ethnic diversity in the unit.
The act applies to state, municipal, or other government entities whose primary function includes enforcing criminal or traffic laws; preserving public order; protecting life and property; or preventing, detecting, or investigating crime. It also applies to the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes' police departments.
Under the act, police officers include sworn members of organized local police departments, appointed constables who perform criminal law enforcement duties, special policemen appointed for state property or utility or transportation companies or to investigate public assistance fraud, and any member of a law enforcement unit who performs police duties.
Communities with High Concentration of Minority Residents
The act requires units serving communities with a relatively high concentration of minority residents to make efforts to recruit, retain, and promote minority officers so that the unit's racial and ethnic diversity is representative of the community. For these purposes, a “minority” is an individual whose race is other than white or whose ethnicity is defined as Hispanic or Latino by the federal government for use by the U. S. Census Bureau. The efforts may include, among other things, community outreach and attracting young people from the community to law enforcement careers through:
1. establishing police athletic leagues in which officers support young people through mentoring, sports, education, and positive relationships;
2. implementing explorer programs and cadet units; and
3. supporting public safety academies.
Efforts may also include instituting policies that require filling a vacancy by hiring or promoting a minority candidate if his or her qualifications exceed or equal those of other candidates when ranked on a promotion or examination list.
§ 4 — USE-OF-FORCE INVESTIGATIONS
The act expands when the Division of Criminal Justice must investigate a death involving a peace officer. Prior law required the division to investigate when a peace officer, in the performance of his or her duties, used deadly physical force on someone and that person died. “Deadly physical force” is physical force that can be reasonably expected to cause death or serious physical injury (CGS § 53a-3(5)). The act requires an investigation when the officer uses any type of physical force and death results.
The act also requires the chief state's attorney, for purposes of these investigations, to either designate a prosecutor from a judicial district other than the one where the incident occurred or appoint a special assistant state's attorney or special deputy assistant state's attorney. (These attorneys are temporarily appointed under a contract. ) Prior law gave the chief state's attorney the option to appoint one of these individuals to conduct the investigation.
Existing division policy requires (1) an investigation into any death determined to have been caused by a police officer's use of force and (2) the chief state's attorney to assign a state's attorney from a judicial district other than the one where the incident occurred to supervise the investigation and decide whether to pursue criminal charges.
§ 5 — RECORD OF POLICE USE OF FIREARMS OR FORCE
The act requires law enforcement units to create and maintain a record about any incident in which a police officer (1) discharges a firearm except in training or when dispatching an animal or (2) uses physical force likely to cause serious physical injury or death to another person, including striking someone with a club, baton, or an open or closed hand; kicking another; or using pepper spray or an electroshock weapon on another. By law, a “serious physical injury” is one that creates a substantial risk of death or causes serious disfigurement, impairment of health, or loss or impairment of an organ's function (CGS § 53a-3(4)).
The act requires the record to include the police officer's name, the incident's time and place, a description of the incident, and the names of any known victims and witnesses present at the incident. These provisions apply to the same law enforcement units and officers as described above in the provisions on minority hiring.
§ 6 — HIRING AND OFFICER MISCONDUCT
The act prohibits a law enforcement unit from hiring a police officer who was in previous employment with the unit or in another jurisdiction and (1) was dismissed for malfeasance or serious misconduct calling into question his or her fitness to serve as an officer or (2) resigned or retired during an investigation for such conduct.
It also requires a law enforcement unit to inform another unit about a former officer's dismissal, resignation, or retirement under the circumstances described above if it knows the officer is applying for a position as a police officer with the other unit.
Under the act:
1. “malfeasance” has its common meaning and
2. “serious misconduct” means an officer's improper or illegal actions connected with official duties that could cause a miscarriage of justice or discrimination, such as a felony conviction, evidence fabrication, repeated use of excessive force, bribe acceptance, or fraud.
These provisions do not apply if an officer is exonerated of each allegation of malfeasance or serious misconduct.
These provisions apply to the same law enforcement units and officers as described in the above provisions on minority hiring.
§§ 7 & 8 — BODY CAMERAS
DESPP-POST List
The act requires the DESPP commissioner and POST to jointly evaluate and approve the minimal technical specifications of (1) body cameras for police officers to wear and (2) digital storage devices or services for law enforcement agencies to use to retain cameras' recorded data. By January 1, 2016, they must make the technical specifications available to law enforcement agencies. They may revise the specifications as necessary.
Grants
The act requires the Office of Policy and Management (OPM), within available resources, to administer a grant program to reimburse municipalities for purchasing body cameras and digital storage devices or services that conform to the DESPP-POST minimal technical specifications. Municipalities may apply for grants in a manner set by the OPM secretary.
The act requires grants to reimburse municipalities that purchase:
1. during FY 17, enough equipment to allow each sworn officer to have a device when interacting with the public in a law enforcement capacity, at up to 100% of the costs (for digital storage services, reimbursement is limited to the cost of services for up to one year);
2. (a) from January 1, 2012 through June 30, 2016, such equipment in an amount no greater than described above, and (b) additional body camera equipment during FY 17, if enough equipment is purchased to allow each sworn officer to have a device when interacting with the public in a law enforcement capacity, at an additional amount up to 100% of the costs; and
3. in FY 18, such equipment if the municipality was not reimbursed under the other provisions, at up to 50% of |
The satellites built in the plant will be used primarily by OneWeb for its global internet services, but satellites also will be available for other commercial satellite operators and government customers globally as early as 2018.
“We actually allow vendors to work within the facility and have their own residency,” giving the company a much tighter relationship with its vendors, which are able to test and validate pre-production components, according to Wyler.
Greg Wyler
The company, whose board includes the Virgin Group’s Sir Richard Branson and Qualcomm Executive Chairman Paul E. Jacobs, is very much grounded in the business and technology of cellular—and Wyler, who founded O3b Networks in 2007, described the company’s DNA as a mix of talent from the microprocessor, computer, cellular, battery and even solar panel industries. Satellites just happen to be the delivery mechanism.
RELATED: SoftBank CEO’s 30-year vision covers ARM, OneWeb, AI—but not Sprint
During Mobile World Congress 2017, Intelsat and OneWeb announced their merger and a new cash infusion from SoftBank. The combined entity promises to deliver a robust technology roadmap for customers in wireless, mobility and government sectors, as well as media and enterprise segments.
Of course, telecom operators are one of OneWeb’s primary customer bases, and OneWeb has designed its systems to be fully compatible and integrated with the cellular networks, including as they move to 5G.
“We designed our system so our usage of the new Ka band is totally compatible with the mobile industry’s needs,” Wyler told FierceWirelessTech. “We’re not a satellite company. We are a communications company,” which happens to have satellites in its system.
As 5G standards get hammered out, one of the first questions is: Can a satellite be part of a 5G network?
“The answer is, for OneWeb, yes,” he said. “We have tested and validated our latency” and signaling path to make sure it will operate seamlessly between the core network and the eNodeB, an element of the LTE RAN. “The core network doesn’t know it’s going over OneWeb, a microwave on the ground, fiber on the ground” or a cable. “It’s all the same to the core network. We’re just a microwave repeater that happens to be a little bit higher in elevation.”
The second question is whether the system can be easily deployed, which will be crucial in 5G.
“We will have a very simple deployment for backhaul for 5G,” he said. That is key because if an operator wants to roll out a million small cells, for instance, it’s going to be a challenge currently to feed capacity to all those cells.
OneWeb is also an option for wireless operators that want to fill in dead spots in coverage, which, despite massive infrastructure rollouts, still happen, especially in rural areas.
“There are many dark spots in the U.S.,” and OneWeb will enable coverage at an extremely low cost, which makes rollout easier and less expensive for mobile operators, he said, noting that the U.S. is certainly a market where OneWeb’s coverage will be relevant.
RELATED: OneWeb CEO: We are solving the rural connectivity problem
The unique way in which OneWeb is designing its satellites—each of which will weigh only about 150 kilograms—means it will actually be affordable, something that has been elusive for much of the satellite industry. As for the latency, which is a big deal in 5G, OneWeb’s satellites will have very high throughput, but because they’re 30 times closer to earth than GEO satellites, they'll have dramatically lower latency, according to Wyler.
OneWeb’s investor base includes Qualcomm, SoftBank, EchoStar and Intelsat—all of which have a good understanding of spectrum. But Wyler said OneWeb is so far removed from the traditional satellite industry that it’s not even part of the spectrum debates going on between the terrestrial mobile and satellite industries as part of the FCC’s Spectrum Frontiers proceeding.
While Qualcomm is an investor, it’s also been working closely with OneWeb, supplying what Wyler considers a chipset that’s truly revolutionary for the satellite industry and very much a part of how it’s going to be able to make the whole system work affordably. Wyler has said previously that the hardest part of OneWeb’s system is done by Qualcomm on the chipset side.NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has already delivered the first details of craters on the surface of Ceres as it draws closer to its historical rendezvous with the dwarf planet.
Dawn will be the first ever probe to visit a dwarf planet and has been heading for Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt, since it left its first mission objective, Vesta, in 2012.
Its new images show the dwarf planet at 27 pixels across, around three times better than the calibration images taken in early December. The pictures are still only around 80 per cent of the resolution of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 and 2004, but Dawn is about to get much closer to the dwarf world.
At the end of January, its images will surpass Hubble resolution, bringing scientists the first clues about this icy body in the asteroid belt, which some academics believe may harbor a subsurface ocean. That puts Ceres in the same bracket as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus – warm, wet planetary bodies that are potentially habitable.
" We know so much about the solar system and yet so little about dwarf planet Ceres. Now, Dawn is ready to change that, " said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“Already, the [latest] images hint at first surface structures such as craters," added Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany.
Ceres sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has an average diameter of 590 miles and is thought to be made up of a large proportion of water – though how much of that water is liquid is still in question.
The dwarf planet is Dawn’s second port of call, after it delivered over 30,000 pictures and huge amounts of data and insight into Vesta, the second most massive object in the same asteroid belt. The probe orbited the 326-mile diameter space rock from 2011 to 2012, but thanks to its ion propulsion system, still has enough juice to be the first ever spacecraft to orbit two deep-space destinations.
Ceres has offered tantalising hints about its make-up, including the presence of water vapour in its thin atmosphere and these first hints of craters on its surface.
"The team is very excited to examine the surface of Ceres in never-before-seen detail," said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We look forward to the surprises this mysterious world may bring."
For more on dwarf planets and other science and tech news, follow me on Twitter and Google +.If Mayor Rob Ford had convinced anyone the Sheppard subway expansion would be paid for with corporate cash, he shattered the illusion on Wednesday. In a morning meeting at Queen’s Park, Ford asked Premier Dalton McGuinty to give the city $650 million for Sheppard by 2014. His justification: $333 million in federal money depends on that provincial money.
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford said he did not ask for "new money" during Wednesday's meeting with Premier Dalton McGuinty. ( BERNARD WEIL / TORONTO STAR )
For a mayor who said in April that the $4.2 billion Sheppard project would not require a major government investment — “I’m not quite sure where taxpayers’ money is coming in when we’re using private money,” he said — the request represented a notable turnabout. It also provided ammunition for critics, transit experts among them, who say the project is not feasible. Under the March agreement that killed the Transit City light-rail plan, the province agreed to direct up to $650 million to the Sheppard project if it had leftover funds from the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT project, for which it is paying. Ford’s policy director, Mark Towhey, said Ottawa is willing to hand over the $333 million it promised for light rail on Sheppard under Transit City — but only if the province hands over the $650 million by 2014.
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Towhey believes McGuinty can commit now because it is already certain that the Eglinton project will come in more than $650 million under its $8.2 billion budget. McGuinty disagrees. “It’s very difficult to determine how much would exist by way of residual funds at this point in time. If anything,” he told reporters after the meeting. Vanessa Thomas, a spokesperson for Metrolinx, the provincial agency overseeing GTA transit, said the agency would know what the surplus is only after environmental approvals are finalized and contracts are awarded. “There’s no firm estimate on timing,” she said. McGuinty said he would consider Ford’s pitch. And he said he would, regardless, see if the city and province could “work hard together” to encourage Ottawa to spend the $333 million. But he pointedly noted that the federal money was intended for Transit City, which was championed by former mayor David Miller.
“New mayor, new deal,” McGuinty said. A senior official in his government put the onus for a decision on the $333 million on federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, a Conservative with whom Ford has close ties.
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“I’m sure Minister Flaherty wants to make this work for Mayor Ford,” the official said. The Sheppard expansion was originally estimated at $4.2 billion. Gordon Chong, leader of the city entity developing the business case for the line, later used $4.7 billion. Towhey said he believes, based on estimates from “industry,” that the expansion will cost “much less” than even $4 billion. He said revenue-generating tools such as tax increment financing, in which a city borrows against future tax windfalls from subway-area properties whose value increases, would raise far more than critics believe. And Ford said the Sheppard project is “definitely, definitely feasible.” Asked if it is feasible without federal or provincial funding, Ford paused, then said, “We’re going to obviously need help from all three levels, but it’s going to get off the ground and we’re going to have the Sheppard subway built.” “It’s important to taxpayers, and it was clearly stated during the election,” he said. “People voted in that area, you look at the poll results, I campaigned on the Sheppard subway and people supported my platform.” Left-leaning Councillor Joe Mihevc, a former TTC vice-chair, criticized Ford for cancelling Transit City, which would have included a light-rail line on Finch Ave., in favour of the unfunded Sheppard subway expansion he said “will never be built.” “Here we had a fully funded, fully committed plan. He’s turned that down, and now he’s going cap in hand to the provincial government,” Mihevc said. “This is a betrayal of the mayor’s initial commitment, which was that he’d get this money from the private sector. It’s interesting that he’s now at the dole of the province to fund this ill-fated project.” Ford, sensitive to the perception that he is begging for dollars, said he had not asked McGuinty for “new money” during the meeting. The McGuinty official took issue with that claim with regard to the subway. McGuinty faces a tough election battle against Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, whose party Ford supports. PC MPP Elizabeth Witmer would not be specific when asked if her party would provide the Sheppard funding if elected, saying only that it would invest $35 billion in infrastructure. With files from David Rider and Rob Ferguson
Read more about:Star Wars: Episode VIII helmer Rian Johnson is now piloting a campaign that might be described as the talent strikes back.
In March, Johnson was dragged to court by his former agent Brian Dreyfuss, who claimed entitlement to 10 percent of all commissionable projects including Star Wars. Not only is Johnson resisting the demand, he's now returning fire by seeking to have Dreyfuss disgorge past commissions from past works.
Dreyfuss began representing Johnson in 2002 as an agent at Kohner Agency and helped raise money for Johnson's first feature-length film, Brick. Four years later, Dreyfuss formed his own firm, Featured Artists Agency, and Johnson came along as a client. Up until March 2014, the two worked together as Johnson's stature in the industry rose with projects like The Brothers Bloom, Looper and several key episodes of Breaking Bad.
In 2011, though, around the time Johnson was readying the release of Looper, he had also retained Creative Artists Agency. That meant for the subsequent three years, he was paying double commissions — 10 percent each — to both CAA and FAA. In his lawsuit, Dreyfuss says CAA's engagement was the result of interference from Johnson's producing partner Ram Bergman who allegedly wanted to "marginalize" him.
Regardless of how it happened, Dreyfuss' relationship with Johnson came to an end on March 23, 2014. "I just want to pursue other opportunities," Johnson allegedly then told Dreyfuss, who is now suspicious about the timing of his termination. According to Dreyfuss, Johnson was pursuing a World War II spy film, an adaptation of acclaimed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, and perhaps most importantly, Star Wars. Dreyfuss says that in January 2014, he was contacted by LucasFilm to inquire about Johnson's interest in future film projects. Johnson allegedly waived it off, but Dreyfuss can't help but think that by "other opportunities," Johnson meant Star Wars. Dreyfuss demands a cut.
Post-termination commissions aren't unusual, but in this instance, Johnson has reacted by filing a petition to the California Labor Commissioner.
In the petition, Johnson says he fired Dreyfuss well before receiving an offer to write and direct Star Wars, and that Dreyfuss didn't play a role in him obtaining the gig, but what takes the dispute beyond the ordinary is allegations how his former agent has "circumvented guild rules and regulations on licensing requirements, maximum commissions and post-termination commissions."
According to Johnson, when Dreyfuss first began representing him, the Kohner Agency was licensed and franchised by the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America. The guilds have an agreements with the Association of Talent Agents whereby directors and writers pay no more than a 10 percent commission to agents.
Johnson, through his attorney Aaron Moss at Greenberg Glusker, says he's now come to learn that Dreyfuss has been operating as an unlicensed talent agent, and further, "unbeknownst to Johnson, when Dreyfuss left Kohner to start Featured, Featured deliberately failed to become franchised by the DGA, in order to attempt to avoid the obligations required of the ATA-DGA Agreement."
The petition asserts that Dreyfuss' representation of Johnson is governed by the ATA-DGA agreement anyway, and as such, Johnson can't be paying 20 percent in commissions. Johnson implies that the 10 percent to CAA on Star Wars and other projects is proper while the 10 percent to FAA would not be, though it's hardly clear why CAA's own commissions is free and clear from a claim of breach of agency agreement. In other words, why does CAA get priority? At the moment, Johnson seeks an order requiring Dreyfuss to disgorge his 10 percent commission for any project on which Johnson has paid more than the maximum. The director is also seeking a declaration that he is not obligated to pay his former agent any commissions on the WWII project, the Murakami project or any Star Wars film.
Johnson is also attempting to use the petition to pause Dreyfuss' lawsuit. Dreyfuss is opposing on procedural grounds as well as the existence of claims (e.g. the tortious interference allegation against Bergman) not subject to the jurisdiction of the Labor Commissioner.
Randy Merritt, attorney for Dreyfuss, tells THR that it's typical for talent agencies to be licensed, but not talent agents themselves. He says that Dreyfuss' Featured Artists Agency is certainly licensed.Advertisement
Keeping on top of everything — from your to-do lists and finances, to the articles you read, and the ideas you have — can be a nightmare. All these things will often be found in different documents, or saved to entirely different apps. By default, they become too arduous to keep on top of, and quickly become outdated.
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Within OneNote, you can set up different notebooks for entirely different parts of your life. Within each notebook, you can set up tabs, and within those tabs, you can store individual notes. These can easily be searched based on tags and keywords.
This structure makes for a logical way to organize potentially thousands of notes within a single app, in much the same ways as you would organize a ring binder.
Exactly how you organize these notes is entirely up to you. It’s what you store in those notes that’s important.
2. A To-Do List That Works
You could choose from a number of powerful to-do list apps To-Do List App Showdown: Any.do vs Todoist vs Wunderlist To-Do List App Showdown: Any.do vs Todoist vs Wunderlist Some to-do list apps stand head and shoulders above the rest. But how do they compare and which one is best for you? We'll help you find out. Read More, but OneNote can also double up as a respectable choice.
This could simply be a master to-do list, with a long string of things you need to do. But a more useful option would be to set up something like you can see above. This is a “Kaizen” setup, where you aim to move your tasks from left to right depending on their current status. You can easily add a new table for each project you’re working on, and drag and drop these wherever you like.
I’ve also included a check-box shopping list, which is another way you can organize lists in OneNote. This could be set up as a separate note, and then shared with your partner, so they can also add to the list as necessary.
3. Tracking Your Fitness
If you track any aspect of your health, this can usually be replicated in OneNote. If you want to keep things simple, you can create a new notebook for each aspect of health and fitness you want to track, then create a basic table to track what’s important.
Alternatively, if you’re using the Windows version of OneNote, you are able to import an existing Excel spreadsheet into OneNote. This means you could find a fitness tracking Excel template 10 Excel Templates To Track Your Health and Fitness 10 Excel Templates To Track Your Health and Fitness Read More and use this within OneNote instead of needing to use Excel. Note that any changes you make to the spreadsheet in OneNote will not be saved to the Excel file, or vice versa.
4. Project Management
If the simple Kaizen to-do list setup isn’t enough to help you manage your projects, OneNote can be used as a full project management tool How to Use Microsoft OneNote for Project Management How to Use Microsoft OneNote for Project Management OneNote is the ideal collaboration tool for managing simple projects in small teams. And it's completely free. See how OneNote can help your projects take off! Read More too.
Depending on the complexity of your projects, you may want to set up a new notebook for each one. Within these notebooks, you can add detailed to-do lists in OneNote 6 Tips for Using OneNote as Your To-Do List 6 Tips for Using OneNote as Your To-Do List These tips show how easy it is to set up your to-do list in OneNote and enjoy the advantages as compared to pen and paper. Read More, track emails, share information, create a team wiki, and record meeting notes. You can then share all or part of this notebook with your team members. If you want a step-by-step guide to all of this, the video below will help.
If many of your projects are quite similar, you can also create OneNote templates How to Use OneNote Templates to Be More Organized How to Use OneNote Templates to Be More Organized OneNote is a great way to keep your thoughts organized, and templates can make that process even easier. Learn how to use, edit and create your own templates with this guide. Read More to make starting a new project extremely easy.
5. Managing Your Finances
The easiest way to track your finances in OneNote is to import a suitable Excel finance spreadsheet into your notebook and keep this up to date within the app.
If you’re a Mac user, you’ll need to create your own, simple table to combat those pesky Mac-user restrictions.
As well as this, a very useful feature here is the ability to store all of your receipts in OneNote. Download the OneNote app to your smartphone, and start taking snaps of each of your receipts. Be sure to send these to a dedicated section of OneNote. The OCR feature within the app makes each of these receipts readable, so you can search for dates or items, instead of sifting through huge piles of fading pieces of paper.
6. Goal Setting
A seemingly popular way to organize goals in OneNote is to create a new tab titled “Goals”, then create a new page for each goal. This page will then be home to everything you need to progress.
On this single page, you can create schedules, list your action items, store research (this is made a lot easier if you use OneNote’s Web Clipper), jot down notes, and keep a record of your progress. Having all of this relevant information in one place understandably helps to keep you extra-focused.
7. Daily Journal
Journaling has been shown Start this Simple Habit to Rocket Your Productivity: Journaling Start this Simple Habit to Rocket Your Productivity: Journaling Journaling is an underrated career tool and a core habit of many successful people. From increasing productivity, to maintaining accountability, we explore why you should consider introducing journaling as a productivity tool into your workday. Read More to help improve productivity and reduce stress. Naturally, there are tons of ways you can start a journal, whether that’s a bullet journal in Evernote How to Use Evernote as a Bullet Journal How to Use Evernote as a Bullet Journal There are many ways to use calendars and to-do apps. Take Evernote, a journaling system called the Bullet Journal, and no coding experience whatsoever, to create a completely tailored organization system for yourself. Read More, or a video journal on Snapchat Could Snapchat Be the Best Way to Keep a Private Journal? Could Snapchat Be the Best Way to Keep a Private Journal? Thanks to a new feature called Snapchat Memories, the social media sharing app could be the best kind of private journal. If you've never found a reason to use Snapchat, this might be it. Read More. OneNote is just another option to add to that list, where you can create a single note to keep adding to regularly.
Gratitude — List one thing you’re grateful for.
— List one thing you’re grateful for. Intention — How do you want to be today? Focused? Spontaneous? Light?
— How do you want to be today? Focused? Spontaneous? Light? Priorities — What are the 3 most important things you want to do today?
— What are the 3 most important things you want to do today? Progress — What progress, however small, have you already made towards your goals?
— What progress, however small, have you already made towards your goals? Opportunity — Every day can be an opportunity: What’s yours today?
— Every day can be an opportunity: What’s yours today? Request — Ask for what you need, from yourself, your family, and the universe!
The type of journal you choose to start is up to you. This could be a gratitude journal, weekly overviews, daily snapshots, random reflections. The list goes on.
Whichever you choose, creating a quick journal template is easy. The template above was written by one of our own writers in his article looking at seven different types of journals you can keep How to Jumpstart a Journaling Habit with 7 Simple Templates How to Jumpstart a Journaling Habit with 7 Simple Templates If you have a journaling template, you have a big advantage: you don't have to figure out what to write! Templates are time-savers and they also reduce the friction of starting. Read More.
This could be used simply as a way for you to clear your mind of distractions each morning, or to look back on to relive special memories.
8. Master Lists
If you’re the kind of person who loves to keep lists, you probably have a huge list of movies you want to watch, books you want to read 35 Classic Novels You Can Read for Free on Your Kindle 35 Classic Novels You Can Read for Free on Your Kindle There's a treasure trove of free, out-of-copyright books available on Amazon.com to download to your Kindle right now. Here are our recommendations for classic novels you should be reading... Read More, and bands you want to listen to. Instead of having these scattered around your hard drive, why not import them into OneNote?
This should be as easy as copy/pasting them into a single note, and maybe adding a check box next to each one. This allows you to see all your lists in one place. If you need to store more information, you might want to separate each of these master lists into different notes.
9. Your Content Repository
The amount of content we consume these days is astounding. Not surprisingly, we forget most of what we’ve consumed How to Easily Organize & Remember All the Life Hack Tips You Read How to Easily Organize & Remember All the Life Hack Tips You Read We forget things if we don't repeat them. That's bad news for the endless words of wisdom we read every day. The good news is that forgetfulness can be beaten. Read More. To help with this, there are some useful OneNote integrations you can use to keep track of all that content.
To set any of these up, you’ll need a free IFTTT account. As a few examples of what you’ll be able to do, you can:
For any other content you come across online, simply use OneNote’s Web Clipper to save these directly to a specific notebook. If you wanted to, you could even turn OneNote into your own RSS reader.
As you can see, it won’t take long until you have an impressive library of interesting content you can turn back to and search whenever you like.
10. Social Media Photo Backups
If you’re paranoid about losing any photos on your social media accounts, you can back these up to OneNote, again by using IFTTT.
For example, you can have all of your Instagram photos saved to OneNote, and even have all photos of you on Facebook saved to one of your notes.
11. Simplify Life with Checklists
If there are certain things you’re constantly forgetting, sometimes it can help to create processes or a series of checklists for these to make each step easier in future.
This could be a list of things to pack for a vacation, to leave for the babysitter, to host a party, etc. Keep these in a single OneNote tab, and they’re always just a few clicks away so you can rest more easily.
12. Brainstorming and Note Taking
And finally, you’ll want to use OneNote for what it was actually designed for: Note taking and brainstorming.
By now, you’ll probably be able to see most of what OneNote is capable of. When you’re taking notes, you can insert screenshots, lists, text, tables, and images. You can even insert drawing elements like lines and arrows, which can make brainstorming a lot more visual. Each of these notes can then be organized however you see fit.
A Base for Everything
Storing all of this information and keeping it organized is all straightforward in OneNote. As shown, the amount of things you can actually keep track of within the app pretty much means you can run a large chunk of your life from one place.
By using some of the ideas above, you could easily go a lot further. You could keep a list of contacts, a gallery of business cards, a list of online subscriptions. Basically anything to want to empty from your mind can be dumped into OneNote for you to access at a time that’s convenient to you.
And for many of the apps that you don’t want to say goodbye to, OneNote might even be able to integrate with these to make those processes even simpler.
What else would you like to be able to store in OneNote?Ms. Ann Druyan is an author, writer and television producer. She was co-writer, along with her late husband Carl Sagan, of the Emmy and Peabody Award winning television series COSMOS, and served as creative director of the NASA project to design a complex message consisting of music, images and ideas for possible alien civilizations that was placed aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 interstellar spacecraft. She also wrote and produced the PBS NOVA episode "Confession of a Weaponeer," on the life of president Eisenhower's science advisor, George Kistiakowsky. More recently Ms. Druyan was the CO-writer and CO-producer of the movie "Contact", based on the novel by Carl Sagan by the same name.
Ms. Druyan is the author or co-author of several books, including Comet, and, most recently, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Reader's Digest, Parade, Discover, Explorers Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post. Ms. Druyan is the CEO of Cosmos Studies, Inc., who, is currently working on a new COSMOS series with Seth McFarlane and Steven Soter for Fox Television.
She previously was a director with New York Children's Health Fund, a project that provides mobile pediatric care to homeless and disadvantaged children in more than half-a dozen cities.Saif al-Islam Gaddafi says ICC charges over the shooting of Benghazi protesters may be dropped in return for secret peace deal
The son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has claimed that Nato has offered the regime an "under the table" deal that would see the international arrest warrants against both men dropped.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi vehemently denied that he or his father ordered the killing of civilian protesters, as charged this week by the international criminal court (ICC).
In his first interview since the charges were brought, Saif alleged that western powers had proposed sacrificing the independence of the ICC to negotiate an end to Libya's civil war.
"It's a fake court," he told Russian news channel RT in an interview released on Friday. "Under the table they are trying to negotiate with us a deal: 'If you accept this deal, we will take care of the court.' What does it mean? It means the court is controlled by those countries which are attacking us every day. It is just to put a psychological and political pressure on us."
Documents from the ICC outline multiple incidents in which the tribunal prosecutors allege government troops fired on civilian protesters during anti-Gaddafi street demonstrations earlier this year.
Saif, 39, wearing a thick beard, insisted that neither he nor his father were responsible. "This court is a Mickey Mouse court," he said. "Come on, they accuse me of killing people. Everybody knows, even the rebels themselves, they can't accuse me of using force because I'm not in the army, I'm not in the government, so for me to be responsible for killing people, it was a big joke.
"Second joke – the people who died at the beginning, 159 – most of the people died when they attacked a military site and this would happen anywhere in the world – in Russia, in America, in France, in Germany and Italy. If people in the street move towards a military site trying to steal ammunition or arms, the military will prevent that, and this is what happened in Benghazi."
On Monday, the tribunal at The Hague issued arrest warrants against Gaddafi, Saif and intelligence chief Abdullah al-Sanoussi. The three are accused of orchestrating the killing, injuring, arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of civilians during the first 12 days of the uprising and for trying to cover up their alleged crimes.
Asked by the Russian state-funded network who did order the brutal crackdown, Saif replied: "Nobody ordered, nobody. The guards fired – that's it. The guards were surprised by the attack of the people and they started firing. They don't need an order to defend themselves and to defend their barracks and their camps."
Saif, who studied at the London School of Economics, had once been viewed as a reformer by the west and was being groomed as a possible successor to his father.
He accused Nato and the rebels of being in a "hurry" to finish the conflict, and warned that the government is ready to wait them out.
"They want to finish as soon as possible because they are hungry, they are tired, they want to share the cake," he said. "For them Libya is like fast food, like McDonald's, fast. Because everything should be fast: fast war, fast airplanes, fast bullets, fast victory.
"But we are very patient because we are in our country. We live here, we die here, so we are very patient. We may win tomorrow, in one week or in one year, but one day we'll win. One day the French will go back to Corsica in France, the Italians will go back to Sicily in Italy, the Danish will go back to Denmark, the Canadians will go back to Toronto and Libya will go back to the Libyans."
Saif's reaction to the ICC charges was dismissed by underground activists in Tripoli. A man using the name Niz, who belongs to a group known as the Free Generation Movement, said: "There is no one who does anything without the desire and wish of Colonel Gaddafi. Any atrocity in the last five months or in the last 42 years is directly associated with an order issued in one way or another by Colonel Gaddafi."
On Friday, rebels were pulling back from their positions outside the strategic town of Bir al-Ghanam, 50 miles south of Tripoli, after coming under rocket attack, Reuters reported.
A rebel spokesman, Gomaa Ibrahim, said a colonel in Gaddafi's army had defected to the rebel side. The officer, Mohammed al-Rajbani, had served as a local commander in the Libyan military and recently joined rebels in Libya's western mountains, Ibrahim told the Associated Press.David Robert Mitchell’s superb indie horror It Follows has made a splash at festivals all over the world and is finally hitting the UK on Friday. The film stars The Guest‘s Maika Monroe as Jay, who is given the curse of being followed by a relentless, unstoppable presence. If it catches her, she’s dead.
We spoke to Monroe about what makes It Follows unique, her favourite horror movies and how she feels about the “Scream Queen” label.
What drew you to It Follows?
Well, I had read the script and was, to be honest, a little confused as to how this would come across on film and into a movie. So I put myself on tape, sent it in and David gave me a call after watching the tape and explained where this idea came from and it was this nightmare as a kid, this consistent thing following him and he wanted to turn it into a movie. And I thought that was really cool; any time a project is really close to somebody I find it more interesting.
It is this strange blend of ’80s horror while being set in the present day…
To be honest the first time I saw it was at Cannes, and I really had no idea that it was going to come together like it did. I didn’t know the music, I had a little bit of an idea because of the wardrobe that it was kind of like this timeless, kind of confused in this in between land, but I really had no idea once it all came together, the kind of ’80s slasher vibe. So I was a bit surprised.
What was it about the character of Jay that appealed to you?
I thought it was very interesting, the character’s journey, she starts off a very normal girl and then thrown into this insane situation and kind of comes out as the hero which probably would never have happened if these events didn’t occur. To see how someone deals with something and watching her story and the emotional side of it, I saw it as a bit of a challenge. And especially portraying this kind of character as very real in such a crazy situation, and I found intrigue in that.
The STD-horror angle is interesting but there’s a lot more to the film than that hook…
Yeah! It’s so funny, people always ask “Can you explain the film?” and I don’t even really know where to begin because it kind of crosses genres. It’s so complicated to explain but there’s something so…reading the script, you don’t read something like that often. Something so different and unique and yet in a genre that can be, I find some horror films very similar, you know, and when you watch It Follows it challenges things and it’s got this elegance to it and this simplicity that is, I think, refreshing.
Jay obviously gets put through a lot during the course of the film; was it a demanding shoot?
Oh yes! It was so exhausting, by the end of |
players requesting (tele-)port services to other areas.
None of that, though, was why I headed into the area in the first place. I wanted to kill things! And get loot, of course.
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A player responded that yes, they were indeed killing orcs, and I quickly found myself in a party. Along the side of my screen now was a list of a few names, with health and mana bars accompanying them. It was all new stuff to me back then.
But I was still lost. I must’ve said something like, “Hey, I’ve never been here before. Where do I go?” and was then lead to an open area, with a few tents, and dead orcs strewn about. Naturally, I joined in the fun.
Unsuspecting orcs enjoying their final moments around a fire.
And that’s pretty much a summary of EverQuest, and every new area I went into: getting lost, asking for help, joining a party, and progressing through Norrath. It’d take me on twenty minute boat rides across the sea, daring dashes across dangerous lands, and perilous adventures.
But it’s important to realize that the game told me none of this: it was all the players around me who facilitated every action in the game. From finding vendors to slaying orcs, everything was directed to me by those players around me. Not by menus, or pop up tutorials, or by Google; just by the players themselves.
The game completely depended on those players for it to function, and it was all completely forced. With no computerized hand to guide you, you’re left to those fellow players inhabiting the same virtual world.
And that’s really where the power of the game came from. That’s why I remember it after all these years. If it was, what one can call, a “solo” MMO, like the ever popular games of the modern day, I would have few memories of it. Think of it this way: how much of questing alone in World of Warcraft do you remember? I’ll answer that for you: practically none of it.
And some critics have the gall to decry forced social interaction! Well, they’re not completely wrong. But it’s not the forced social interaction that’s a problem: it’s a systemic issue with the kind of games that are being played, and how they’re presented.
Pop up tutorials, disembodied voices, and Google all play a part in introducing players to massively online worlds. And the games are designed for that, and around that, and are in essence, about holding the hand of the player and leading them through the world.
So here we are, with World of Warcraft still the king of MMOs. We’ve all played it for hundreds of hours, and can hardly remember any of those. Meanwhile, EverQuest, played around 1999 and the early 2000s, is mostly forgotten, yet strikes me as one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played.
EverQuest had it right: let the guiding hand be that of the players around you, and let it drive the experience forward through a world designed to force players to work together. And so it was.Telegraph notes mystery German gold withdrawal and GATA's clamor about it
Submitted by cpowell on 10:47PM ET Wednesday, October 24, 2012. Section: Daily Dispatches
Bundesbank Slashed London Gold Holdings in Mystery Move
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Telegraph, London
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9631962/Bundesbank-sl...
Germany withdrew two-thirds of its vast holdings of gold from Bank of England vaults shortly after the launch of the euro more than a decade ago, according to a confidential report that emerged on Wednesday.
The revelation came as Germany's budget watchdog demanded an on-site probe of the country's remaining gold reserves in London, Paris, and New York to verify whether the metal really exists.
The country has 3,396 tons of gold worth E143 billion (E116 billion), the world's second-largest holding after the United States. Nearly all of it was shifted to vaults abroad during the Cold War in case of a Soviet attack.
Roughly 66 percent is held at the New York Federal Reserve, 21 percent at the Bank of England, and 8 percent at the Bank of France. The German Court of Auditors told legislators in a redacted report that the gold had "never been verified physically" and ordered the Bundesbank to secure access to the storage sites.
The report called for repatriation of 150 tons over the next three years to test the quality and weight of the gold bars. It said Frankfurt has no register of numbered gold bars.
The report also claimed that the Bundesbank had slashed its holdings in London from 1,440 tons to 500 tons in 2000 and 2001, allegedly because storage costs were too high. The metal was flown to Frankfurt by air freight.
The revelation has baffled gold veterans. The shift came as the euro was at its weakest, slumping to $0.84 against the dollar. But it also came as the Bank of England was selling off most of Britain's gold reserves -- at market lows -- on orders from Gordon Brown.
Peter Hambro, chair of the UK-listed gold miner Petropavlovsk, said the Bundesbank may have withdrawn its bullion in self-protection since it did not, apparently, have its own specifically allocated bars in London. "They may have decided that the Bank of England had lent out too much gold and decided it was safer to bring theirs home. This is about the identification. Can you identify your own allocated gold, or are you just a general creditor with a metal account?"
The watchdog report follows claims by the German civic campaign group "Bring Back Our Gold" and its US allies in the Gold Anti-Trust Committee that official data cannot be trusted. They allege central banks have loaned out or "sold short" much of their gold.
The refrain has been picked up by German legislators. "All the gold must come home: It is precisely in this crisis that we need certainty over our gold reserves," said Heinz-Peter Haustein from the Free Democrats.
The Bundesbank said it had full trust in the "integrity and independence" of its custodians, and is given detailed accounts each year. Yet it hinted at further steps to secure its reserves. "This could also involve relocating part of the holdings," it said.SSA rejuvenates boksto 6 UNESCO heritage site in vilnius, lithuania
characterized by baroque and gothic buildings, the UNESCO world heritage site ‘boksto 6’ sits in a privileged location overlooking the historic center of vilnius, lithuania’s capital city. despite its beauty, the mixed-use complex has sat vacant for nearly twenty years, until london-based studio seilern architects developed an extensive plan of renovation.
mirrored façade
the architectural concept created acknowledges and emphasizes, rather than masks, the structures’ rich history. preservation was placed at the forefront, and any new constructions were carefully-considered in relation to the site’s archival fabric. the scheme incorporates, in addition to a total restoration, a performing arts space, jazz bar and restaurant, spa facilities, landscaped green areas, and accommodations for residential and business-related purposes.
interior park area
proposed elements reinforce the unity and balance of ‘boksto 6’ as a cohesive complex, and are strikingly distinct from original infrastructure. the overt contemporary qualities of insertions aim to evoke, not replicate the site’s history, by clear contrast. studio seilern architects’ ‘boksto 6’ is a rejuvenating effort that establishes a renewed sense of place for a derelict, but stunning historical location.
dining terrace
eatery interior
restaurant courtyard in the evening
interior
roofing prototype
building
construction site
site plan
section
designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.
edited by: nick brink | designboomby Erik Altieri, NORML Executive Director
In a Statement of Administration Policy, released today, President Obama’s administration took a firm stance against recent efforts by Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) to restrict the District of Columbia from using any of its funds towards reducing the penalties for, or legalizing, marijuana for recreational use.
The memo states that “the Administration strongly opposes the language in the bill preventing the District from using its own local funds to carry out locally- passed marijuana policies, which again undermines the principles of States rights and of District home rule. Furthermore, the language poses legal challenges to the Metropolitan Police Department’s enforcement of all marijuana laws currently in force in the District.”
“It is encouraging to see the White House stand up for DC’s right to pursue the reformation of their marijuana laws,” stated NORML Communications Director Erik Altieri, “Prohibition is a failed policy and we are pleased to see President Barack Obama beginning to act in accordance with the view of an overwhelming majority of Americans that states and localities should be free to pursue new approaches to marijuana, free from federal incursion.”
You can read the full text of the memo here.
You can click here to quickly and easily contact your elected officials and encourage them to oppose this amendment.Hello my lovelies.
I’ve been a long time fan of AVFM as well as a teacher; with my recent suspension from answering questions on Quora, and the departure of Emily “Dear Prudence” Yoffe from Slate in favor of a younger model, I feel like it is time for me to bring my counselling efforts to the fore in a place where feminism does not hold sway. You can still ask me to answer questions on Quora but I may not be allowed to answer there, so AVFM permitting, I’ll try to answer them here in future columns if I can.
Oh, and the limericks? Just skip over them if you find them annoying. I still write them because they capture a playfulness and risqué vibe that feminists wish to destroy in society so that ladies nary take offence.
Let’s get to it, then.
Dear Anne Claude –
Do women tend to find receiving sympathy more emotionally soothing than men do, and if so, what is the reason for this? I’ve noticed that it seems to be more common for women to bring up the topic of how they were mistreated in the past and had a lot of disturbing stuff happen to them. I wonder if this is because they have more trouble getting over it, or because they thrive off of the sympathy they receive in a way that men usually don’t.
Signed, Hugs from Quora
Dear Hugs,
I feel that both men and women can find sympathy to be soothing but men face gendered social approbation in situations where sympathy is offered to them that simply does not happen to women. Women find emotional support when they display weakness, and men find contempt when they admit to weakness. This double standard makes it seem that women embrace victimhood while men seek to get past it as soon as possible.
This leads to an impossible choice: to bring about gender equality, should we toughen up women, or soften men?
For example, consider shelters for victims of domestic violence. 99% of domestic violence shelters cater to women only and reject men as clients, even though both men and women experience domestic violence is roughly equal amounts. This exclusion of male victims from support is because men are expected to “man up” to adversity, whereas a “damsel in distress” gets first priority from both men and women. Feminists openly laugh at the idea that men can be victims of women, and because feminists hold all men responsible for “patriarchy,” they carry a strong and invincible contempt for men and believe that men deserve whatever misfortune befalls them.
Even on those rare occasions when feminists speak to men’s issues, as Emma Watson did in her “HeForShe” speech to the United Nations, no promise is made to men that their issues will be addressed. Indeed, both the “HeForShe” label and their on-line pledge promise to fight only for women’s issues, and ignore men’s completely.
A ddffy young witch out of Hogwarts,
Tried getting her hands on some men’s shorts,
“I’ll give blokes a mention
And pretend to attention,
When they pledge, I’ll have them to extort!”
Dear Anne Claude –
What do feminists think is the cause of the high divorce rate?
Signed, Responsible Adult from Quora
Dear RAQ,
All feminists (99.9% or more) believe that “patriarchy” (rule of the fathers) is the cause of all the negative things in the world, so, if the feminist in question sees divorce as a bad thing, the odds are close to one hundred percent that she will blame “patriarchy” as a proxy for blaming men – in this case, for divorce, despite the fact that 2/3 of the people who file for divorce are women. Blaming the “patriarchy” in this case is a political ploy to deflect criticism from the ways that feminism has created skyrocketing levels of divorce since the rise of the 2nd wave feminism in the 1960s.
Under the myth of the patriarchy, women are never responsible for anything, or indeed, for any part of the civilization that men built for us. How could we be held responsible (or get any credit) for building society? We can’t be because we were too oppressed by men to help! Feminists systematically sanitize history of all references to women’s contributions because acknowledging the importance of women’s and men’s partnerships interferes with the feminist narrative that all women have been oppressed by men (patriarchy) throughout all time.
Because feminists recognize that male-female partnerships like marriage spoil their narrative, not all feminists see divorce as a bad thing. Feminists place women’s conveniences ahead of the welfare of both children and husbands, so the fanciful joys of “freeing” a woman from marriage via divorce or spinsterhood take priority over the well-established deleterious effect divorce has on husbands’ lives and children’s futures. Our prisons are crammed full of people who were raised by single mothers but since most of these prisoners are minority men, it is acceptable to dispose of their lives so that women are allowed to shirk parental and marital responsibilities that used to be a marker of adulthood. You can see an example of this feminist attitude in the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman,” in which feminists portrayed their contempt for minority men who dare to greet them in public.
Feminist Meghan Murphy wrote in xoJane that: It seems that if women were truly “embracing feminism,” they’d reject such an unnecessary tradition [marriage] so firmly rooted in sexist practices and ideas. While you can’t guarantee commitment or “till death do us part,” you can guarantee is that marriage, over time, has harmed women more than it’s helped them.
Murphy’s claim that a lifetime of financial and emotional support between husbands and wives is somehow harmful to women is one that I find doubtful at best, especially considering that women live longer and happier lives than men, but her notion does explain why feminists are so blasé about divorce rates.
Of course, feminism is itself the reason why you can’t guarantee commitment – “women’s liberation” from their own freely-given wedding vows and “no fault” divorce laws make it legally painless for women to ignore their pledges of sexual fidelity and yet still harvest their husbands’ money through alimony, spousal support, and child support payments that are more likely to fund a “girl’s night out” than put food in the kids’ bellies.
For such feminists, divorce is like the pain of an ear-piercing that, while momentarily unpleasant, lets you wear all sorts of stylish earrings that you can change as often as you change sexual hookups, all the while laughing at the poor patriarch you duped, who still has to send you a monthly check even though you are giving him nothing in return.
This is why about 80% of women reject “feminist” as a label – we are keenly aware of how feminism makes us look bad by denying women the right and responsibility to make and keep adult commitments, while feminists are stocking “safe spaces” for women with coloring books.
There once was a lady of Letters,
Who got rid of all of man’s fetters,
“I spend all my time,
In coloring and rhyme,
While ex-hubby works hard for his betters!”The study, which was published online Monday in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, was conducted by Dr. Reshma Jagsi, a radiation oncologist and ethicist at the University of Michigan, who had grown concerned about the practice and wanted to know more.
Dr. Jagsi said she had sat in on workshops, seminars, training sessions and department meetings that discussed how to identify good prospects for gifts, how to direct grateful patients to the development office, and how to ask them directly if they wanted to donate.
She was uncomfortable with the idea, but she also knew some patients want to donate and are grateful for guidance on how to do it. And she knew medical centers needed money now more than ever. What was the ethical way for doctors to help, she wondered? Or should they stay out of the donation business completely?
She searched the medical literature for studies on the subject and found pretty much nothing, so she decided to conduct her own research.
The issue is “extraordinarily important,” said Arthur L. Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, adding that he had never seen a paper that examined the issues as thoroughly as Dr. Jagsi’s. “Hopefully, this paper will start a long overdue discussion,” he said.WASHINGTON - National Nurses United today hailed adoption of a resolution by the AFL-CIO at its convention in St. Louis, declaring that “we will support legislation that guarantees health care as a human right through an improved Medicare for All.”
Adopted by unanimous vote, the resolution said the Medicare for all system “must guarantee everyone can get the health services they need without exclusions or financial barriers to care.” To achieve that, we will engage with all affiliate bodies and constituency groups to win... Medicare for All.
The AFL-CIO resolution subsumed a resolution brought to the convention by NNU, together with the Amalgamated Transit Union, American Postal Workers Union, Association of Flight Attendants, American Federation of Government Employees, California School Employees Association, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, United Auto Workers, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, and Utility Workers Union of America.
The proposed resolution was also sponsored by state AFL-CIO labor federations of California, Maine, South Carolina, Vermont, Massachusetts, Washington State, and a number of other local labor councils. The proposed resolution was inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All Act, which is co-sponsored by one-third of U.S. Senate Democrats
Speaking in support of the AFL-CIO resolution NNU Co-President Jean Ross, RN, noted that up to 90 percent of workers on strike across the country were on the picket lines because of health care benefit issues. "We can’t keep giving up our raises to insurance company profits,” she said.
“Every poll shows strong majority support for Medicare for all,” said Ross, including among Democrats, independents, and a plurality of Republicans, 52 percent of Trump voters who earn less than $30,000 per year support a federal guarantee of healthcare. To end the healthcare disparities that afflict our country based on race and class, we need a system of everybody in, nobody out, with a single standard of care.”
Vermont State Labor Council President Jill Charbonneau praised the work of Sen. Sanders in introducing S. 1804, and the work he has done for single payer healthcare for many years.
Yvonne Williams, representing ATU, reiterated the importance for unions and workers winning Medicare for all, to allow us in collective bargaining to focus on other critical issues “and remove a giant sledge hammer management holds over all of our heads.” Sen. Sanders campaign for Medicare for all, was “the reason ATU backed Sen. Sanders” for President in 2016, she said.
APWU’s Judy Beard noted that “today we have more people in Congress with us on this issue.” She praised Rep. John Conyers for his role in sponsoring a House single payer bill, HR 676, for many years, now supported by a majority of House Democrats, as well as Sen. Sanders S 1804. “In Detroit, we have a saying, lead, follow or get out of the way. We need to replace for-profit insurance companies with a public, universal healthcare plan.”
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NNU Secretary Treasurer Martha Kuhl, RN noted how “every day at the bedside, nurses see the impacts of a private insurance-based healthcare industry that denies care and diverts resources away from patients to profits. We must guarantee healthcare as a human right. We spend more and get less than any other industrialized country; we live shorter lives and higher rates of infant and maternal deaths.”
NNU, said Kuhl, “is organizing with allies in states across the U.S., especially in California for SB 562 (a state-based single payer bill) and for S. 1804.”
IFPTE President Greg Junemann said our care “must not be based on the fine print of insurance companies, with the best care only available to the filthy rich.
“We need to pass this resolution and be on the side of all our people and be for healthcare for all,” said Erin McKee, president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO.
Sandy Falwell, RN, an NNU vice president, brought the 1,000 AFL-CIO delegates and guests to silence recounting the story of a premature child in her hospital she cared for whose parents had to get a second mortgage on their house, could not afford to maintain needed after care after taking their baby home, and ultimately had to bring him back to the hospital, tragically too late.
“As nurses, we see this every day. We see families who have insurance and can’t afford to pay for their medications and after care. Why can’t the U.S. do this?” Falwell asked.
Also speaking for the resolution were Art Pulaski, president of the California Labor Federation AFL-CIO, and Clyde Rivers of CSEA.
The AFl-CIO resolution also calls for “retaining a role for workers’ health plans, and retaining the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system as the “primary direct provider of fully integrated care to veterans.”
###"The complete focus was on academic success. There was absolutely nothing (he) had to do except school."
Mattson suggested Xie was unprepared for life in Canada and felt isolated.
"He had no emotional support, he had no one to turn to. He became more and more reliant on (Hao). He just spiralled out of control … and he felt he had no place to turn."
When Hao ended the relationship, Xie was devastated, Mattson said.
Xie, a slim man wearing glasses, a hoodie and handcuffs, took the stand briefly on Monday.
"I just want to apologize and say sorry to the victim for the injuries and damage I caused," said Xie, who has a scar on his neck from his suicide attempt.
Hao did not submit a victim impact statement. She did not want to "revisit" the crime, prosecutor Melanie Sopinka said.
Sopinka said Xie hatched a plan to kill Hao. He bought a knife, rented a car, drove from Toronto, parked on her street and waited for her to leave her house to catch a bus.
The prosecutor told Justice Gary Hearn it was only "by chance" that Xie's plan to kill Hao failed.
Sopinka said women should be able to break off a relationship without fearing for their life.
Mattson said it's wrong to "pigeonhole" this case as domestic violence.
"These people never lived together," he said, adding they did not have a sexual relationship.
Mattson said Xie showed the "ultimate remorse" by trying to kill himself. Sopinka argued the suicide attempt could have been Xie's way to avoid being held responsible for trying to kill Hao.
Mattson said Xie had an "epiphany" after losing the first knife. He decided not to kill her and, in fact, applied pressure to her wound.
"She was not left to die," Mattson said.
Sopinka said an attempted murder conviction often brings 12 years in prison. She asked for nine to 12 years, minus 18 months credit for pretrial custody.
Mattson wants two years less a day.
"I beg your honour, please give Yiyan a chance," Xie's father told Hearn.
Xie, who faces deportation when he leaves jail, will be sentenced on Dec. 3.
"This is a difficult sentencing and I want to give it some thought," Hearn said.
gpaul@therecord.com, Twitter: @GPaulRecordEven the best facilitator in the world will fail miserably if they don’t show up prepared. Anyone can succeed with enough forethought. Today’s post focuses on some recent workshop success, and the reasons why it was a success, shared with us by an MG R USH Alumna.
“Workshop success! I’m happy to share that yesterday’s SE Asia Region planning workshop went off wonderfully. My boss and VPs all commented that it was clear a lot of thought and care went into the format, sessions, and questions, all to good use.”
Workshop Success: Professional Training
If you want to get better facilitating, nothing beats immersion and practice.
“Again, I want to emphasize how useful our FAST training was. I’ve used it, shared it, and need to connect with HR to tell them how useful it was. Multiple people have caught me to say one-on-one what a great success this workshop was, and they credited how I facilitated in particular. The coaching you provided was tremendously helpful and the prep work I did really made a difference.”
Workshop Success: Balance Listening and Reflecting
Effective facilitators do not stand idly while others speak around them. They force content to go through them so they can provide reflection. Visual reflection is frequently more effective than audio reflection.
“Managing the flow of conversation (through me) was one of the more successful differences I saw in this workshop. I spent most of my time recording at the flip charts, referencing our posted agenda or objectives, or the takeaways from previous steps. I asked WHY frequently, asked for clarification of terms, and prompted for more detail at various times.”
Workshop Success: Maintaining Control
Never lose control of context. As process policeperson, your group depends on you to prevent scope creep. Keep track of progress as it relates to time and work remaining so that you can modulate meeting tempo.
“Perhaps most telling is that we did not have any conversation hijacking in this workshop! (Sally) did not dominate the conversation. (Frank) did not steer us off course. We did not find ourselves somehow on a tangent or incorrectly focused on in-the-weeds details. When such drifts started, I would remind the group of the high-level focus, take the conversation back to the objectives or the intent of a particular step, and we’d flow back on track quite well.”
Workshop Success: Do Not Facilitate Context
Never ask a group about context, such as “How do you want to make that decision.” They need you for contextual leadership, not for content. Exude confidence around the method you manage and depend on them to fill in with their content.
“One thing in particular worth sharing really stuck for me. When challenged on the agenda or sessions, was my role was clearly to provide the appropriate structure. I do not open up unwieldy options or choices to the workshop participants (such as “which countries would you like to discuss today?” as I was repeatedly asked to do!), but instead framed that in order to meet our objectives for the workshop, we needed to focus on specific areas and decisions. The scope discipline was so helpful, and I really felt the confidence in holding to that because of our training days.”
Workshop Success: Annotated Agenda
Nothing beats a solid, well-scripted annotated agenda. When done well, you should be able to pass your annotation on to someone else to facilitate. Remember, it provides the play script for what to say and do.
“Also helpful were little notes to myself throughout the day, when I would worry I was too quiet that that was actually OK if the conversation was on track and flowing well, or when I’d notice ‘ugh- I just said >I< again!’ It helped to capture responses verbatim (no need to synthesize while facilitating). It was good to be aware of things in a way that was calm and mindful, but not get flustered. My sense is that I have you to thank for your approach and feedback. It was so supportive and constructive in a way that built up my skillset. It didn’t introduce securities or sensitivities around ways to be even stronger. Thank you for that!
Workshop Success: Alumni Resources
Don’t forget the value of the nearly one thousand files and documents you can download with your alumni password. If you lost yours, simply write us for an update.
“I also wanted to pass along the materials used. Your feedback about simple but impactful changes in the presentation–colors, aligning the coding, etc., were great tips. The pages I prepared in advance used the banners and colors more consistently; those items made on the fly (like the competitor sheet) do not reflect the same care.
Workshop Success: Graphic Stimulation
We are confident you remember that a picture is worth a thousand words. Agile has resurrected the value of writing things down and moving them around. Don’t forget that a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures.
“The bubble chart! The attendees responded really well to creating a bubble chart of our priority countries. I posted sticky dots so we could move them around and debate their placement as a whole. The size is reflective of market, and the colors were reflective of regulatory status– emerging, developing, or mature. Good tip on the level of detail to provide in these materials. The bubble chart was easily one of the favorite visuals in the room. Working with large Post-It Notes® is a skillset I am sure will become more second nature with time and practice.”
Workshop Success: Follow the FAST Introductory Sequence
Nothing gives participants greater confidence in their facilitator than a sharp introduction. Follow the seven-step sequence we recommend, even for a one-hour meeting.
“I also wrote up the agenda and had a large arrow I moved down the sheet as we progressed. I explained during administrivia that if we needed to dig in on a topic we could, but we’d have to sacrifice time elsewhere. That was valuable during a couple steps.”
Workshop Success: Know Your Deliverable
Always keep the end in mind. Know what DONE looks like. Keep moving the group toward decisions, next steps, and clear understanding about progress made during your meeting.
“Lastly, our agenda ended the day with a very difficult topic for the leadership team. We planned to assign ownership for discrete country activities. We did not actually get to a place of assigning roles/responsibilities but instead had a much-needed, healthy, and contentious discussion. I did have a RASI breakout session planned, however could not get to that level of assignment. Will be following up with leadership this week to get some movement on those assignments, using that format. In the end, the CEO, my VP, and I enabled the group to reach high level decisions and it felt great! I’ve really benefitted from your input to date and hope to continue growing. Thank you so very much for helping me improve this talent. — LC, Country Planning & Operations Director”
Become Part of the Solution While You Improve Your Facilitation, Leadership, and Methodology Skills
MG RUSH Professional Facilitation Training provides an excellent way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 PDUs from PMI, 40 CDUs from IIBA, and 3.2 CEUs. As a member of the International Association of Facilitators (IAF), our Professional Facilitation Training aligns with IAF Certification Principles and fully prepares alumni for their Certified Professional Facilitator designation.
Furthermore, our Professional Facilitation curriculum immerses students in the responsibilities and dynamics of an effective facilitator and methodologist. Because nobody is smarter than everybody, attend an MG RUSH Professional Facilitation, Leadership, and Methodology workshop offered around the world, see MG RUSH for a current schedule.
Additionally, go to the Facilitation Training Store to access our in-house resources. Finally, you will discover numerous annotated agendas, break timers, and templates.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader.
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EmailKnights of the Kitchen Table Illustrated by Lane Smith Time Warp #1
1991 What would happen if three regular kids from Brooklyn got a mysterious blue Book with silver designs that could transport them anywhere in time or space? What if these three guys met up with King Arthur, the knights of the Round Table, Merlin the magician, one burping and gas-leaking giant, and a fire-breathing dragon? The Time Warp Trio series would happen.
The Not-So-Jolly Roger Illustrated by Lane Smith Time Warp #2
1991 Joe, Sam, and Fred accidentally warp back to the 1700s and run into Edward Teach (better known as Blackbeard the pirate). Mr. Teach lights fuses in his beard, drinks gunpowder mixed in his rum, shoots and stabs his own men, and sings very poorly. He also makes it very difficult for the Time Warp Trio to find the Book so they can warp safely back home.
The Good, The Bad, and The Goofy Illustrated by Lane Smith Time Warp #3
1992 Watching bad cowboy movies at Joe's house leads to dangerous warping into the Old West. The guys must survive a cattle stampede, angry Sioux Indian warriors, Custer's shooting bluecoats, and way too many plates of beans and bacon. Maybe the Trio will read the directions for time-warping in the Book. But probably not.
Your Mother Was a Neanderthal Illustrated by Lane Smith Time Warp #4
1993 The good news about the Stone Age is that there are no homework assignments or tests. The bad news is that there are hungry saber-toothed tigers, rampaging wooly mammoths, a tribe of cavemen who love rotten meat, and a tribe of cave women who look like they are getting ready to sacrifice the Time Warp Trio. If this book costs $14.99 in hardcover, $4.99 in paperback, and there are 3 members in a trio, would you do your math homework if you were a wooly mammoth?
2095 Illustrated by Lane Smith Time Warp #5
1995 How weird would it be to travel 100 years into the future and meet up with your own great granddaughters? Very weird, very expensive (pizza costs $150 a slice), and very dangerous (you try escaping a giant talking 3D roll of toilet paper). If the guys don't make it back to their time, there might not be any future time, or past time, or present time, or any time. It's enough to make a time warper toss their cookies, blow their lunch, and/or drive the porcelain bus.
Tut, Tut Illustrated by Lane Smith Time Warp #6
1996 If you had to do a class project on Ancient Egypt and you had a Book that could transport you anywhere in time and space and you had a kind of annoying younger sister who is always touching your stuff... TUT TUT could have happened to you. Joe, Sam, and Fred see the pyramids, meet up with King Tut when he was a boy, and get framed for stealing treasure by an evil priest named Hatsnat. Try to say that name without laughing.
Summer Reading Is Killing Me! Illustrated by Lane Smith Time Warp #7
1998 Things go horribly terribly wrong when Fred sticks the guys' summer reading list inside a certain time-and-space-bending Book. You know things are bad when a 266 pound chicken is the least of your worries. Fred's mistake has mixed up characters from all kinds of books. And not in a good way. Dracula has Winnie-the-Pooh in a headlock. A cat in a hat and a kid with a hatchet look lost. The only way to stop the evil Teddybear from ruining every book forever is... to get The Book away from him.
It's All Greek to Me Illustrated by Lane Smith Time Warp #8
1999 If you thought The Book could only get the guys in trouble warping them to different times, you should check this out. Fred gets to use an aluminum foil covered thunderbolt in a class play about Greek gods and goddesses. So of course he throws it. And of course it hits The Book. And of course the trio gets warped into Greek mythology to fight a one-eyed giant, a three-headed dog, and a hundred-headed monster. You really have to wonder why they never read the instructions.
See You Later, Gladiator Illustrated by Adam McCauley Time Warp #9
2000 Read the title of this warp, and I bet you could write it. Fred gets the guys in trouble by wrestling around in Joe's room. Sam figures out a smart way to keep them from getting killed. One of Joe's lame magic tricks actually works out okay. Lots of fighting and wrestling and weapons like spears, swords, tridents, and nets. Thumbs up, you live. Thumbs down, you die. That's why they call it "Sudden Death." Good luck.
Sam Samurai Illustrated by Adam McCauley Time Warp #10
2001 Haiku poetry gets the guys warped to 1600 Japan. And haiku poetry is the only way they can warp home... after they find The Book, battle samurai warriors with razor sharp swords, try to fix the Auto-Translator, run into their time-warping great-granddaughters, and deal with a very nasty warrior with the unfortunate name of Owattabutt.
Oh, Sam Samurai. Time Warp trio adventure, With lots of noodles.
Hey Kid, Want to Buy a Bridge? Illustrated by Adam McCauley Time Warp #11
2002 Did you know that in 1877, when the Brooklyn Bridge was just being built, Thomas Edison had a workshop in New Jersey where he was working on his inventions like the light bulbs and the record player? And did you know that Joe messing around with The Book and Sam's invention in 21st century Brooklyn almost fried Edison's brain and wrecked the Brooklyn Bridge? No? Then this is the book for you.
Viking It and Liking It Illustrated by Adam McCauley Time Warp #12
200 |
aren't I doing the same grand risk with a sketch that I'm writing for Mad TV?" Except that the sketches I was writing were so sloppy because I was so sleep-deprived from going to see movies and going out to do stand-up that I was using it as a defense for my half-assedness in writing the sketches. I was like, "Yeah, but I'm taking a risk here, why do you care where it goes? It shouldn't go anywhere, man!" And, again, it was a young guy who thought that my attitude and my boldness could take the place of actual competence and skill and work.
"I was the worst kind of movie fan. I'm the kind of guy who saw 6 movies a day, didn't write any movies, didn't make any movies, but then could be armchair quarterbacking on a movie that I had no hand in making."
On the first of two events that finally killed his addiction to movies, the release of Star Wars Episode I: Phantom Menace
It's not that it killed the addiction; it made me look at the addiction from such a different angle that it didn't hold any power over me anymore. I'll put it this way — I was the worst kind of movie fan. I'm the kind of guy who saw 6 movies a day, didn't write any movies, didn't make any movies, but then could be armchair quarterbacking on a movie that I had no hand in making.
Yes, I thought [Phantom Menace] was a failure, but the dude took a shot at it. It hit me that I was spending days and days and nights and nights with my friends, arguing back and forth about this film but this guy made a movie. Good or bad, he made a movie. He's on a different realm than you.
On the second event that dealt the death blow to his movie addiction
The New Beverly [Cinema theater] on Beverly Boulevard, that was my crack house, basically. And Sherman Torrigan, who founded it... I went to the New Beverly and bought a ticket and Sherman said, "I thought you'd be handing me a screenplay by now."
... I was basically doing the version of a guy that's shooting heroin and he's like, "I'm doing this so I can be like Lou Reed and David Bowie. I'll eventually do 'Ziggy Stardust' and Transformer..." But it's like, no! You can't do the heroin addiction first. You have to become a good musician first. And even then you shouldn't do the heroin addiction, but I'm just saying, you're doing all this backwards!
On his dream to one day direct films
Eventually I will. But when I make the leap to become a director, I have got to convince a platoon of people to make the leap with me, so that's really nerve-racking. And I'm in the process of working up to that. And hopefully, someday, someone can play back this interview, if I've made a movie, and I can go, "Oh, OK. I was at least approaching it respectfully."
It's gonna have to be me finally just closing my eyes, and hitting the gas pedal and pulling out into traffic.Don’t expect the federal Liberals or NDP to lead the battle against raising the age of sexual consent. They’re ducking for cover.
Raising the age of consent was the first change in law proposed by newly appointed Justice Minister Vic Toews last month. It’s a topic that the Harper Conservatives and their predecessors, the Canadian Alliance and Reform Party, had long made a priority, even introducing private member’s bills on the matter.
Both Liberals and NDP justice critics continue to argue against raising the age – claiming existing laws protect youth from sexual exploitation and that further criminalizing of youth sexuality would be a mistake. But they won’t commit to voting against a future Conservative bill.
Liberal Justice Critic Sue Barnes says youth are already fully protected from sexual exploitation under several laws now on the books. She points especially to Bill C-2, the so-called child-porn bill, the first law introduced by the Martin government after the 2004 election in which Stephen Harper suggested the Liberal leader was soft on child porn. Bill C-2 was strongly criticized by leading gay and civil rights groups because it made a difference in age sufficient grounds for a judge to rule that an accused was sexually exploiting a teen.
Bill C-2 is “very adequate. It enhanced protections against sexual exploitation,” says Barnes. There’s no need to raise the age of sexual consent from 14, she adds. Germany has 14. France has 15. “We’re in the same range as other countries. The reality is any sexual offence without consent is already a crime.”
The NDP, long a party that has trumpeted its support for gay equality issues, is taking a cautious approach this time.
Those who want to raise the age “have not proven to my satisfaction that it will better protect youth from sexual exploitation,” says Bill Siksay, the party’s critic for gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans issues. The law has been at 14 in Canada since the late 1900s and appears to work.
“I think if the government introduces legislation we need a thorough hearing. We need to hear from experts and young people.” Evidence from research needs to be aired.
“Lots of people in Canada are concerned about exploitation,” says Siksay. “That merits discussion. I don’t want to deny people the opportunity. And I don’t want to see any backsliding.”
Libby Davies, the NDP deputy justice critic is also being cautious.
“I think this is going to come up in Parliament and we have to seek a reasoned, intelligent debate that is objective, rather than one based on a political ideology,” she says.
Siksay appears to have a bottom line. He says he cannot support any future Conservative bill that would not include an exemption from prosecution for teens close in age. “It would also have to reduce the anal sex age of consent, Siksay adds. The Criminal Code now sets a separate age of consent for anal sex – the only body part with its own sex law. That law has been ruled discriminatory and unconstitutional in three provinces – Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.
In contrast, Liberal critic Barnes does not favour reducing the age of consent for anal sex.
“I’m very happy with where the Criminal Code is right now.” But, she says, she’s “open as the opposition critic to consulting with all communities” on the matter.
Even The Sex Party is dipping its toe in the water before taking a stand on raising the age of consent. The 250-member party ran three candidates in last year’s provincial election in BC and hopes to run federally next election, says founder John Ince, who owns a sex shop called The Art of Loving.
Ince says his members haven’t been able to find consensus on an age of consent. But like Siksay and Davies, he calls for a close look at what the research shows. And there’s one provision in the existing Criminal Code that makes him angry – singling out anal sex for a higher age of consent. That clearly discriminates against gays, he says.
“For me the litmus test is the disparity between anal sex and other sex practices. It’s clear in my mind that protection of youth is not what it’s about with that agenda, it’s something else.”
Siksay says he’s suspicious about why this issue has become a Conservative priority.
“I’m interested to see who is making the argument and why. I don’t want young people being sexually criminalized. I grew up in that kind of environment and don’t want to see it return.
“The politics of this Parliament are going to be very, very interesting. Many people are concerned about what the Conservatives will bring forward, given some of the things they’ve said in the past.”
Tom Warner says he’s not surprised that opposition Parliamentarians are diving for the bushes on the consent issue. Recent polls suggest the majority of Canadians want the age raised, and in a minority Parliament, the politicians try not to take any stands that can cost them future votes.
It’s hard to defeat a bill that’s going to be framed as protecting young people and children, no matter how wrong-headed and harmful the bill itself is, notes the longtime gay activist and member of the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario.
But queers, civil libertarians, AIDS educators, planned-parenthood groups and others who care about the genuine health and well-being of teens need to fight back against anti-sex legislation, he says. A look at who’s behind the bill shows the need for pushing back.
“It’s all being driven by the religious right as part of their campaign to recriminalize consenting sex and I suspect they’ll be very loud on these things in the next several years. Despite what’s being said, it’s an attempt to remove the right to sexual self-determination of youth.
“The idea that once someone is over a certain age, it’s automatically exploitation is just wrong. It’s certainly the experience in our community that young people are often the seekers of sexual relationships with an older person and they do not feel exploited. It’s a fundamental question of young people being able to determine for themselves their own sexual decisions.”American basketball player
Terrence James Elijah Ross (born February 5, 1991) is an American professional basketball player for the Orlando Magic of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played college basketball for the University of Washington, where he was a first-team All-Pac-12 selection before being drafted eighth overall in the 2012 NBA draft by the Toronto Raptors. As a rookie, he was crowned champion of the 2013 Slam Dunk Contest. In January 2014, he became the first player in NBA history to score 50 or more points in a game while averaging fewer than 10 points per game at the time.
High school career [ edit ]
As a freshman and sophomore, Ross attended Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon where he won the Oregon 5A Player of the Year, after leading Jefferson to the first of three consecutive state championships. As a junior in 2008–09, he attended Montrose Christian School in Rockville, Maryland where he was first-team All-Metro after averaging 13.5 points per game for the number 1 ranked Montrose. Midway through his senior year, Ross returned to Jefferson High School but could not play basketball due to transfer rules.[1]
On April 30, 2010, Ross signed a National Letter of Intent to play college basketball for the University of Washington.[2][3]
Considered a four-star recruit by ESPN.com, Ross was listed as the No. 5 small forward and the No. 30 player in the nation in 2010.[4]
College career [ edit ]
Ross dunking for Washington
In his freshman season at Washington, Ross earned honorable mention Pac-10 All-Freshman team honors after averaging 8.0 points, 2.8 rebounds and 1.0 assists in 34 games. He was also named to the Pac-10 All-Tournament team after averaging 15.3 points and 2.7 rebounds per game in the 2011 Pac-10 Tournament.[1]
In his sophomore season, Ross earned first-team All-Pac-12 honors after averaging 16.4 points, 6.4 rebounds, 1.4 assists, and 1.3 steals in 35 games. He helped Washington reach the semi-finals of the 2012 National Invitation Tournament with averages of 25.0 points and 5.5 rebounds per game.[1]
On April 1, 2012, Ross declared for the NBA draft, foregoing his final two years of college eligibility.[5]
Professional career [ edit ]
Toronto Raptors (2012–2017) [ edit ]
2012–13 season [ edit ]
On June 28, 2012, Ross was selected with the eighth overall pick in the 2012 NBA draft by the Toronto Raptors. On July 10, 2012, he signed his rookie scale contract with the Raptors.[6]
On January 2, 2013, Ross had a season-best game with 26 points and six three-pointers in a 102–79 win over the Portland Trail Blazers.[7] On February 16, 2013, Ross defeated Jeremy Evans in the 2013 Sprite Slam Dunk Contest, receiving 58% of the vote from fans worldwide in the final round.[8]
2013–14 season [ edit ]
On October 24, 2013, the Raptors exercised their third-year team option on Ross' rookie scale contract, extending the contract through the 2014–15 season.[9]
On January 25, 2014, Ross scored a career-high and franchise-tying 51 points in a 126–118 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers. He was 16-for-29 from the floor, 10-for-17 from behind the arc (his 10 three-pointers set a career high) and 9-for-10 from the free-throw line. He tied the franchise record for points in a game set by Vince Carter on February 27, 2000.[10] Ross entered the game averaging 9.3 points per game, making him the first player in NBA history to have a 50-point game while averaging under 10 points per game.[11]
2014–15 season [ edit ]
On October 13, 2014, the Raptors exercised their fourth-year team option on Ross' rookie scale contract, extending the contract through the 2015–16 season.[12] On February 4, 2015, he scored a season-high 23 points and matched a season high with five three-pointers in a loss to the Brooklyn Nets.[13][14]
2015–16 season [ edit ]
On November 2, 2015, Ross signed a three-year, $33 million contract extension with the Raptors.[15] Ross averaged just 6.3 points in 17.5 minutes over the first seven games of the season, coming off the bench in all seven. He then missed six games with a left thumb injury before returning to action on November 20, scoring eight points in a 102–91 win over the Los Angeles Lakers.[15] He made his first start of the season on December 7, also against the Lakers, scoring a season-high 22 points in place of injured starter DeMarre Carroll.[16] On February 28, 2016, he set a new season high with 27 points in a 114–101 loss to the Detroit Pistons.[17] On March 30, he scored 13 points in a 105–97 win over the Atlanta Hawks, helping the Raptors record a 50-win season for the first time in franchise history.[18] In the Raptors' regular season finale on April 13, Ross recorded his first double-double of the season with 24 points and 10 rebounds off the bench in a 103–96 win over the Brooklyn Nets.[19]
The Raptors finished the regular season as the second seed in the East with a 56–26 record. After defeating the Indiana Pacers 4–3 in the first round of the playoffs, the Raptors moved on to the second round for the first time since 2001. In Game 1 of the conference semi-finals against the Miami Heat, Ross set a career playoff high with 19 points in a 102–96 loss.[20]
2016–17 season [ edit ]
Ross attempting a lay-up against the Washington Wizards in November 2016
On November 28, 2016, Ross scored a season-high 22 points in a 122–95 win over the Philadelphia 76ers.[21] He set a new season high on December 12, scoring 25 points in a 122–100 win over the Milwaukee Bucks.[22]
Orlando Magic (2017–present) [ edit ]
On February 14, 2017, Ross was traded, along with a 2017 first-round draft pick, to the Orlando Magic in exchange for Serge Ibaka.[23] He made his debut for the Magic on February 23, 2017, recording 13 points on four of 17 shooting, which included a two for eight showing from three-point range, in a 112–103 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers.[24] Two days later, he scored a game-high 24 points in a 105–86 win over the Atlanta Hawks.[25] On April 8, 2017, he scored a season-high 29 points in a 127–112 loss to the Indiana Pacers.[26]
On November 22, 2017, Ross scored a season-high 22 points in a 124–118 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves.[27] On November 30, 2017, he was ruled out indefinitely after being diagnosed with a sprained right medial collateral ligament (MCL) and a non-displaced fracture of his right tibial plateau. He suffered the injury the night before against the Oklahoma City Thunder.[28] Ross returned to action on April 8, 2018, after missing more than four months. He scored three points in 10 minutes in the Magic's 112–101 loss to the Raptors.[29]
On February 7, 2019, Ross scored 32 points and hit six 3-pointers in a 122–112 win over the Timberwolves.[30]
Career statistics [ edit ]
Legend GP Games played GS Games started MPG Minutes per game FG% Field goal percentage 3P% 3-point field goal percentage FT% Free throw percentage RPG Rebounds per game APG Assists per game SPG Steals per game BPG Blocks per game PPG Points per game Bold Career high
NBA [ edit ]
Regular season [ edit ]
Year Team GP GS MPG FG% 3P% FT% RPG APG SPG BPG PPG 2012–13 Toronto 73 2 17.0.407.332.714 2.0.7.6.2 6.4 2013–14 Toronto 81 62 26.7.423.395.837 3.1 1.0.8.3 10.9 2014–15 Toronto 82 61 25.5.410.372.786 2.8 1.0.6.3 9.8 2015–16 Toronto 73 7 23.9.431.386.790 2.5.8.7.3 9.9 2016–17 Toronto 54 0 22.4.441.375.820 2.6.8 1.0.4 10.4 2016–17 Orlando 24 24 31.2.431.341.852 2.8 1.8 1.4.5 12.5 2017–18 Orlando 24 20 25.0.398.323.750 3.0 1.6 1.1.5 8.7 Career 411 176 23.8.421.371.798 2.6 1.0.8.3 9.6
Playoffs [ edit ]
Year Team GP GS MPG FG% 3P% FT% RPG APG SPG BPG PPG 2014 Toronto 7 7 22.6.298.167.600 2.0.3.9.4 5.0 2015 Toronto 4 4 26.8.379.333.000 1.5 1.0.8 1.0 7.0 2016 Toronto 20 0 16.8.387.328.650 1.6.6.7.3 6.3 Career 31 11 19.3.364.292.640 1.7.5.7.4 6.1
College [ edit ]
Year Team GP GS MPG FG% 3P% FT% RPG APG SPG BPG PPG 2010–11 Washington 34 4 17.4.443.352.758 2.8 1.0.6.4 8.0 2011–12 Washington 35 35 31.1.457.371.766 6.4 1.4 1.3.9 16.4 Career 69 39 24.4.453.364.764 4.7 1.2.9.7 12.3
Personal life [ edit ]
Ross is the son of Terry Ross and Marcine Parker. His father played in the defunct Continental Basketball Association and won the slam-dunk title while with the Tri-City Chinook in 1995.[31] His sister, Taelor, played college basketball for Seattle University. He also has a brother, Drew.[32]A civil engineer’s new critique of Elon Musk’s vaunted Hyperloop project exposes a number of problems with the the futuristic vessel that promises to move humans from LA to San Francisco in 35 minutes.
According to a post by civil engineer Kristen Ray that’s making the rounds on Quora, Hyperloop is a novel concept, but isn’t “even close to feasible” as a project, because of the numerous engineering concerns belying its launch.
Writing in response to Elon Musk’s heralded whitepaper on Hyperloop, published in 2013, which glossed over the gory details of the lightning quick vacuum-powered rail system, Ray methodically hammers out why the engineers have an arduous path ahead of them as Hyperloop construction begins in the coming weeks.
She writes that “the structure is so overly simplified,” noting astutely that Hyperloop is basically an enormous steel tube that lays placidly over concrete pillars:
“To maintain the tolerances needed for the speeds suggested this structure needs to be designed MUCH more carefully. It is not an easy thing to keep such a rigid structure suspended above ground for such long distances.”
Expanding on this sentiment, Ray calls into question the whitepaper’s tepid analysis of Hyperloop’s integrity amid potential seismic activity in California.
Musk's whitepaper claims Hyperloop's concrete pillars can withstand seismic activity.
Ray calls B.S. on the track’s “dampers,” which are intended to absorb seismic activity:
“Their “structural simulations” are clearly not to scale for the average span (between 20-100ft tall and average of 100ft between spans). A simple damper will not suffice for the major seismic activity potential in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas with a structure that needs to keep such exact tolerances due to the high speeds.”
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Perhaps most glaring in Ray’s findings is that the cost of Hyperloop will most likely mirror projections for the California High-Speed Rail Line that’s currently under construction. Ray says that much of the purported astronomical cost of Hyperloop will hinge on things like system communication, concrete pylons, steel tubing, and perhaps most importantly, dampers.
She writes:
“The Dumbarton Bridge in [the] SF Bay Area recently had 96 bearings installed under the road deck for a seismic retrofit. They cost $90,000 EACH. If one of these bearings was on each pylon, it would add over $2 billion. And there would probably be two bearings per pylon (one for each tube), so we’re probably at $4 billion.”
California’s High Speed Rail Line is expected to cost a whopping $68 billion. Once service begins in 2022, California’s High-Speed Rail is projected to shuttle passengers from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2 hours and 40 minutes, while Hyperloop intends to do it in 35 minutes.
Passengers will travel in pods — which are being designed right now!After rumors regarding tension and a potential solo venture for Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters have announced this evening that the band is not breaking up and that nobody is going solo.
The band took to Twitter on March 1st to schedule an announcement.
They tweeted:
Official band announcement tomorrow night. Stay tuned. — Foo Fighters (@foofighters) March 2, 2016
Coming on the heels of this ominous tweet, on March 2nd, the band released a statement via YouTube:
This comes in the wake of a report from NY Post’s Page Six that frontman Dave Grohl intends on going solo — and that the plans were not going over well with drummer Taylor Hawkins.
According to the NY Post: “The band is billing it as a ‘break,’ but it’s totally Dave going solo, and Taylor is pissed about it,” a source told us. Grohl’s Oscar performance on Sunday night was his big entrance into his solo career.”
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While news of the band’s breakup is false, we have no doubt Dave will continue to do any damn thing he wants, much the envy of rockers everywhere.Share:
KARACHI- Up to 15000 cases of separation between couples and children custody are being registered in Karachi annually. Materialism, urbanization, industrialization, democracy, female employment and media role are also included in the reasons behind divorce. This was told in a seminar at University of Karachi today.
The seminar was organized by Department of Sociology of the University. It was further told that the family system in Europe had reached at a verge of destruction. Remaining in the ambit of Islam and not breaching social norms will not only make our marital life pleasant but will also firm our family system.
Advocate Khwaja Naveed said divorce is very harmful for the society as children of the separated couples become criminals. Advocate Zia Awan said that laws were made in the country upon international pressure but implementation was always an issue. Only the existence of law is not enough for prevention of child marriage, he said.
Chairperson Women Lawyers Association Faiza Khaleel said that in most diverse cases men wanted compromise but the women sought for immediate separation which affected the future of their kids.Some criminals get caught leaving behind evidence that could come from no one else, such as their fingerprints, a few strands of hair or some type of DNA.
After Zachery Tentoni allegedly mugged a woman in Boston, he left behind his birth certificate and a letter addressed to him from his mother.
Boston police announced they'd arrested the 26-year-old for snatching the woman's wallet, which contained $40. The theft happened late Monday as she walked through a middle school playground in the Dorchester section of the city.
In the suspect's struggle to grab the wallet, he dropped two bags that he'd been carrying. They contained clothes, a pair of sneakers, hygiene products, and most importantly, the letter from Tentoni's mom and his birth certificate.
Police found the suspect at 1:35 a.m. on Tuesday, one block from where the woman was robbed. Tentoni allegedly gave police a false name and age when they questioned him, but the victim pointed to him as the culprit.
Tentoni, of Southington, Conn., was charged with unarmed robbery.Critics say home secretary’s demand for access to encrypted messaging to thwart attacks is unrealistic and disproportionate
Amber Rudd has called for the police and intelligence agencies to be given access to WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging services to thwart future terror attacks, prompting opposition politicians and civil liberties groups to say her demand was unrealistic and disproportionate.
The home secretary said it was “completely unacceptable” that the government could not read messages protected by end-to-end encryption and said she had summoned leaders of technology companies to a meeting on Thursday 30 March to discuss what to do.
Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Rudd refused to rule out passing new legislation to tackle encrypted messaging if she did not get what she wanted.
But she stressed it was her desire to persuade internet and social media companies to cooperate voluntarily with the government on this and also the posting of extremist material online.
Rudd added: “It is completely unacceptable. There should be no place for terrorists to hide.
“We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.”
She indicated that she hoped to be able to win them over without resorting to legislation.
“These people have families, have children as well,” she said. “They should be on our side, and I’m going to try to win that argument.”
Her call came after it emerged that police were investigating reports that Khalid Masood, the British extremist who killed four people outside parliament before he was shot dead, had used WhatsApp a few minutes before he launched his attack on Wednesday.
Police have said they believe Masood was essentially a “lone actor”, though counter-terrorism officers continue to search for more details about his background and associations.
It emerged on Sunday that Masood had been on the radar of the intelligence community for potential links to extremism in 2010, after he returned from teaching English in Saudi Arabia.
A 30-year-old man was arrested in Birmingham on Sunday on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts, making him the 12th person to be held over the incident. A 58-year-old man who was arrested in Birmingham on Thursday remained in police custody after his detention was extended under anti-terrorism legislation. All other people arrested in the aftermath of Masood’s attack have been released.
Critics questioned both the need for powers of the kind Rudd seemed to be demanding, and also the practicalities of trying to use UK domestic legislation to curb the activities of global internet companies largely based in the US.
Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman and a former deputy assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan police, said that giving the security services access to encrypted messages would be “neither a proportionate nor an effective response” to the Westminster attack.
“These terrorists want to destroy our freedoms and undermine our democratic society,” he said. “By implementing draconian laws that limit our civil liberties, we would be playing into their hands.
“My understanding is there are ways security services could view the content of suspected terrorists’ encrypted messages and establish who they are communicating with.”
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said the police and intelligence services already had “huge, huge powers of investigation” and questioned Rudd’s demand.
He said he thought the balance in law between the interests of security and privacy was probably about right as it is.
Why political rebels love WhatsApp Read more
Police and the security services have for some years expressed concerns about the ability of firms to provide messaging services using end-to-end encryption that means texts and emails cannot be accessed in extremis by the service provider, or by the authorities demanding information with a warrant.
But while encryption does make it much harder for the intelligence agencies to read messages, sources said one technique they could use to get around it was equipment interference, or hacking, which can enable spies to read what is on the screen of a phone that has been targeted.
The Open Rights Group, which campaigns for internet privacy, said Rudd’s proposal would make communications less secure for everyone online.
Its executive director, Jim Killock, said: “It is right that technology companies should help the police and intelligence agencies with investigations into specific crimes or terrorist activity where possible. This help should be requested through warrants and the process should be properly regulated and monitored.
“However, compelling companies to put back doors into encrypted services would make millions of ordinary people less secure online. We all rely on encryption to protect our ability to communicate, shop and bank safely.”
WhatsApp said in a statement that it was “horrified” by the London attack and that it was “cooperating with law enforcement”.
It is understood that Masood’s phone connected to WhatsApp shortly before he launched his attack on Westminster Bridge, but it is not known whether he sent or received a message.
At one point in an interview, Rudd appeared to say Masood had sent a message via WhatsApp, but the Home Office later said her words had been misconstrued and that she was only talking in general terms about terrorists sending WhatsApp messages.
Rudd also signalled a renewed determination to stop internet companies publishing extremist material online by declaring that they now had to accept they were “publishing companies”, with the responsibilities that went with that, not just technology firms providing a platform.MANKATO, Minn. — Vikings coach Mike Zimmer might be regarded as old school, but he’s embracing the team having gone high tech.
The Vikings are using a virtual reality camera system during training camp at Mankato State Minnesota and likely will continue to in practices throughout the season. A camera placed on a stand on the field films at 360 degrees, and players later can put on goggles and watch everything that has occurred around them.
Zimmer initially was skeptical about using the system. But after STRIVR Labs, the Palo Alto, Calif., company that developed the technology, reached out to him, he was intrigued.
“It’s a little bit of the jury’s still out, but I think with the age of guys that we have (on the team) now and the video games they have now and all of the things they have,” Zimmer said. “Teddy (Bridgewater) really liked it when the (quarterback) saw it and the people we’ve talked to really liked it. It’s really another way for them to get a bunch of reps.”
The Vikings have two cameras, but have only have used one so far since they have just one stand (a second is on the way). Zimmer said the technology could be quite helpful for a player such as Bridgewater being able to see on film everything happening around him.
“You put these goggles on and you’re in a room and you look to the right and see the right corner, the safety, and you see the receivers running the route,” Zimmer said. “And you look to the left, same thing. You see everything moving just like you would be on the field.”
The Vikings are the fourth NFL to use the STRIVR’s technology. The others are Dallas, New England and San Francisco.
Follow Chris Tomasson at twitter.com/christomasson.A new study has made a ‘weedy’ revelation about the human evolution.
According to the researchers, essential molecules have changed more rapidly in human muscle than in the brain over the course of evolution.
During the study, the researchers found that the rate of change in muscle was 10 times that seen in chimpanzees. Comparatively, the molecules in the human brain had evolved four times faster.
“Our results suggest a special energy management in humans that allows us to spare energy for our extraordinary cognitive powers at a cost of weak muscle,” said lead researcher Dr Kasia Bozek, from the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai.
Biologist Roland Roberts says “weak muscles may be the price we pay for the metabolic demands of our amazing cognitive powers.”
The scientists have been noting for quite a long time that the major difference between modern humans and other apes is our possession of an oversize, energy-hungry brain. According to the scientists, it was the brain’s development that drove the evolution of early humans away from an apelike ancestor.
The researchers carried study on macaque monkeys to find the muscle changes were not the result of human lifestyle.
They focused on the evolution of metabolites – molecules like vitamins, amino acids, sugars and neurotransmitter (nerve signalling chemicals) with key roles in the way the body functions.
Co-author Dr Philipp Kaitovich, also from the Shanghai team said, “Metabolites are more dynamic than the genome (genetic code) and they can give us more information about what makes us human.”
The researchers found that humans have evolved weaker muscles much more rapidly than the rest of our body changed in the last six million years.
The study was published on Tuesday in the journal PLoS Biology.WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange risks turning from a popular hero into an L. Ron Hubbard figure, tolerating only “blinkered, cultish devotion”, said one his former backers Jemima Khan.
Claiming Assange had alienated his supporters, Khan, associate editor of the New Statesman, wrote for the weekly British magazine that Assange’s anti-secrecy organisation was now “guilty of the same obfuscation and misinformation as those it sought to expose”.
She compared the Australian to US science-fiction author Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology.
Assange has been holed up inside the Ecuadoran embassy in London after losing his battle in the British courts against extradition to Sweden, where he faces questioning over allegations of rape and sexual assault. Ecuador has granted him political asylum.
By jumping bail, the 41-year-old surrendered the £200,000 ($315,000, 230,000 euros) that supporters including Khan had put up as a surety.
Khan — daughter of the late financier James Goldsmith and former wife of Imran Khan, the Pakistan cricket captain turned political leader — was an executive producer of “We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks”, Alex Gibney’s documentary about the whistle-blowing website.
“The problem with Camp Assange is that, in the words of (former US president) George W. Bush, it sees the world as being ‘with us or against us’,” wrote Khan.
“When I told Assange I was part of the ‘We Steal Secrets’ team, I suggested that he view it not in terms of being pro- or anti-him, but rather as a film that would be fair and would represent the truth.
“He replied: ‘If it’s a fair film, it will be pro-Julian Assange.’ Beware the celebrity who refers to himself in the third person.
“In many ways, the film’s narrative arc mirrors my own journey with Assange, from admiration to demoralisation.
“The list of alienated and disaffected allies is long: some say they fell out over redactions, some over broken deals, some over money, some over ownership and control.”
Khan said she felt passionately that democracy needs strong, free media and remained convinced that were Assange prosecuted for espionage then investigative journalism would be in jeopardy.
She said it remains to be seen if the allegations against Assange can be substantiated in the Swedish courts but the former computer hacker is “undermining both himself and his own transparency agenda” by turning his refusal to go to Sweden “into a human rights issue”.
“We all want a hero,” she wrote.
“It would be a tragedy if a man who has done so much good were to end up tolerating only disciples and unwavering devotion, more like an Australian L. Ron Hubbard.”Twitter wants to control what political messages you see.
In a truly egregious move yesterday, Twitter suspended the account responsible for #WhichHillary, activists @GuerrillaDems. Twitter also removed #WhichHillary from trending status — odd, considering the hashtag received more than 450,000 tweets in less than 24 hours.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has exerted political control like this. It is also a demonstrable conflict of interest, in light of Twitter Executive Chairman Omid Kordestani’s Sunday, 2/28 fundraiser with Clinton.
It is no secret that media execs possess enormous editorial influence. Rupert Murdoch has proven the potent political power of media ownership, using Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and his media empire to propagate conservative ideology. Together with News Corp, five other companies control 90% |
malleable depending on what you do in these scenes?
David Cage: We didn’t try to replicate Heavy Rain, because we would have just done Heavy Rain 2. We really wanted to create an experience that would be different. We wanted to build on what we learned from Heavy Rain: interactive story-telling, the bending story with actions, consequences, emotions, different feelings. All of this is there in Beyond, but Beyond is an emotional journey through the life of someone based over 15 years, where Heavy Rain took place over four days. So it’s a different experience.
”For a year I’m writing 12-15 hours a day non-stop. It’s really thinking about the story night and day, literally. It really makes you feel a little bit weird because you don’t socialise any more, you’re always in your mind asking questions and thinking about that, waking up in the middle of the night to go back and write.”
In Beyond there are many ways of playing the game and many parts that you will see or miss depending on how you play. Some actions have local consequences, some consequence are unseen, and others are long-term. But it’s a different balance compared to Heavy Rain, so I hope people who play Heavy Rain approach Beyond with a fresh mind, an open-mind, just go on the journey and see what happens.
VG247: You wrote the whole thing. Do you feel your writing has improved since Heavy Rain?
David Cage: It’s always a learning curve. It’s a learning curve since I started 16 years ago. There was a story in Omikron that no one could really say what the story was about, because it was probably too confusing and not done very well at all. Fahrenheit saw great performance. Heavy Rain was hopefully stronger as well, and I think that Beyond is … the way I see it, is maturity for me as a writer. It’s probably the most accomplished thing I’ve written to date, and it’s been a very interesting process.
Also, telling the life of someone was something new to me, and something pretty challenging, because it’s about telling compelling things about a little girl who matures to an adult, and when you mix all the scenes – because the game is not told in order – the challenge is to still make sense. These were very, very interesting challenges for me as a writer.
But I would even say that the writing of Beyond was a journey for me. Sometimes you start with an idea, and for me it’s always a very simple idea. Then I start writing, and the writing sometimes takes me somewhere else. Then after a year, I realised what I really wanted to talk about, so it’s like your little ‘inner voice’ in a way, took the pen at some point and said what you liked to say. It’s a journey for me as a writer.
VG247: Do you dabble in other writing projects as well? Short stories and the like?
David Cage: I would love to but it’s a full-time job, and a game like Beyond is insane, and I don’t really think gamers realise what it means to the people who made it. For me it’s a year in writing, so for a year I’m writing 12-15 hours a day non-stop. It’s really thinking about the story night and day, literally. It really makes you feel a little bit weird because you don’t socialise any more, you’re always in your mind asking questions and thinking about that, waking up in the middle of the night to go back and write. It’s challenging.
But then there’s a year in shooting, where you stress because it’s a year of shooting every day pretty much. It’s stressful because of the amount of actors involved in shooting Beyond, and then working every day with people like Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe is a tight pressure, but part of the job. Then you have a year where my job is mainly the filming, building, directing, talking with music composers to make sure everything flows in the right direction. So it’s a full time job [laughs].
VG247: Given all of that effort, how does it feel to be the last big first-party release on PS3?
David Cage: We had this discuss with Sony at some point about should we release this game on PlayStation 4, or should we release it on PlayStation 3, and our position has always been that we want to be on PlayStation 3, because we think it’s a very exciting moment for the console as it has the bigger install base.
”With the presence of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe in the game, we managed to open some of these doors, where people who would never talk about video games before are now getting interested. With Beyond it’s about opening that door and to show people that all games are not the same, they are not all about shooting
It’ll be years before PlayStation 4 has that audience. In this type of experience, we want as wide a market as possible because you want to talk to the mass market, and not necessarily the early adopters of the new console. We also did the same thing with Fahrenheit on PlayStation 2, and we thought it was the right decision.
VG247: And now you’ve used PlayStation 4 tech on Kara and The Dark Sorcerer, which I thought was hilarious when you showed it at E3.
David Cage: It was very funny because I was in the audience at E3 and everybody was deadly serious during the first part, and it was really funny to see this moment where the sorcerer goes, “Shit!” [laughs]. Because suddenly everything changes. It almost hit the audience like, ‘Oh okay, it’s not serious.’
VG247: Is humour something you’d like to explore next? Is that the next big challenge for you?
David Cage: You know, when were thinking about that new technical prototype everybody expected another “Kara”, with a girl who makes you cry and I thought, ‘Why not do something people don’t expect? What are the other emotions that we have not tried yet?’ I realised, we’ve not done a lot of humour, and actually I had serious doubts about that Sony conference about whether I could write something that was actually funny.
The goal was not to make people laugh, it was to just make you smile and it seemed to have worked. I think it shows that games can create any type of emotion – dramatic or not dramatic – because they’ve matured and are capable of exploring the other emotions. This is what we wanted to show with The Dark Sorcerer demo.
VG247: It was neat because it pulled people in one direction and then shoved them another. What’s your take on game-writing in that regard?
David Cage: It’s a very interesting situation right now. I think with the games we make, we’re in a more interesting position. We get these preconceptions certainly from hardcore gamers who say, ‘Oh it’s not a videogame. It’s interactive cinema and we’re not interested in games where you don’t shoot.’ So they’re not interested in our games. But at the other end of the spectrum we see people who are like, ‘We see what you’re doing, delivering emotion, but videogames are still all about violence and shooting.’
So what I think we’re doing is trying to say to both ends, ‘Wait a second. Look at what we’re doing and then make your judgement.’ But we like to say to hardcore gamers, ‘Yes there are some great games out there whether it’s GTA, Call of Duty and all of those things, but look, this is something a little bit different.’ It’s not about shooting. It’s different but give it a try. For the sake of society have a look, because all games are not about violence. They are about very different things.
There are very interesting indie games right now exploring very different reactions that are clearly not about violence, that are trying to make this medium really strong. There is definitely something happening in the industry just now and we should look at this. It’s interesting because with the presence of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe in the game, we managed to open some of these doors, where people who would never talk about video games before are now getting interested. With Beyond it’s about opening that door and to show people that all games are not the same, they are not all about shooting.
VG247: When I last interviewed you at gamescom in 2012, I asked if you could ever see a world where actors in digital games are awarded in the same way the Academy awards film performances. Shortly after that, Kara actor Valorie Curry actually won an award for her role. What does that say to you?
David Cage: It’s difficult to answer this question because I personally feel that the performance delivered by Valorie Curry in Kara deserved an award for acting. She’s a fantastic actor and she’s actually in a very successful TV series right now. She’s just a great actress. The same thing for Ellen Page in Beyond. I look at her performance and I think what she’s done is amazing. I’ve never seen a video game character doing what she does. I think she’s just amazing. Does she deserve an award? Yeah probably, I’d say so.
But at the same time when you think about development, not everybody is interested in acting, and others think it’s something that should play a role in the games industry. So there are different points of view. We’ll see how it goes. Since Heavy Rain some games have tried to deal with acting and emotion, and that’s very good. We’ll see if it’s a growing trend or just an erratic trend in the industry.
VG247: Where do you see those trends going in years to come?
David Cage: At Quantic Dream or in general?
VG247: In general.
David Cage: I really don’t know what to expect in the future of the games industry, but for me, from where it is today can go in very different directions. What I see today is big triple-a titles with crazy budgets, incredible teams working on one game, but maybe not that creative because there’s so much money involved they don’t want to take any creative risks. So we keep getting pretty much the same thing year after year just to keep their fan base.
On the other side I’d say the indie space is very interesting, with very small developers of about four or five guys, and they are trying to find new creative new ideas. That is very interesting. At Quantic Dream we share that view. We believe that we are really an independent developer because we have full creative freedom, we can do whatever we want. We don’t follow necessarily the rules of marketing, we don’t make sequels, we do things that present a lot of risk.
But at the same time we have the support of a major console manufacturer that give us all the resources. If you asked me where I would like the future to be, then I would say indie developers. I hope they will really make the future of this industry, but it’s up to the players to decide what they want.
I often try to explain, ‘Give support to indie developers and you will see more indie games. If you support these big franchises you will see less risk.’ The answer is not one or the other. It’s both. If you look at the industry it’s an interesting mix of blockbusters but also the more indie, new ideas.
Beyond: Two Souls launches on PS3 October 8.SAN DIEGO — Doctors may want to roll up their sleeves before work, literally. A new study suggests that long sleeves on a doctor's white coat may become contaminated with viruses or other pathogens that could then be transmitted to patients.
In the study, the researchers had 34 health care workers wear either long- or short-sleeved white coats while they examined a mannequin that had been contaminated with DNA from the "cauliflower mosaic virus." This virus infects plants and is harmless to humans, but it is transmitted in a way that is similar to that of other, harmful pathogens, such as Clostridium difficile, a bacteria that causes severe diarrhea, said Dr. Amrita John, an infectious disease specialist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, who led the study. John presented the research here on Friday (Oct. 6) at an infectious disease conference called IDWeek 2017.
The health care workers wore gloves while they examined the mannequin, then removed the gloves, washed their hands and put on a new pair of gloves before examining a second, clean (non-contaminated) mannequin. After the health care workers had finished examining both mannequins, the researchers swabbed the workers' sleeves, wrists and hands, and tested the samples for DNA from the cauliflower mosaic virus. Each of the 34 participants completed the exam twice (once wearing short sleeves and once wearing long sleeves), for a total of 68 "simulations." [6 Superbugs to Watch Out For]MANILA - A video of a batch salutatorian in Quezon City interrupted by school authorities while delivering her graduation speech has been making rounds online.
In the video uploaded on YouTube, Krisel Mallari, batch salutatorian of the Sto. Niño Parochial School, was delivering a speech that was still in the early parts of her speech when the announcer suddenly interrupted her, saying "Thank you very much, Ms. Krisel Mallari."
"Sa bawat taon na lumipas ay puspusan ang pag-aaral na ginawa ko sa eskuwela, naniwala ko sa patas na labanan. Sa pagtatapos ng school year na ito’y isang hakbang na lang ang layo ko sa finish line, ngunit sa pagdating ko rito’y naglaho ang pulang tali na sisimbolo sana sa aking tagumpay, naglaho nga ba o sadyang kinuha?" Mallari was saying when the announcer interrupted.
Instead of stopping, Mallari proceeded with her speech, but school authorities kept insisting for her to stop and take a seat.
"Maraming tao ang nagbulag-bulagan sa isang sistemang marumi at kaduda-duda. Ngunit di ko ito tinuluran, ipinaglaban ko ang sa tingin ko’y tama, nanindigan ako bilang isang Pilipino na palaban at may takot sa Diyos. Chismis, isang piyesta ng chismis ang inabot ko ng pinagmukha nila akong masama," she said as the announcer interrupted anew.
At one point, a teacher is seen in the video seemingly handing Mallari a paper for her to read, instead of what she was delivering.
In an interview with ABS-CBNNews.com, Mallari confirmed that the speech she delivered during the graduation rites was different from the one approved by school authorities.
Mallari said she knew that the teachers would not approve the speech containing what she really wants to say—which is about an alleged cheating incident in the school—that's why she did not have it checked by school authorities.
"May freedom of speech naman po di ba?" Mallari said.
Mallari's sister, Katherine, explained that even before the graduation rites, they had been asking the school to release the computation of Krisel's grades for the sake of transparency.
However, she said that the school just kept on shrugging off their requests.
"Limang araw pabalik-balik 'yung dad ko para kunin ang computation," Katherine said, stressing that they are not asking for the computation of grades for the sake of school competition, but for transparency.
She claimed that there have been previous cases similar to Krisel's, whose grades, she said, were suspiciously lower than expected, but the students involved chose to keep quiet.
"Parang naging boses nila si Krisel ngayon," said Katherine.
She also revealed that the program for the graduation rites listed Krisel as a recipient of the Best in Religion award, but the school did not give it to the student because of her speech.
"Ano namang kaugnayan noong speech sa Best in Religion?" she said.
ABS-CBNNews.com tried to get the side of the school on Monday morning. However, according to a certain Olga Mendoza, the administrators were out for a school's recognition day.
The video of Krisel's interrupted speech already had more than 11,000 views since it was posted on Saturday.
The full text of Krisel's speech, which she was not able to finish during the graduation rites, is also seen in the video uploaded in YouTube.
"I am Krisel Mallari, a Filipino citizen who would rather choose to fail with honor, than win by cheating," Krisel would have said had she not been stopped during the graduation rites.SANTA CRUZ >> Three hours after Dr. Todd Mitchell’s Dec. 3 flight from Beijing landed in San Francisco, a call demanded his immediate attention.
Mitchell, 59, had spent two-and-a-half weeks in China, which has the most mushroom poisoning deaths in the world, sharing the treatment method he developed at Dominican Hospital.
The call concerned a Santa Rosa hospital patient believed to have eaten deadly mushrooms.
Principal investigator of an amatoxin mushroom poisoning clinical trial that has treated nearly 100 patients across North America in the past 10 years, Mitchell arranged for the patient’s overnight transfer to Dominican Hospital.
This patient was the first of seven from outside Santa Cruz County to be treated at Dominican Hospital over the next three days — a cluster of death cap cases.
On Dec. 4, the call came from closer to home.
A Mexican-Indian family of five at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas had eaten soup made with wild mushrooms that looked similar to edibles they foraged in Mexico. They had no idea their mistake could be deadly.
Four members of the family ate them for dinner and a fifth ate the leftovers for breakfast.
Unfortunately, death caps are tasty, and cooking does nothing to reduce the toxic effects.
Dominican Hospital agreed to treat the entire family — a last chance to save their lives.
“The sickest cohort I have ever seen,” Mitchell said.
GRIM ODDS
One was a 19 month old. For the youngest, the odds of survival after ingesting amatoxin — the poison in the mushrooms — are grim.
After six hours on the “Santa Cruz protocol,” the toddler’s condition improved but remained critical. She was flown to UC San Francisco Medical Center, ultimately undergoing a liver transplant five days later. Her aunt recovered after undergoing a liver transplant at Stanford.
Treating six patients with amatoxin poisoning, a life-or-death situation, strained Dominican Hospital’s resources.
“It was like a bus accident occurring right in front of the hospital,” Mitchell said, reporting most of the family members returned home after five days at Dominican.
Later that week, Oakland hospitals used the Santa Cruz protocol for two patients with amatoxin mushroom poisoning. Both recovered.
Around the world, rapid recovery is not the usual outcome.
“These mushrooms continue to wipe out entire families each and every year in Nepal, South Africa, Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam and India as well as China,” Mitchell said. “Amatoxin mushroom poisoning is an unrecognized worldwide public health crisis. Literally, hundreds die every single year.”
The Santa Cruz Fungus Fair at the Louden Nelson Community Center aims to help people figure out the difference between deadly and delightful mushrooms, with Henry Young and Debbie Viess speaking on that topic this weekend.
STEPPING UP
Dominican Hospital provides the home of this clinical trial, with the Dignity Health Institutional Review Board providing oversight required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Hospital pharmacy staff volunteered to stock and ship silibinin, purified from the common milk thistle and which must be given intravenously as soon as possible.
After hours, at night, on weekends — the pharmacy staff receives urgent calls for the medication, which is kept in locked storage bins.
“It’s always an emergency,” said Mitchell. “But Dominican always finds a way to get the antidote delivered within 24 hours of the initial hot line call.”
Since July, the pharmacy had shipped the antidote to liver transplant centers affiliated with Indiana University, Duke University in North Carolina, Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, University of Rochester, UC San Francisco and the Cleveland Clinic.
Mitchell said all seven of those severely poisoned patients enrolled in the clinical trial made complete and rapid recoveries.
Dominican pharmacists calculate how much to send, package the drug, add mixing instructions and consent forms and negotiate shipping arrangements for FedEx SameDay.
“We get it to San Francisco and they fly it out,” said clinical consulting pharmacist Glenn Robbins. “Calls, texts, we get it there.”
Robbins, 61, began working at Dominican Hospital’s pharmacy in 1986 and saw it become a 24/7 operation 12 years ago.
He answers telephone questions about mixing the drug, maintains the inventory and keeps up with the FDA paperwork.
The pharmacy has 18 pharmacists and 18 technicians, all of whom had to be trained to know what to do.
“They’ve done a yeoman’s job,” Robbins said.
Mitchell, a UC Santa Cruz alum who has practiced medicine in Santa Cruz for 28 years, is amazed at the support provided by a community hospital that has no medical school affiliations with Stanford University or UC San Francisco.
IMPROVING ODDS
Mitchell’s dive into amatoxin poisoning treatment began in January 2007 when a local Mexican immigrant family of six ate tacos made with death cap mushrooms foraged at Wilder Ranch State Park.
Searching online for an alternative to a liver transplant, he asked Madaus, a German drug company, to ship its European-licensed antidote, silibinin, brand name Legalon SIL, via air courier to Santa Cruz.
Ownership of the drug has changed hands several times since. In mid-2007, Madaus was acquired by Rottapharm of Italy, which was acquired in 2014 by Meda of Sweden, which was acquired by Mylan in August.
Mylan made headlines last year after the company headed by Heather Bresch raised the price of the lifesaving allergy treatment EpiPen by 400 percent as her own compensation grew 600 percent.
Currently, because Legalon SIL is part of a clinical trial, Mylan provides the drug to patients at no charge.
Silibinin had never been tested in a well-designed clinical trial, according to Mitchell, noting the drug had developed a reputation for being unreliable.
Of nine people in Australia treated with the drug between 2000 and 2013, four died; one needed a liver transplant.
In 2015, dozens of amatoxin mushroom poisonings occurred in Germany among Syrian refugees foraging for food. Of 40 given the drug, at least 10 died or needed a liver transplant.
Mitchell discovered that silibinin fails when the patient’s kidneys, gallbladder and biliary tract are not given appropriate attention during treatment.
Feeding patients, he said, allows bile to recirculate back to the gut, allowing the amatoxin poison to re-attack the liver again. Kidney function and a brisk urine output must be maintained for silibinin to work successfully, he added.
If the patient gets plentiful intravenous hydration, the kidneys can move amatoxin into urine to exit the body; however, insufficient intravenous fluids lead to kidney injury and treatment failures.
Patients who recover on the Santa Cruz protocol “are virtually good as new,” Mitchell said.
GLOBAL INVITES
In late November, Mitchell presented in Singapore at the 15th Annual Asia Pacific Medical Association of Medical Toxicology.
Invited for the first time to China, Mitchell set up two demonstration projects to begin this summer. He presented at an acute liver failure symposium in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, where up to 100 deaths occur each year from amatoxin mushroom poisoning.
He was invited to Shenyang, a city the size of Chicago near the North Korean border, where 17 people died in University Hospital from amatoxin poisoning last summer.
In Beijing, he participated in a daylong meeting with the head of the national Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Poison Control.
Treating the cluster of Bay Area cases slowed Mitchell’s progress on publishing the clinical trial results, which could be midyear, but the experience provided a wealth of data that backed up his suppositions.
“We can’t recover every single poisoning, but fortunately it’s quite rare when the protocol does not successfully do so,” he said.
The amatoxin hot line: 866-520-4412 or 412-563-1400.
Fungus Fair
What: 43rd Annual Santa Cruz Fungus Fair, speakers, cooking demonstrations, kids’ room, panel to identify mushrooms; books, wild mushroom delicacies for sale.
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
Where: Louden Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz.
Details: Fungus Federation Santa Cruz, ffsc.us.Here is a template you can use to lobby your MP to make sure our fishermen are protected during the EU negotiations, contact your MP here – https://www.writetothem.com/
Watch EU fishing disaster here – https://youtu.be/vNPxdFQ1jbs
Dear Mr. “X”, MP,
I am writing to you, in order to urge you to support our fishermen during the EU negotiations.
When we joined the EU in the early ’70s we gave away 80% of our fishing waters and the rest 10 years later. We allowed any country in the European Union to fish in British waters, taking away valuable stock from our fishermen, thus wrecking the industry.
60% of the British fleet has been deliberately scrapped under government programs whilst other EU countries have built boats on EU grants to fish in our waters. Brexit is an opportunity to rebuild our fishing industry creating thousands of jobs, increasing exports of fish and decreasing imports. Britain has the richest fishing waters in Western Europe, yet we can’t use it! Quotas and directives have squashed this vital industry so I urge you to support our trawlermen during government negotiations whilst exiting the European Union.
It doesn’t matter if you were for Remain or Leave, you must use Brexit as an opportunity to help communities across Britain which have long been neglected.
Thank you in anticipation of your kind assistance in this matter.
Yours sincerely,
[your name and address]Mr. Biden will be the first vice president to move into the residence without previously living in Washington, said Donald Ritchie, a Senate historian.
For the Bidens, the move will bring a drastic change in habit. Mr. Biden, 66, will abandon his long-cherished routine that cemented his reputation as “Amtrak Joe,” an average guy who rushes to make the train home to spend time with his kids. Dr. Biden, 57, will almost certainly surrender her job at Delaware Technical and Community College.
In Delaware, they live in a 10-year-old lakeside home in the aptly named suburb of Greenville, outside Wilmington, a house that Mr. Biden personally designed.
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In Washington, they will inhabit a 115-year-old Victorian with 33 rooms on a heavily guarded circular lot, next to the British Embassy.
The Bidens and their aides declined to discuss their plans or the question of whether Dr. Biden would find a new job in Washington. But friends and colleagues said that in all the decades Mr. Biden worked in Washington, he never had much of a social life there. He rarely stuck around for an evening fund-raiser or a cocktail party. He was not a regular at typical lawmaker haunts like the Capital Grille or Charlie Palmer, instead inviting people to the Senate dining room if he happened to be in town for dinner.
“I think he was far more interested in his children than the social whirl,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a longtime Biden friend. “I have to kid him a little bit, because he’s no longer going to be asking, ‘Are we going to finish this vote by 7:45?’ so he can make this mad dash to the train.”
Not that Mr. Biden will suddenly become a fixture at Washington dinner parties, predicted Mr. Leahy, who in his 34 years in the Senate has seen a few new administrations come to town. “Everybody loves to have the vice president over for dinner, and he’ll have 100 invitations piling up,” Mr. Leahy said. “But I think he can be very valuable to President Obama up on the Hill. That will be the most important place to be.”
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Sally Quinn, the journalist and author, said that like the Obamas, who have spent little time in Washington, the Bidens will be social newcomers.
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“I’ve never seen Joe Biden at a party in Washington,” Ms. Quinn said. “Both of those couples are going to be fresh faces, even though they’ve both been in the Senate and Biden’s been here for a hundred years. It’ll be very interesting to have them around.”
Mr. Kaufman, who has been a close Biden friend since the 1970s, said Mr. Biden was damaged politically by his absence on the social scene.
“He did not participate in it,” Mr. Kaufman said. “To be honest, it was a real hindrance, because when he ran for president in ’87, people didn’t know him. You could probably count on two hands the number of embassy functions he went to.”
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That could change in January, if he and Dr. Biden make time to sample the city’s Italian restaurants (their favorite cuisine) or visit the National Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue instead of traveling to New York to see a show (their regular practice until now).
Or they could take in performances at the Kennedy Center, a place Mr. Biden was rarely spotted at when he was a senator, said John Dow, a spokesman for the Kennedy Center.
If the Bidens stay closer to home, they will be surrounded by familiar faces in their new neighborhood on Massachusetts Avenue in northwest Washington. Hunter Biden, one of Mr. Biden’s sons, lives a mile and a half from the Naval Observatory with his wife and their three daughters. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lives around the corner in a five-bedroom brick Colonial on Whitehaven Street. They may also bring Mr. Biden’s 91-year-old mother, Jean, to live with them, as she does in Delaware.
Dr. Biden, who runs five miles a day, five days a week, will enjoy close proximity to the trails winding through Rock Creek Park, close to the Naval Observatory. (She will be closely trailed by athletic Secret Service agents.)
And the Bidens are expected to keep their home in Greenville, which Dr. Biden has said they will never sell. “In D.C., we’re so close that I would be lucky enough that we could take advantage of both places,” she recently told The News Journal, a Wilmington paper.
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If Dr. Biden decides to continue working, she would be one of the few vice-presidential spouses to do so. Lynne Cheney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and wrote several books during the Bush administration. Lady Bird Johnson supervised her Texas broadcasting company while her husband served as vice president. But most other second ladies have devoted themselves to volunteer work and ceremonial duties on behalf of their husbands.
If she chooses to work, Dr. Biden’s chosen profession is unlikely to raise any red flags. “It’s almost impossible for me to imagine what kind of conflict there could be with a teacher,” said Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group.
An official at one Washington college said she hoped that Dr. Biden would come looking for a job there. “We would love it,” said Elizabeth Homan, a spokeswoman for Montgomery College, one of the largest community colleges in the Washington area. “I think it would be a really pleasant surprise.”
Officials at Amtrak, however, were less enthusiastic about losing their high-profile customer.
“We will miss having Senator Biden as a regular passenger,” said Karina Romero, an Amtrak spokeswoman.Hello all,So I've been working on an RPG recently with the focus in mind for players learning another language. In this case, it's Korean but once I get a working model I'm hoping to do versions for other languages as well. Essentially, all the players attend a school for magic (the game is loosely based on The Magicians, by Lev Grossman) and they cast spell by speaking Korean. Low level spells are cast by putting a noun and verb together (like Ars Magica) but is contextually based so they are no overarching categories - the noun and verb will be different depending on the spell. So step one: build vocab. After that, players cast spells of various types by making simple sentences. Different types of spells require different grammar patterns. Illusion spells are simple statements as they are the easiest to cast, etc.In order to cast spells players narrate scenes in which something affects them negatively - this earns them drama points which are then used to cast spells. Magic is fueled by pain and emotional scars and wounds acquired by the players. It is the players responsibility to narrate scenes to acquire drama points and the GM's responsibility to narrate scenes that present challenges and conflicts that require the expenditure of drama points (by casting spells). In addition, the role of GM changes each turn. So when it is a players turn to narrate a player turn they frame a scene designed to gain drama points and when it comes their turn to narrate a GM turn they add to previous GM turns by introducing conflict, adding to the overall storyline, etc.I'd really be grateful for any feedback on the game. Here's a link to the pdf for all those willing to look at it! Thanks in advance and please post any constructive criticism you have!https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o5os1in29pzrpi8/2XsW6NiZbv">Link to pdfProblem Child is a 1990 American comedy film that was directed by Dennis Dugan and produced by Robert Simonds. The film features stars like John Ritter, Amy Yasbeck, Gilbert Gottfried, Jack Warden, Michael Richards and Michael Oliver.
Telling us the tale of Junior and the fact that his mother had abandoned him at a young age. He lived in thirty foster homes, including a Catholic orphanage. Ben Healy (John Ritter) is a pleasant but brow-beaten yuppie working for his father, “Big Ben” (Jack Warden), a very successful tyrannical sporting goods dealer who is running for mayor. Ben and his social climbing wife Flo (Amy Yasbeck) have been unable to conceive, and from there Ben approaches an adoption agent with his dilemma. The adoption agent, Igor Peabody (Gottfried) presents Ben and Flow with a cute seven-year-old boy named Junior (Michael Oliver). However, Junior is hardly a model child. Considered to be devilish and incorrigible, the child leaves a path of serious destruction in his wake, and is even pen pals with Martin Beck (Michael Richards), a notorious serial killer. The film is interspersed with an imprisoned Beck looking to escape and eventually meet up with Junior, whom he misconstrues as a fellow criminal named “J.R.”
The film debuted ad third place and went on to be a commercial success at the box office, grossing $54 million domestically and $72 million worldwide. While it’s since widely received negative reviews upon its release. The critics consensus reads that it’s “Mean-spirited and hopelessly short on comic intervention, Problem Child is a particularly unpleasant comedy, one that’s loaded with manic scenery chewing and juvenile pranks.” Although it was rated PG, it is still heavily censored when it’s shown on television due to the remarks that are made about adoption, which critics saw as insensitive. It was not screened for critics prior to its release.
The Film Itself (3.5/5):
Problem Child is a film that I personally haven’t seen in years, and only remembered small pieces from. That said, I was excited to bring this release home as I do remember semi-enjoying it. And with this particular release, that particular feeling of slight fulfillment in this movie remained the same. Giving us a story that’s very Dennis The Menace-esque but with more of a seeking the approval and love of your family aspect, it wasn’t all that bad. There were moments during the story that I straight up laughed my ass off, while there were others that I did not find myself too entertained. Those involved in the cast of this film, from the child (Michael Oliver) to the father (John Ritter) and the unexpected criminal (Michael Richards) did an absolutely fantastic job in their respective roles and offered a story that has not only held up throughout the years, but was very well maintained as the film moved onward.
Picture Quality (4.5/5):
The overall visual presentation of Problem Child was significantly better than my previous encounters with the film; however, that enhancement is something that I expected with the changes in technology over the years. The picture quality itself was really nicely done as my wife and I were able to see and understand everything as the move played out on our living room television. There were some aspects of the film that I didn’t remember seeing that were much more visible in this release. The only problem that I saw with this release, and I want to preface this with that it could possibly be related to the original source material, but during some of the scenes that played out on this release in the very beginning seemed to have had some serious interlacing issues. Interlacing itself is something that I personally wouldn’t have expected to see on a Blu-ray release, however they were definitely present and only there for a brief moment of time.
Audio Quality (3/5):
Packaged with a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 audio track, Problem Child doesn’t really offer much in terms of an immersive experience for its home viewers. However, the overall audible presentation of this film has never sounded better until now! Various aspects of the story that weren’t heard previously, like the starting of the fire in his bedroom from the downstairs area of the house were significantly more prominent and easily available to the untrained ear. As my wife and I watched this movie, we were able to hear and understand everything as the movie played out and we really couldn’t complain too terribly much. We just wished that they would’ve gone with an optional 5.1 audio track since they were already putting the work into making this release available in a better quality presentation.
The Packaging (3/5):
Problem Child comes packaged in your typical single-disc Blu-ray amaray case. Within that case is the standard Blu-ray copy of the film. The disc does not feature any artwork whatsoever, and only includes the standard text |
time shopping Amazon, Target and Apple.com, the National Security Agency's elite team of hackers spends its time shopping a secret high-end catalog of custom tools designed to subvert firewalls, servers, and routers made by U.S. firms, impersonate a GSM base station to intercept mobile phone calls, or siphon data from a wireless network.
Hackers in the Tailored Access Operations division get the "ungettable" data the NSA can't otherwise obtain from tapping undersea cables or collecting bulk data from companies like Yahoo and Google. They do this by by installing backdoors and other implants remotely or by physically intercepting hardware being delivered to customers and planting backdoors in firmware, der Spiegel reports, citing newly disclosed documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
"For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox," der Spiegel writes. "And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA's specialists seem already to have gotten past them."
The $40,0000 CANDYGRAM mimics a cell phone tower to intercept signals from mobile phones and track targets.
With names like PICASSO, IRATEMONKEY, COTTONMOUTH, and WATERWITCH, the various tools allow NSA snoops to map networks and not only monitor data but surreptitiously divert it or modify it.
A 50-page catalog from the NSA's ANT Division provides a handy list of tools NSA employees can order to hack a target's hardware and include prices that range from free to $250,000, according to der Spiegel. The 2008 catalog (which can be viewed here) includes $30 rigged monitor cables that let NSA spies see what a target sees on his computer, a $40,000 GSM base station that mimics a mobile phone tower to track users, and computer bugging devices disguised as USB plugs that are capable of sending and receiving data via radio. A 50-pack costs more than $1 million.
Another modified GSM handset called PICASSO collects user data, location information and room audio, all for the bargain price of $2,000.
Also listed among the array of products NSA hackers can buy is a digital lockpick for firewalls made by Juniper Networks. The hacking tool, called FEEDTROUGH, lets the NSA burrow into a Juniper firewall to install other tools – implants called ZESTYLEAK and BANANAGLEE – onto a target's servers. FEEDTROUGH provides persistent access to the system even after reboots and software upgrades so that spy tools wiped from a system during these processes can be restored.
Other tools place a backdoor in routers made by Cisco, or infect the BIOS of a computer to maintain a persistent foothold even if the hard drive is wiped clean and the operating system reinstalled.
The HALLUXWATER does what the U.S. accuses China of doing -- installs a backdoor on products made by the Chinese firm Huawei.
Ironically, the list also includes tools for the NSA to plant a backdoor in firewalls and routers made by Huawei, a Chinese firm that has come under tremendous scrutiny recently amid suspicions it might be providing surveillance backdoors for the Chinese government.
The backdoors and other spy tools listed in the NSA catalog appear to be only after-market implants rather than backdoors installed with the manufacturer's cooperation.
Some of the tools can be installed remotely via the internet, others require an "interdiction" – the NSA's term for the physical intrusion of a device or system to implant a bugging device on it. In this case, the NSA relies on the CIA or FBI to gain physical access to a system or intercept product shipments from manufacturers and retailers so the spies can subvert equipment before it's delivered to the customer.
The ANT tools help the NSA reach systems and data in a more efficient fashion than hacking individual computers or tapping undersea cables, where it must sift a lot of data. By compromising a target organization's routers and servers, it can zero in on an entire network to map its infrastructure and uncover vulnerabilities, siphon entire spools of email from servers or target specific machines, including industrial control systems. But these implants, depending on how securely they're designed, could introduce a security risk that allows others to hijack the same equipment to take over a system.I had lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It didn't go well.
We met at a French cafe in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, not far from Columbia University. It was a meeting more than a year in the making. I first e-mailed him when his book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes, was published to see if he might submit to an interview. This, I realized, was a long shot. Taleb, best known as the author of The Black Swan, a book about how we underestimate the improbable, isn't much for interviews and regards most journalists as fools and phonies, right alongside professional academics and bureaucrats. I didn't expect to hear back.
Lo and behold, he agreed to an interview. Before we could hash out the details, though, Carlin Romano wrote a review of The Bed of Procrustes for The Chronicle. The headline was "The Bed of Crusty," so right away it didn't sound favorable. It wasn't. Romano dismissed Taleb as a "would-be aphorist with a major tin ear." I explained to Taleb that, while Romano and I write for the same publication, we had never met and I didn't know about the review in advance. He was not mollified and backed out, with apologies. Who could blame him?
Then, last summer, I learned that he had a new book coming out. Not a slim volume of maxims and observations but rather a meaty treatise. I e-mailed him again, and we spoke on the phone. He seemed excited about the possibility of an article, giddy even, perhaps because he thought it would stick it to the academics he regards with contempt. In previous books, he told me, he had held back, pulled a punch or two. Not this time. If they wanted to come at him with lawyers and pitchforks, so be it. Taleb sent me a PDF of the manuscript, titled Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, which he hadn't quite completed. It had yet to be edited, and he was still working on the conclusion.
I read it. Afterward, I sent him an e-mail, calling the book "engaging and stimulating throughout." Say what you want about Taleb's writing—and Romano is not the only critic—he doesn't produce antiseptic prose, and there's something fun about his surly, middle-finger-to-the-experts attitude. And the digressions! One moment he's telling you why convexity leads to philostochasticity and the next he's explaining why he doesn't eat papayas. For the record, he avoids all fruits without a Greek or Hebrew name because his ancestors would not have eaten them. And he drinks only beverages that are at least a thousand years old. Don't offer the man an orange Shasta.
Taleb, now in his early 50s, lives his philosophy and believes everyone else should too. You must have "skin in the game," as he puts it repeatedly. He uses that phrase, by my count, 28 times in Antifragile, and it's central to his worldview and integral to his critique of the "fragilista": the sucker who sits on the sidelines, who doesn't know what he thinks he knows, who lacks the pluck to risk his own fortune and reputation. Unlike Taleb. "I have only written, in every line I have composed in my professional life, about things I have done, and the risks I have recommended that others take or avoid were risks I have been taking or avoiding myself," he writes. "I will be the first hurt if I am wrong."
Here's an example. Taleb made a lot of money when the housing bubble burst in 2008. Common wisdom had it that housing prices go up, because they had always gone up. Taleb told me it was obvious to him that executives at Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage company, didn't understand the concept of "fat tails," that is, they didn't understand the extreme risks of the investments they held. In retrospect that's obvious, but it was not a widely held opinion back then. The handful who bet on the unthinkable made a killing, including Taleb.
He asked me how much I thought he made during the crisis.
"I don't know," I said.
"Guess."
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"Five million?"
He laughed. "Try times 10," he said.
Later, he made a reference to $30-million, so I'm unsure of the exact figure, not that it matters: Taleb was already wealthy. He had made his first millions on Wall Street by age 27. "I became successful because I knew what I learned in school about probability was bullshit," he said. "That's when my war with academia started."
Taleb is in the university but not of it. He spent the first couple decades of his career as a derivatives trader before turning to scholarship and essay writing in his mid-40s. Taleb is a professor of risk engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Despite his wall of degrees (he has an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and a doctorate from the University of Paris), he believes that universities propagate "touristification," another term he coined, a phenomenon that occurs when what should be an exciting exploration turns into a programmatic exercise. It's better to be an adventurer than a tourist. Education isn't the only result of this modern sin; gym machines and "the electronic calendar" fall short as well.
Taleb has a low opinion of most professors. He titles one section of the new book "The Charlatan, the Academic, and the Showman." In a chart, Taleb divides professions into three categories: fragile, robust, and antifragile. It's bad to be fragile, better to be robust, best to be antifragile. Artists and writers are antifragile. Postal employees and truck drivers are robust. Academics, bureaucrats, and the pope are fragile. Benedict, beware.
"I don't rely on external confirmation, and I have a happy life."
Most of Taleb's ire is directed at business schools, specifically the one at Harvard. At Harvard they "lecture birds to fly," then arrogantly claim credit when the fledglings become airborne. He rails against the "Soviet-Harvard delusion," linking an institution that's graduated thousands with a state that killed millions. What is the delusion, exactly? It is a belief in a top-down system that tries to control and protect, purportedly for mankind's benefit, thereby eliminating the natural stressors and necessary randomness that create strength and encourage enterprise. Dekulakization and course catalogs are symptoms of the same ailment.
Taleb has no patience for so-called structured learning. "Only the autodidacts are free," he writes in the book. He pursued his real education in his spare time, doing only as much as was required to pass his courses. At 13, he set himself a goal of reading for 30 to 60 hours a week, pretty much a full-time job. To prove that he hit the books with enthusiasm, Taleb ticks off the names of more than 30 great writers he has read. We don't learn much about what he gleaned from this ardent page-turning or which authors influenced his own style. He does give the following assessment of the work of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig: "didn't like."
Actually, Antifragile feels like a compendium of people and things Taleb doesn't like. He is, for instance, annoyed by editors who "overedit," when what they should really do is hunt for typos; unctuous, fawning travel assistants; "bourgeois bohemian bonus earners"; meetings of any kind; appointments of any kind; doctors; Paul Krugman; Thomas Friedman; nerds; bureaucrats; air conditioning; television; soccer moms; smooth surfaces; Harvard Business School; business schools in general; bankers at the Federal Reserve; bankers in general; economists; sissies; fakes; "bureaucrato-journalistic" talk; Robert Rubin; Google News; marketing; neckties; "the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature"; regular shoes.
The social sciences make the list, too. He contrasts them with "smart" sciences, like physics. He mocks social scientists as mired in "petty obsessions, envy, and icy-cold hatreds," contrasting the small-mindedness of academe with the joie de vivre of the business world. "My experience is that money and transactions purify relations," he writes. "Ideas and abstract matters like'recognition' and 'credit' warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry." In our interview, he went even further, saying he would "shut down" the social sciences. "Those guys are living in their own world," he said. "That is the truth. You don't need them."
I pointed out that he praises some psychologists, like Daniel Kahneman, and regularly refers to psychological concepts in Antifragile. Would he padlock the psych labs, too? No, he told me. "Psychology is more empirical," he clarified. Sociologists, on the other hand, would presumably be better off delivering mail.
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He saves his iciest hate for economists. Taleb has no use for the "charlatanic" field, comparing economic research to medieval medicine. Economists are, in his estimation, weak, ignorant, fearful, and generally pathetic. At one point he fantasizes about beating up an economist in public.
Taleb singles out his least-favorite economists, including Robert C. Merton, a professor of finance at MIT, formerly of Harvard, and Myron Scholes, a professor emeritus of finance at Stanford, who jointly received the Nobel Prize in 1997 for their model of valuing derivatives that's designed to hedge against risk. Merton is "serious, mechanistic, boring," according to Taleb, and the two used "fictional mathematics" in their research. He calls this "unsettling" in a footnote, though in the earlier draft he sent me he used a harsher word. I'd wager that punch may have been pulled by Random House's legal department. Merton didn't return my messages, and Scholes politely declined to comment.
Gary Pisano, however, was willing to talk. Pisano, a professor of business administration at Harvard, is singled out in the book for his "dangerous" thinking; Taleb hammers him for supposedly misunderstanding the market for biotechnology. Pisano told me Taleb didn't know what he was talking about. "His argument is about these rare events that generate huge returns," he said. "That doesn't happen in biotech." The specifics of that debate aside, Pisano shrugged off the criticism and said he had enjoyed Taleb's work in the past: "I think he writes some very interesting and provocative things, but I think it gets a little lost in the manner."
The idea that Taleb's insights are sometimes overwhelmed by his belligerence is a longstanding criticism. Articles published in the American Statistician soon after The Black Swan appeared chastised him for his alleged ignorance of "entire subfields of statistics," committing mathematical errors, and lobbing "gratuitous insults" at statisticians. The opprobrium was mixed with gratitude that, whatever his faults, Taleb had managed to shine a bright light on an arcane topic. Still, you got the sense that statisticians were smarting. Taleb's fans—and there are many of them—see his abrasiveness as proof that he doesn't tolerate nonsense. They show up in droves to hear him speak, leave rapturous reviews on Amazon, and praise his television appearances. One YouTube commenter put it succinctly: "He's so awesome."
While Taleb dislikes the university system and doesn't respect career academics, he's not against education per se. Studying mathematics is fine for its own sake. And it's worthwhile to read the classics. But modern scholarship is bewitched by novel findings—what Taleb dubs "neomania"—and researchers are driven by their need to publish, perverting their efforts and tainting the outcome. "How can knowledge be something you do for professional advancement?" he asked. But, you might counter, Taleb is a professor at a university who publishes in journals. It would be one thing if he were blogging from a cabin somewhere, but isn't he part of the problem he's identified?
Ah, but he doesn't publish papers to advance his career. They are technical addenda to his popular books. "I ban myself from publishing anything outside of these footnotes," he writes in Antifragile. Because of his success, he is not beholden to deans and committees or anyone else, for that matter. "You cannot rely on external confirmation and have a happy life," he told me. "I don't rely on external confirmation, and I have a happy life."
I wanted to know more about that happy life, which is why I flew to New York to meet Taleb. When he arrived at lunch, he was wearing a plain black shirt, black shorts, and sandals of some kind (not regular shoes, which, as stated earlier, he opposes). He writes in Antifragile that readers, upon meeting him, "have a rough time dealing with an intellectual who has the appearance of a bodyguard." I wouldn't have guessed bodyguard, though he is thicker—thanks to a newfound love of weightlifting—than he appeared in publicity shots for The Black Swan, published in 2007. Taleb has less hair these days, and more of it is gray. He speaks rapidly and conspiratorially, punctuating his remarks with "You see?"—though the way he says it is more imperative than interrogative. You will see.
We sat outside, where it was difficult to hear over the din from the street and the chatter of fellow diners. The waiter screwed up his order. Taleb seemed generally agitated and uncomfortable. That was understandable, I thought: He's been in his head, writing his opus, the book he believes is more significant than his big best seller, and then somebody starts poking at him before it's been delivered to the printer. That could put a person on edge. The double espresso he knocked back didn't help either.
After we ate, Taleb asked if I wanted to accompany him to a nearby bookstore. I said sure. When we arrived, he turned to me and asserted that any article I wrote should be in the form of a question-and-answer column. I bumbled a response, telling him that's not what I had in mind (indeed, in an e-mail, I had used the word "profile" twice). This was unacceptable to him. "Go write fiction then!" he exclaimed. "I haven't given you enough for a profile anyway!" We parted on bad terms and exchanged a few curt e-mails the next day. A planned follow-up—we were going to rendezvous at a restaurant in his neighborhood—didn't happen.
Taleb writes about storming out of meetings with publishers and interviews with radio stations. That usually happens when he feels he's been insulted. The publisher suggests he take speaking lessons or the radio host tells him his answer is too complicated. Perhaps I accidentally insulted him or didn't sufficiently appreciate his ideas. Or maybe my questions about his weightlifting and dietary habits were too intrusive. I don't know what set him off. But considering his history, maybe I should have seen it coming.Snapshots from Stan Musial’s last game, Sept. 29, 1963, when the Reds played the Cardinals at St. Louis:
Mass and McMahon
Musial attended Mass that Sunday morning at St. Raphael the Archangel Catholic Church near his St. Louis home. He drove to the ballpark with his friend, actor Horace McMahon, who was visiting from Connecticut, The Sporting News reported. McMahon had received an Emmy nomination for his role as a detective in the TV show “Naked City.” Musial was godfather to McMahon’s son.
Visit with Ducky
After parking his steel blue Cadillac, Musial entered the ballpark at 10:50 a.m. One of the first to greet him in the clubhouse was Joe Medwick, a slugger for the Cardinals from 1932-40. “Fellows,” Musial said to the reporters on scene, “this is the guy I replaced as regular left fielder 22 years ago.”
Salute to Shannon
When Cardinals outfielders Gary Kolb, 23, and Mike Shannon, 24, walked by, Musial asked them to stop and sit with him. With Kolb on one side of the retiring legend and Shannon on the other, Musial said to reporters, “And these are my protégés who’ll replace me next year.”
Sharp tune-up
Entering the field wearing the familiar No. 6 on his jersey, Musial went directly to the batting cage. Bill White stepped aside for Musial, who took his swings against Lloyd Merritt, a St. Louis native who pitched for the Cardinals in 1957. Musial hit Merritt’s last batting-practice toss onto the pavilion roof in right field.
Reds rooters
When he left the cage, Musial was greeted by Reds veterans Joe Nuxhall and Frank Robinson and rookie Pete Rose. Nuxhall and Robinson brought baseballs for Musial to sign. Rose shook hands with Musial and wished him well.
Diamonds are forever
During ceremonies before the game, Ken Boyer, the Cardinals’ captain, presented Musial with a gift from his teammates: a ring with six diamonds shaped in the number 6. In his book “Stan Musial: The Man’s Own Story,” Musial said, “Of all the gifts I’ve been given at one time or another, I believe I cherish most the ring … that was presented by my 1963 teammates. My world championship rings had been stolen from my house several years earlier.”
Feeling the strain
Musial opened the game in left field. In his 22-year Cardinals career, Musial played 929 games in left, the most of the three outfield positions. “My legs were wobbly from emotion and exhaustion as I trotted to the outfield to start my last game,” Musial said.
At-bat interruption
Facing Jim Maloney, a 23-game winner in 1963, Musial struck out on three pitches in the first inning. Musial didn’t swing at the first pitch. Umpire Al Barlick took the ball from catcher Johnny Edwards’ glove and gave it to Musial, who trotted over to a box seat and handed the ball to Sid Keener, director of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Musial fouled off the next pitch and watched a curve snap in for strike three. Said Musial: “As I returned to the dugout, trainer Bob Bauman growled, ‘You weren’t bearing down up there.’ ”
No no-hitter
Maloney struck out six of the first 10 batters. When Musial came up in the fourth, the Cardinals were hitless. “I crouched low, trying to forget all else except the giant pitcher and the ball he fired so fast,” Musial said. With the count 1-and-1, Musial swung at a fastball, low and inside, and drilled it to the right of Rose at second base for a single.
The final swing
With Curt Flood at second in a scoreless game, Musial batted against Maloney in the sixth. Shadows covered the batting area. On a 2-and-1 pitch, Maloney threw a curve. “I picked up the spin of the ball in time,” Musial said. “My wrists whipped the bat down and in.” Musial grounded a RBI-single to right, his 3,630th hit.
Kolb relieves
Manager Johnny Keane lifted Musial for a pinch-runner, Kolb. It was the ninth time Kolb had been used as a pinch-runner for Musial, 42, in 1963. Kolb scored in the inning on a sacrifice fly by Charlie James, giving St. Louis a 2-0 lead. In the clubhouse, Musial told reporters, “I feel pretty good. Everyone was pulling for a home run, but I’m a singles hitter, so it seemed appropriate that I should go out with a pair of ’em.”
Classy warriors
After being replaced by a pinch-hitter in the eighth, Maloney went to the Cardinals clubhouse to congratulate Musial. When Musial saw Maloney enter, he said aloud, “Here’s a real tough guy. He had me worried.” Said Maloney to reporters: “I was glad to see him go out hitting.”
That’s a winner
The Cardinals won, 3-2, in 14 innings. Boxscore The Cardinals had won by the same score in Musial’s first game on Sept. 17, 1941. Like his finale, Musial had two hits in his debut game.
Holy cow
After saying more farewells, Musial did a post-game interview with Harry Caray for radio station KMOX. Musial told Caray that Warren Spahn was the best pitcher he faced in his career and Willie Mays was the best all-around player.
Celebration
At 7:45 p.m., nine hours after he had arrived, Musial left the ballpark, stopped home briefly and went with his family to a party in his honor at the restaurant he owned with business partner Biggie Garagnani. Among those attending the party were U.S. senator Stuart Symington, Missouri governor John Dalton and St. Louis mayor Raymond Tucker.
The next day, Musial and his wife, Lil, took a flight to New York to attend the World Series. Musial, dressed in a suit and with Joe DiMaggio at his side, threw the ceremonial first pitch on Oct. 2 before Game 1 between the Dodgers and Yankees. From there, the Musials went to Fort Riley, Kan., to get their first look at their first grandchild, Jeff, who was born Sept. 10.
Previously: Stan Musial and the Cardinals’ most iconic momentsWhat's the most badass thing you've ever seen a man do? Crack a cinder block with his fist? Catch a crossbow bolt with his bare hands? Chew bubble gum with his ass cheeks? Well take that shit and multiply it by about a thousand, and you'll have the kind of things that other species do in their everyday routine. We're talking about creatures like the...
6 The Mantis Shrimp's Fists of Death
The mantis shrimp lays claim to owning the fastest and tastiest arms of the water bound kingdom. If Chuck Norris lived under water, he would drown and die. And a mantis shrimp would punch a hole in his carcass.
Those tiny boxing gloves aren't for gardening.
The speed of the mantis shrimp's punch is delivered at some 50 mph. Keep in mind the shrimp is doing this in water. If you've ever stupidly wrestled with friends at the beach, you realize how your devastating roundhouse winds up moving in slow motion as you slosh through the surf. Think how strong you'd have to be to punch through the water as fast as a moving vehicle.
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Wait, What?
The mantis shrimp's power comes from the two club-like arms it keeps behind its head. It locks those arms in place allowing energy to build up in the muscles. For an added "fuck you" there's an organic spring mechanism in the joint that adds extra force.
So when the local shrimp from Cobra Kai start shit, the mantis shrimp unleashes the force of the muscle which, when combined with the added oomph from the uncoiling spring, means the weapon is released at an acceleration which can reach 10,000 times the force of gravity. That's kind of like being punched by Mike Tyson in his prime, if his outstretched arm was attached to a meteor as it entered the atmosphere.
How Badass is That?
In captivity, the shrimp have been known to punch through aquarium glass, totally fucking up people's rugs. In fact, the punch of the mantis shrimp is so fast, it actually lowers the pressure of the water in its path which--conveniently for a badass sea-ninja who fancies some pre-cooked crab--boils the water around the punch. Steven Seagal's probably only done that once or twice at best.Apr 15, 2015; Toronto, Ontario, CAN; Charlotte Hornets forward Noah Vonleh (11) holds the ball as Toronto Raptors guard Greivis Vasquez (21) and Raptors forward Patrick Patterson (54) defend at the Air Canada Centre. The Hornets won 92-87. Mandatory Credit: John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports
After being traded to the Portland Trailblazers this offseason, the team and Indiana Hoosier Noah Vonleh himself hoped the change of scenery would benefit the young forward. So far, so good.
Stellar play during the Samsung Summer League in Las Vegas earned him All-League Second Team recognition. Joining him are:
Larry Drew II (New Orleans)
Emmanuel Mudiay (Denver)
Dwight Powell (Dallas)
Alan Williams (Houston)
The first team consisted of:
Kyle Anderson (San Antonio) – Summer League MVP
Seth Curry (New Orleans)
Doug McDermott (Chicago)
Norman Powell (Toronto)
T.J. Warren (Phoenix)
Through Portland’s summer league run, he played 29 minutes per game, averaging 17.2 points, 8.5 rebounds. He also made 50% of his three-point attempts.
The Trailblazers have a gaping hole at power forward with the departure of LaMarcus Aldridge, and they are hoping Vonleh is the future at the position. Obviously this excellent play was in the summer league, but regardless, it’s a positive sign. Vonleh has a high ceiling and we are starting to see how good he could end up being.PS4 Sells 0 Units in Brazil Due to Insane Asking Price
The PS4 is selling like hot-cakes in Europe right now, but what about South America?
Brazilian news outlet G1 is reporting that during the first 12 hours of the PS4's launch in Brazil no units have been sold. Reportedly, boxes have been left to collect dust at retailers across the country.
It's not necessarily that the console is unattractive, but rather that its price point is. Unlike the $399 Americans paid, or the £349.00 British price, Brazil has a PS4 price that equates to $1850 U.S. Dollars, making it the most expensive launch console in history.
Sony says the price is a result of import fees, and you can't shame it for trying to offer its new console to as many territories as possible. But really, nobody is going to buy any console at $1850 unless it's plated gold or prints $100 bills. Not now, not ever.In the wee hours of the morning, this morning, there was a great disturbance on the Internet, as if millions of shitposters suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. For about ten seconds.
What had happened? This:
Have resigned from A Voice for Men. Wish everybody there the best. — Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) July 22, 2015
Huh. That’s interesting.
But I’m not exactly stunned to hear that another Men’s Rightser has had what looks like a big falling out with the rather temperamental Paul Elam. Or perhaps that Elam has had a falling out with him?
Oh, sorry, I’m being told that Esmay is quitting “to look after his health” and to “take his activism in a different direction.”
That’s A Voice for Men’s explanation, anyway.
Esmay own explanation, which he posted in a Twitlonger shortly after his announcement, also mentions the health thing:
I am taking some time off, looking after my long-neglected health, and relaxing with family and friends.
But he also notes, a little enigmatically,
Unless there is some serious issue of life and limb that requires grand drama, it’s never a good idea to air philosophical and personal conflicts publicly. I have quit A Voice for Men because it was time to move on. That is all. I am on speaking terms with everybody.
It seems as though Esmay is, for once, trying to be diplomatic. But he doesn’t seem very good at it. “On speaking terms” is not exactly what you’d call a ringing endorsement of the Cult of Elam, which had utterly consumed Esmay’s life for a number of years.
Esmay promises that
I will also continue to be a shit-stirrer, but now, as a civilian. At least until I find my next home. 🙂
So with that, I would like to introduce We Hunted the Mammoth’s new Chief Operating Officer, Dean Esmay!
Just kidding. We Hunted the Mammoth’s chief operating officer is the one on the right here:
I look forward to the inevitable meltdown of the facade of amicability between Esmay and his former boss.
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Like this: Like Loading...Étienne-Jules Marey ( French: [maʁɛ]; 5 March 1830, Beaune, Côte-d'Or – 15 May 1904,[1] Paris) was a French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer.
His work was significant in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography and the science of laboratory photography. He is widely considered to be a pioneer of photography and an influential pioneer of the history of cinema. He was also a pioneer in establishing a variety of graphical techniques for the display and interpretation of quantitative data from physiological measurement.[2]
Biography [ edit ]
Flying pelican captured by Marey around 1882. He found a way to record several phases of movements in one photo
Marey started by studying blood circulation in the human body. Then he shifted to analyzing heart beats, respiration, muscles (myography), and movement of the body. To aid his studies he developed many instruments for precise measurements. For example, in 1859, in collaboration with the physiologist Auguste Chauveau and the watch manufacturer Breguet, he developed a wearable Sphygmograph to measure the pulse. This sphygmograph was an improvement on an earlier and more cumbersome design by the German physiologist Karl von Vierordt.[3] In 1869 Marey constructed a very delicate artificial insect to show how an insect flies and to demonstrate the figure-8 shape it produced during movement of its wings. Then he became fascinated by movements of air and started to study bigger flying animals, like birds. He adopted and further developed animated photography into a separate field of chronophotography in the 1880s. His revolutionary idea was to record several phases of movement on one photographic surface. In 1890 he published a substantial volume entitled Le Vol des Oiseaux (The Flight of Birds), richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, and diagrams. He also created stunningly precise sculptures of various flying birds.
Marey studied other animals too. He published La Machine animale in 1873 (translated as "Animal Mechanism"). The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge carried out his "Photographic Investigation" in Palo Alto, California, to prove[dubious – discuss] that Marey was right when he wrote that a galloping horse for a brief moment had all four hooves off the ground. Muybridge published his photos in 1879 and received some public attention.
Marey hoped to merge anatomy and physiology. To better understand his chronophotographic images, he compared them with images of the anatomy, skeleton, joints, and muscles of the same species. Marey produced a series of drawings showing a horse trotting and galloping, first in the flesh and then as a skeleton.
The presence and activity of Marey in Naples is well documented,[4] in particular thanks to the documentation preserved in the historical archive of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn. Marey began to travel to Naples presumably because of his relation with madame Vilbort, wife of Joseph Vilbort, the director of the French journal Le Globe. Madame Vilbort moved to Naples to cure her illness, thanks to the warm climate, and Marey followed her. Marey and madame Vilbort bought villa Maria in Posillipo in 1880. Marey accomplished in Naples part of his studies aimed at the realization of his pre-cinematographic tools and in the Dohrn zoological station studied the movement of fishes hosted in the aquarium's tanks. In a letter dated 1 November 1876 Marey requested the Stazione Zoologica to provide live ray fishes for his studies. Among the documentation that witnesses the collaboration of Marey with Anton Dohrn is the archive at the zoological station which preserves photos where the two appear together during an excursion and show Marey on board Dohrn's boat. The usage of the chronophotographic gun, which Marey used to aim at birds, but without shooting, appeared unusual to local people who referred to Maray sometimes as the "silly from Posillipo" ("lo scemo di Posillipo").[5]
Chronophotography [ edit ]
Marey's chronophotographic gun was made in 1882, this instrument was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, with all the frames recorded on the same picture. Using these pictures he studied horses, birds, dogs, sheep, donkeys, elephants, fish, microscopic creatures, molluscs, insects, reptiles, etc. Some call it Marey's "animated zoo". Marey also conducted the famous study about cats always landing on their feet. He conducted very similar studies with a chicken and a dog and found that they could do almost the same. Marey also studied human locomotion. He published another book Le Mouvement in 1894.
Marey also made movies. They were at a high speed (60 images per second) and of excellent image quality. His research on how to capture and display moving images helped the emerging field of cinematography.
Towards the end of his life he returned to studying the movement of quite abstract forms, like a falling ball. His last great work was the observation and photography of smoke trails. This research was partially funded by Samuel Pierpont Langley under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, after the two met in Paris at the Exposition Universelle (1900). In 1901 he was able to build a smoke machine with 58 smoke trails. It became one of the first aerodynamic |
and concentrated in a centralized Ministry of Education. In the late 1980s, the ministry was responsible for administration of schools, allocation of resources, setting of enrollment quotas, certification of schools and teachers, curriculum development (including the issuance of textbook guidelines), and other basic policy decisions. Provincial and special city boards of education still existed. Although each board was composed of seven members who were supposed to be selected by popularly elected legislative bodies, this arrangement ceased to function after 1973. Subsequently, school board members were approved by the minister of education.In high school they would call it year one grade (9th grader) and year 2 would be (10th grader) and so on.
Most observers agree that South Korea's spectacular progress in modernization and economic growth since the Korean War is largely attributable to the willingness of individuals to invest a large amount of resources in education: the improvement of "human capital." The traditional esteem for the educated man, now extends to scientists, technicians, and others working with specialized knowledge. Highly educated technocrats and economic planners could claim much of the credit for their country's economic successes since the 1960s. Scientific professions were generally regarded as the most prestigious by South Koreans in the 1980s.
Statistics demonstrate the success of South Korea's national education programs. In 1945 the adult literacy rate was estimated at 22 percent; by 1970 adult literacy was 87.6 percent[41] and, by the late 1980s, sources estimated it at around 93 percent.[41] Although only primary school (grades one through six) was compulsory, percentages of age-groups of children and young people enrolled in secondary level schools were equivalent to those found in industrialized countries, including Japan. Approximately 4.8 million students in the eligible age-group were attending primary school in 1985. The percentage of students going on to optional middle school the same year was more than 99 percent. Approximately 34 percent, one of the world's highest rates of secondary-school graduates attended institutions of higher education in 1987, a rate similar to Japan's (about 30 percent) and exceeding Britain's (20 percent).
Government expenditure on education has been generous. In 1975, it was 220 billion won,[41] the equivalent of 2.2 percent of the gross national product, or 13.9 percent of total government expenditure. By 1986, education expenditure had reached 3.76 trillion won, or 4.5 percent of the GNP, and 27.3 percent of government budget allocations.
Student activism [ edit ]
Student activism has a long and honorable history in Korea. Students in Joseon secondary schools often became involved in the intense factional struggles of the scholar-official class. Students played a major role in Korea's independence movement, particularly in March 1, 1919. Students protested against the regimes of Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Observers noted, however, that while student activists in the past generally embraced liberal and democratic values, the new generation of militants in the 1980s were far more radical. Most participants adopted some version of the minjung ideology but was also animated by strong feelings of popular nationalism and xenophobia.
The most militant university students, perhaps about 5 percent of the total enrollment at Seoul National University and comparable figures at other institutions in the capital during the late 1980s, were organized into small circles or cells rarely containing more than fifty members. Police estimated that there were 72 such organizations of varying orientation, having the change of curriculum and education system of South Korea people have been enriched in an imaginary way that makes them propel in all their studies.
Reforms in the 1980s [ edit ]
Following the assumption of power by General Chun Doo-hwan in 1980, the Ministry of Education implemented a number of reforms designed to make the system more fair and to increase higher education opportunities for the population at large. In a very popular move, the ministry dramatically increased enrollment at large.[4]
Social emphasis on education was not without its problems, as it tended to accentuate class differences. In the late 1980s, a college degree was considered necessary for entering the middle class; there were no alternative pathways of social advancement, with the possible exception of a military career, outside higher education. People without a college education, including skilled workers with vocational school backgrounds, often were treated as second-class citizens by their white-collar, college-educated managers, despite the importance of their skills for economic development. Intense competition for places at the most prestigious universities—the sole gateway into elite circles—promoted, like the old Confucian system, a sterile emphasis on rote memorization in order to pass secondary school and college entrance examinations. Particularly after a dramatic expansion of college enrollments in the early 1980s, South Korea faced the problem of what to do about a large number of young people staying in school for a long time, usually at great sacrifice to themselves and their families, and then faced with limited job opportunities because their skills were not marketable.
Great recession [ edit ]
With a slowing economy, a rigid and fast-changing job market as a result of the Financial crisis of 2007–08 and the demise of the Industrial Age, many young South Korean high school graduates are now realizing that high entrance examination and test scores for the promise of future career success did not carry the same weight as it once did.[42] In 2013, 43,000 South Koreans in their twenties, and 21,000 in their thirties lost their jobs.[19] According to a 2013 survey conducted by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training, nearly four out of every 10 young workers in their 20s and 30s said they were overeducated.[43][44] In 2013, fewer young South Koreans chose go on to university after finishing high school as the unemployment rate for university graduates continues to soar, falling income for college graduates continues to decline and the value of a college degree has now becoming increasingly in doubt.[45] Educational reforms initiated by the South Korean government have become more dynamic and that university is no longer the only guarantee of a career.[46][47] Government measures have also been prompted to encourage young unemployed college graduates to look at other employment possibilities such starting a business or seeking employment opportunities at smaller and medium size businesses.[48] Former President Lee Myung-Bak urged young unemployed job seekers to start looking at other employment possibilities with small and medium-sized businesses beyond large conglomerates.[48][49]
An oversaturated and overqualified labor market has resulted in shortages of skilled blue-collar labor and a lack of qualified vocational employees for small and medium-sized businesses, young South Koreans now realize that a college degree no longer guarantees a job as it once did.[46] With the nation's high university entrance rate, South Korea has produced an overeducated and underemployed labor force with many being unable find employment at the level of their education qualifications. In addition, a subsequent skills surplus has led to an overall decline in labour underutilization in vocational occupations.[44][50][51] In the country, 70.9 percent of high school graduates went on to university in 2014, the highest college attendance rate among the Organization for Economic and Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries.[14] In the third quarter of 2016, one out of three unemployed people in South Korea were university graduates, largely attributed to the combination of a protracted South Korean economic slowdown and so-called academic inflation.[52] Many young unemployed South Korean university graduates are now turning to vocational education such as skilled trade and technical schools and have simply opted out the national college entrance examination test in favor of entering straight into the workforce.[53] With dire employment prospects for university graduates, enthusiasm for tertiary education has also been waning, as less than 72% of South Korean high-school students went on to university in 2012, a sharp drop from a high of 84.6% in 2008. Other factors that attribute to this include demographic change and the current economic climate as well as financial burdens – particularly the cost of education has gone up dramatically with income growth for college graduates stagnating. According to 2012 employment trend research conducted by Statistics Korea reveals that college graduates' earnings are lower than those of high school graduates. Many traditional Korean families still continue to believe that a university education is the only route to a good well paying job despite mounting evidence to the contrary according to a McKinsey report, noting that the net present value of a university education now trails the value of a high school diploma, due to huge private education costs.[54][50][51] The cultural norms of South Korean parents continue to pressure their children to enter university and have even disregarded the phenomenon for declining income of college graduates where the income for university graduates has fallen that below of high school graduates as well as the fact that the unemployment rate for college graduates is higher than that of high-school graduates.[55][2][56] The country has also produced an oversupply of university graduates in South Korea where in the first quarter of 2013 alone, nearly 3.3 million South Korean university graduates were jobless, leading many graduates overqualified for jobs requiring less education.[32][57] Further criticism has been stemmed for causing labor shortages in various skilled blue-collar labor vocational occupations, where many of which go unfilled. With labor shortages in many skilled labor and vocational occupations, South Korean small and medium-sized businesses complain that they struggle to find enough skilled blue-collar workers to fill potential vocational job vacancies.[58] Despite strong criticism and research statistics pointing alternative career options such as vocational school often with good pay and greater employment prospects that rival the income and prospects of many professional jobs requiring a university degree, a number of South Korean parents still continue to pressure their children regardless of their aptitude to enter university rather than go to a vocational school.[2][56] In 2012, 93% of South Korean parents expected their children to attend university, but as societal attitudes change and reforms in the South Korean education system reform underway, more young South Koreans are starting to believe that they have to do what they like and what they enjoy in order to be happy to achieve success.[19][59]
With South Korea's bleak economic and employment prospects for its youth, President Park Geun-hye went out internationally to countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and Austria to address South Korea's more glaring employment needs including tackling the country's high youth employment rate and as well as reforming South Korea's education system.[60][61] In early 2015, Park Geun-Hye traveled to Switzerland to study the European apprenticeship system. By summer, the South Korean government mandated that all students in vocational high schools must also have an opportunity to be an apprentice. The government has also mandated an "employment first, university later" policy to encourage vocational graduates to work in industry and put off higher education until later.[62][63] Drawing inspiration from the vocational schools and apprenticeship models of Germany and Switzerland, many Meister schools have been established in South Korea to prepare students for careers earlier. The schools offer to teach students specialized industrial skills and job training to tailor the needs of respective South Korean industries such as automobile and mechanical manufacturing and shipbuilding.[64] Dual apprentice schools have also been introduced where students can work and study at the same time. High school students can go to school for a couple of days a week or a set period of the year or study at school for the rest with a stronger emphasis gaining employment skills than rather going to college. Many young South Koreans are now choosing their jobs tailored to their interests rather than blindly accepting career choices imposed by their parents and choosing jobs outside the conventional classroom.[62][65][66] With the changing dynamics in the global economy in the 21st century as well as the implementation of vocational education in the South Korean education system as an alternative to the traditional path of going to university, a good education from a prestigious university no longer guarantees a comfortable life, and one's status in society is no longer necessarily guaranteed by educational background. Since the rise of Meister schools and modern reforms in the South Korean education system, many young South Koreans are now realizing that one doesn't necessarily need a college degree to be successful in the workforce and enter the middle class, but instead the right skills. The establishment of Meister schools now shows South Koreans that there can be multiple pathways to socioeconomic and career success and that vocational school graduates can still be professionally and financially successful in South Korean society.[53] Educational reform modeled from Switzerland and Germany offers career alternatives besides the traditional university route allowing South Koreans to express occupational diversity and as well as redefine what is real achievement in South Korean society is.[67][17][38][39]
School grades [ edit ]
Note: All ages are in Western years, bracketed are according to age system in Korea.
Kindergarten [ edit ]
The number of private kindergartens have increased as a result of more women entering the workforce, growth in the number of nuclear families where a grandparent was often unavailable to take care of children, and the feeling that kindergarten might give children an "edge" in later educational competition. Many students in Korea start kindergarten at the Western age of three and will, therefore, continue to study in kindergarten for three or four years, before starting their 'formal education' in 'grade one' of primary school. Many private kindergartens offer their classes in English to give students a 'head-start' in the mandatory English education they would receive later in public school. Kindergartens often pay homage to the expectations of parents with impressive courses, graduation ceremonies, complete with diplomas and gowns. Korean kindergartens are expected to start teaching basic maths, reading and writing to children, including education on how to count, add, subtract, and read and write in Korean, and often in English and Chinese. Children in Korean kindergartens are also taught using games focused on education and coordination, such as "playing doctor" to teach body parts, food and nutrition, and work positions for adults. Songs, dances, and memorization are a big part of Korean kindergarten education.
Primary Education [ edit ]
Elementary schools (Korean: 초등학교, 初等學校, chodeung hakgyo) consists of grades one to six (age 8 to age 13 in Korean years—7 to 12 in western years). The South Korean government changed its name to the current form from Citizens' school (Korean: 국민학교, 國民學校, Gungmin hakgyo) in 1996. The former name was shortened from 황국신민학교, 皇國臣民學校 (Hwangguk sinmin hakgyo), which means school of the people who are subjects of the Empire (of Japan).
In elementary school, students learn the following subjects. The curriculum differs from grades 1-2 to grades 3-6.[68]
Grades 1–2:
We Are First Graders (Korean: 우리들은 1학년 ) (grade 1 only)
(Korean: ) (grade 1 only) Korean (listening, speaking, reading, writing)
Mathematics
Disciplined Life (Korean: 바른생활 )
(Korean: ) Sensible Life (Korean: 슬기로운생활 )
(Korean: ) Enjoyable Life (Korean: 즐거운생활 )
(Korean: ) Physical Education
Grades 3–6:
Usually, the class teacher covers most of the subjects; however, there are some specialised teachers in professions such as physical education and foreign languages, including English.
Those who wish to become a primary school teacher must major in primary education, which is specially designed to cultivate primary school teachers. In Korea, most of the primary teachers are working for public primary schools.
Because corporal punishment has been officially prohibited in every classroom since 2011, many teachers and some parents raised with corporal punishment are becoming more concerned about what they see as worsening discipline problems. However, some teachers infringe the law and raise their students with corporal punishment.[69]
Secondary education [ edit ]
In 1987, there were approximately 4,895,354 students enrolled in middle schools and high schools, with approximately 150,873 teachers. About 69 percent of these teachers were male. About 98% of Korean students finish secondary education.[70] The secondary-school enrollment figure also reflected changing population trends—there were 3,959,975 students in secondary schools in 1979. Given the importance of entry into higher education, the majority of students attended general or academic high schools in 1987: 1,397,359 students, or 60 percent of the total, attended general or academic high schools, as compared with 840,265 students in vocational secondary schools. Vocational schools specialized in a number of fields: primarily agriculture, fishery, commerce, trades, merchant marine, engineering, and the arts.[citation needed]
Competitive entrance examinations at the middle-school level were abolished in 1968. Although as of the late 1980s, students still had to pass noncompetitive qualifying examinations, they were assigned to secondary institutions by lottery, or else by location within the boundary of the school district. Secondary schools, formerly ranked according to the quality of their students, have been equalized, with a portion of good, mediocre, and poor students being assigned to each one. The reform, however, did not equalize secondary schools completely. In Seoul, students who performed well in qualifying examinations were allowed to attend better quality schools in a "common" district, while other students attended schools in one of five geographical districts. The reforms applied equally to public and private schools whose enrollments were strictly controlled by the Ministry of Education.
In South Korea, the grade of a student is reset as the student progresses through elementary, middle and high school. To differentiate the grades between students, one would often state the grade based on the level of education he/she is in. For example, a student in the first year of middle school would be referred to as "First grade in Middle School (중학교 1학년 中學校 1學年)".
Middle schools are called Jung hakgyo (중학교, 中學校) in Korean, which literally means middle school. High schools are called Godeung hakgyo (고등학교, 高等學校) in Korean, literally meaning "high school".
Middle school [ edit ]
Middle schools in South Korea consist of three grades. Most students enter at age 12 or 13 and graduate at age 15 or 16 (western years). These three grades correspond roughly to grades 7–9 in the North American system and Years 8–10 in the English and Welsh system.
Middle school in South Korea marks a considerable shift from primary school, with students expected to take studies and school much more seriously. At most middle schools regulation uniforms and haircuts are enforced fairly strictly, and some aspects of students' lives are highly controlled. Like in primary school, students spend most of the day in the same homeroom classroom with the same classmates; however, students have different teachers for each subject. Teachers move around from classroom to classroom, and few teachers apart from those who teach special subjects have their own rooms to which students come. Homeroom teachers (담임교사, RR: damim gyosa) play a very important role in students' lives.
Most middle school students take seven lessons a day, and in addition to this usually have an early morning block that precedes regular lessons and an eighth lesson specializing in an extra subject to finish the day. Unlike with high school, middle school curricula do not vary much from school to school. Korean, Algebra, Geometry, English, social studies, and science form the core subjects, with students also receiving instruction in music, art, PE, korean history, ethics, home economics, secondary language, technology, and Hanja. What subjects students study and in what amount may vary from year to year. All regular lessons are 45 minutes long. Before school, students have an extra block, 30-or-more minutes long, that may be used for self-study, watching Educational Broadcast System (EBS) broadcasts, or for personal or class administration. Beginning in 2008, students attended school from Monday to Friday, and had a half-day every 1st, 3rd, and 5th (calendar permitting) Saturday of the month. Saturday lessons usually included Club Activity (CA) lessons, where students could participate in extracurricular activities. However, these classes were also not used well either. Many schools have regular classes except having extracurricular activities because schools and parents want students to study more. However, from 2012 onwards, primary and secondary schools, including middle schools, will no longer hold Saturday classes. However, still many schools have Saturday classes illegally because the parents want their children to go to school and study.[71]
In 1969, the government abolished entrance examinations for middle school students, replacing it with a system whereby primary school students within the same district are selected for middle schools by a lottery system. This has the effect of equalizing the quality of students from school to school, though schools in areas where students come from more privileged backgrounds still tend to outperform schools in poorer areas. Until recently most middle schools have been same-sex, though in the past decade most new middle schools have been mixed, and some previously same-sex schools have converted to mixed as well. Some schools have converted to same-sex due to pressure from parents who thought that their children would study better in single-sex education.
As with primary schools, students pass from grade to grade regardless of knowledge or academic achievement, the result being that classes often have students of vastly differing abilities learning the same subject material together. In the final year of middle school examination scores become very important for the top students hoping to gain entrance into the top high schools, and for those in the middle hoping to get into an academic rather than a technical or vocational high school. Otherwise, examinations and marks only matter insofar as living up to a self-enforced concept of position in the school ranking system. There are some standardized examinations for certain subjects, and teachers of academic subjects are expected to follow approved textbooks, but generally middle school teachers have more flexibility over curricula and methods than teachers at high school.
More than 95% of the middle school students also attend independent owned, after-school tutoring agencies known as hagwon, and many receive extra instruction from private tutors. The core subjects, especially the cumulative subjects of Korean, English and math, receive the most emphasis. Some hagwon specializing in just one subject, and others offer all core subjects, constituting a second round of schooling every day for their pupils. Indeed, some parents place more stress on their children's hagwon studies than their public school studies. Additionally, many students attend academies for things such as martial arts or music. The result of all this is that many middle school students, like their high school counterparts, return from a day of schooling well after sunset. The average South Korean family spends 20% percent of its income on after-hours cram schools, more spending per capita on private tutoring than any other country.[72][73][74][75][76]
High school [ edit ]
High schools in South Korea teach students for three years, from first grade (age 15–17) to third grade (age 17–19), and students commonly graduate at age 18 or 19. High school students are commonly expected to study increasingly long hours each year moving toward graduation, to become competitive and be able to enter attractive universities in Korea that almost all parents and teachers want students to enter. Many high school students wake and leave home in the morning at 5 am. When the school is over at 4 pm, they go to a studying room in the school or to a library to study instead of going home. This is called 'Yaja', which literally means 'evening self-study'. They don't need to go home to eat dinner since most schools provide paid dinner for students. After finishing yaja (usually ends at 10 pm, but later than 11 pm at some schools), they return home after studying, then return to specialty study schools (which are called Hagwon) often till 2 am, from Monday to Friday. In addition, they often study on weekends.
The Yaja had not been really'self' study for more than 30 years; all high school students were forced to do it. From the 2010s, the Ministry of Education has encouraged high schools to free students of yaja and to allow them do it whenever they want, and many normal public high schools near Seoul are now no longer forcing students do it. But private high schools, special-purpose high schools (such as science high schools, foreign language high schools), or normal schools far from Seoul are still forcing students to do yaja.
It is a commonly known saying in Korea that 'If you sleep three hours a night, you may get into a top 'SKY university;' If you sleep four hours each night, you may get into another university; if you sleep five or more hours each night, especially in your last year of high school, forget about getting into any university.'. Accordingly, many high school students in their final year do not have any free time for holidays, birthdays or vacations before the NCATs (National College Scholastic Aptitude Test, Korean: 수능, 修能), which are university entrance exams held by the Ministry of Education. Surprisingly, some high school students are offered chances to travel with family to enjoy fun and relaxing vacations, but these offers are often refused on the first suggestion by the students themselves, and increasingly on later additional trips if any, due to peer influences and a fear of 'falling behind' in classes. Many high school students seem to prefer staying with friends and studying, rather than taking a break. The idea of'skipping classes' for fun is extremely rare in Korea. Rebellious students will often stay in class and use smartphones connected to the internet to chat with friends behind the teacher's back during classes.
High schools in Korea can be divided into specialty tracks that accord with a student's interest and career path or a normal - state high school. For special high schools, there are science (Science high school), foreign language, international and art specialty high schools to which students can attend by passing entrance examinations which are generally highly competitive. These schools are called special-purpose high schools. And there are autonomous private high schools, which are relatively free of the policy of the Ministry of Education. Also, there are schools for gifted students. Tuition of many special-purpose high schools, autonomous private high schools, and schools for gifted students are highly expensive (the average of tuition of special-purpose or autonomous private high school is 5,614 USD per year.[77] One of schools for gifted students is 7,858 USD per year[78]). There are few schools that require more than what's calculated in the article as an average, Cheong Shim international Academy, Hankuk Academy of Foreign studies, Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, Ha-Na academy are known for their expensive tuition, But at the same time, these schools are also known for its students high academic achievements and college results mostly sending more than 50% of their students to SKY university yearly. Other types of high schools include public normal high schools and private normal high schools, both with or without entrance examinations. These high schools do not report to specialize in a field but are more focused on sending their students to top and popular colleges.
However, since the appearance of special-purpose, autonomous private and international schools and schools for gifted students, almost every normal high school have sent few students to top and popular college. Because those schools' infrastructure, teaching ability of teachers, and other activities provided by them which improves students' school record so that they can enter top colleges were absolutely better than normal schools' ones. This means those schools won the competition of sending students to universities; if you are normal high school student, it's hard to enter SKY. So excellent students and their parents avoid to enter normal high school and tried to enter special-purpose, autonomous private, and schools for gifted students. Therefore, only students whose grade is normal or too low to enter vocational school entered normal high school. Then excellent students avoid entering the normal high schools because the academic level of students in normal school is low. This vicious cycle continued, and normal schools got slumisim so the cycle got even more vicious. As a result, since the admission committee of top universities don't like to admit students from normal schools which got slum, they started to prefer to admit students from special-purpose, autonomous private, or international schools or schools from gifted students mainly. So the cycle got worse. This made the competition of entering special-purpose, autonomous private, and international schools and schools for gifted students so hard that the competition got as hard as one of entering top colleges.
For students who do not wish a college education, vocational schools specializing in fields such as technology, agriculture or finance are available, such that students are employable right after graduation. Around 20% of high school students are in vocational high schools.[79] The treatment to those who graduated vocational schools is highly bad.
On noting the schedule of many high school students, it is not unusual for them to arrive home from school at midnight or even as late as 3 am after intensive "self-study" sessions supported by the school or parents. The Korean government has tried to crack down on such serious study habits in order to allow a more balanced system, and fined many privately run specialty study institutes (Hagwon) for running classes as late (or as early) as 2 am. To solve this problem, the Korean government made a law that bans hagwons from running classes after 10:00 pm, which is often not conformed to. Some such institutes also offer early morning classes for students to attend before going to school in the morning.
The normal government school curriculum is often noted as rigorous, with as many as 16 or so subjects. Most students choose to also attend privately run profit-making institutes known as hagwon (學院, Korean: 학원) to boost their academic performance. Core subjects include Korean, English and mathematics, with adequate emphasis on social and physical science subjects. Students do not typically ask questions in the classroom, but prefer to memorise details. It is critical to note that the type and level of subjects may differ from school to school, depending on the degree of selectivity and specialisation of the school. Specialty, optional, expensive, study schools help students memorise questions and answers from previous years' CAT tests (since August 1993) and universities' interview questions.
High school is not mandatory, unlike middle school education in Korea. However, according to a 2005 study of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries, some 97% of South Korea's young adults do complete high school. This was the highest percentage recorded in any country.[80] However, this is mainly due to the fact that there is no such thing as a failing grade in Korea, and most graduate as long as they attend school a certain number of days.
As it stands, the Korean secondary system of education is highly successful in preparing students for teacher-centered education such as that often used to teach mathematics since the transfer of information is mostly one way, from teacher to student. However, this does not hold true for classroom environments where students are expected to take on self-reliant roles wherein, for the most part, active and creative personalities seem to lead to success.[81]
It is becoming ever more evident that active student use of the English language in Korean high schools is increasingly necessary for the purposes of helping the students enter top universities in Korea as well as abroad.[82]
Vocational [ edit ]
South Korea once had a strong vocational education system that it rebuilt its shattered economy after the Korean War. As the university degree grew in prominence to employers during the 1970s and 1980s, the shift to a more knowledge-based rather than an industrial economy resulted vocational education shifting in favor towards university degree for many young South Koreans and their parents. In the 1970s and 1980s, vocational education in South Korea was less than socially acceptable, yet it was another pathway to succeed in obtaining a steady job with a decent income as well as elevate their socioeconomic status, yet many vocational graduates were scorned and stigmatized by their college educated managers despite the importance of their skills for economic development.[83][84]
With South Korea's high university entrance rate, the perception of vocational educational still remains in doubt in the minds of many South Koreans. In 2013, only 18 percent of students were enrolled in vocational education programs as it was due to the prestige of university—affluent families that were able to afford the tutoring that is now required for students to pass the notoriously difficult college entrance exam and be able to attend university. With the pervasive bias against vocational education, vocational students are labeled as "underachievers", lack a formal higher educational background, and are often looked down upon as vocational jobs are known in Korea as the "3Ds" dirty, demeaning, and dangerous. In response, the South Korean government increased the number of spots in universities and the rate of university enrollment was 68.2 percent, an increase of 15 percent over 2014. As a result, to boost the positive image of vocational training, the South Korean government has been collaborating with countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and Austria to examine the innovative solutions that are being implemented to improve vocational education, training, and career options for young South Koreans as alternative to the traditional path of going to university.[83][85]
According to a 2012 research report from The McKinsey Global Institute reckons that the lifetime value of a college graduate’s improved earnings no longer justifies the expense required to obtain the degree and have called on the need for more vocational education to counteract the human cost of performance pressure and the high unemployment rate among the country's university-educated youth. The South Korean government, schools, and industry with assistance from the Swiss government and industry are now revamping and modernizing the country's once strong vocational education sector with a network of vocational schools called "Meister Schools". The purpose of the Meister schools is to reduce the country's shortage of vocational occupations such as auto mechanics, plumbers, welders, boilermakers, electricians, carpenters, millwrights, machinists and machine operators as many of the positions go unfilled.[86][87] In spite of the country’s high unemployment rate during the Great Recession, secondary vocational school graduates have been successful in navigating the workforce as they possess relevant skill sets that are in high demand in the South Korean economy.[88]
Negative perception and stigmatization of vocational education continues to be the largest challenge in South Korea. The government is encouraging younger students to visit and see the programs for themselves firsthand to change their perception. Those in doubt on the quality of vocational education are encouraged to spend time working in industry during school vacations so they are up-to-date on current industry practices. Meister schools are continuing to be proving to be a good influence in changing the opinion of vocational education yet only 15,213 (5 percent) of high school students are enrolled in Meister schools with a lack of places unable to meet the demand despite a 100 percent employment rate. Meister students are now using these schools as an alternative path besides going to university; if a student works in industry for three years after graduating from a Meister, they are exempt from the extremely difficult university entrance exam.[83] Nonetheless, the perception of vocational education is changing and slowly increasing in popularity as participating students are working in adult jobs and learning real skills that are highly valued in the current marketplace as vocational school graduates have been swamped with job offers in an otherwise slow economy.[83] The initiative of Meister schools has even helped youth secure jobs at conglomerates such as Samsung over their peers who graduated from elite universities.[46] South Korea has also streamlined its small and medium-sized business sector along German lines to ease dependence on the large conglomerates ever since it began introducing Meister schools into its education system.[89]
Tertiary education [ edit ]
History [ edit ]
Some form of higher education has existed continuously in South Korea since the 4th century.
The development of higher education was influenced since ancient times. During the era of King So-Su-Rim in the kingdom of Goguryeo, Tae-Hak, the national university, taught the study of Confucianism, literature and martial arts. In 551, Silla which was one of three kingdoms including Goguryeo founded Guk-Hak and taught cheirospasm. It also founded vocational education that taught astronomy and medicine. Goryeo continued Silla’s program of study. Seong-gyun-gwan in the Chosun Dynasty period was a higher education institute of Confucianism and for government officials.
Today there are colleges and universities whose courses of study extend from 4 to 6 years. In addition, there are vocational colleges, industrial universities, open universities and universities of technology. There are day and evening classes, classes during vacation and remote education classes.[90] The number of institutes of higher education varied consistently from 419 in 2005, to 405 in 2008, to 411 in 2010.
Private universities account for 87.3% of total higher educational institutions. Industrial universities account for 63.6% and vocational universities account for 93.8%.[clarification needed] These are much higher than the percentage of public institutes.[91]
Entrance requirements [ edit ]
Students have the option of participating in either 수시 (su-shi, early decision plans for college) or 정시 (jeong-shi, regular admissions). Students will have to take the College Scholastic Ability Test (colloquially known as 수능 Su-neung). The Korean College Scholastic Ability Test has five sections: Korean Ability, Mathematical Ability, English Ability, various "elective" subjects in the social and physical sciences, and 'Second Foreign Languages or Chinese Characters and Classics'. Unlike the American SAT, this test can only be taken once a year and requires intensive studying. Students who perform below their expectations on the test and choose to defer college entrance for one year in order to try and achieve a higher score on another attempt are called jaesuseng. Every year some students commit suicide because they are pessimistic of the scores they got in su-neung.
For Korean university admissions, college scholastic ability tests, student’s grade books and university regulated examinations are evaluated. The student’s grade book contains an overall record of their high school activity, including voluntary work. College scholastic ability tests include language, mathematics, English, social and natural sciences, job research and a second foreign language. The job research section applies only to students of vocational schools. The second foreign language requirement applies only to students who pursued a liberal arts curriculum as opposed to natural sciences.
Because college entrance depends upon ranking high in objectively graded examinations, high school students face an "examination hell", a harsh regimen of endless cramming and rote memorization of facts that is incomparably severe.[92] Korean students study 16 hours more each week than the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) average.[70] Unlike the Confucian civil service examinations of the Choson Dynasty, their modern reincarnation is a matter of importance not for an elite, but for the substantial portion of the population with middle-class aspirations. In the late 1980s, over one-third of college-age |
100-run stand between Kohli and Dilshan off 8.5 overs. By the time Kohli fell, he had reduced the equation to 50 off the last five overs, but RCB's light-weight middle order gave the Redbacks a chance. Nathan Lyon piled on the pressure with a four-run 16th over, but Tait ceded the advantage with two sixes in the 17th, though he managed to dismiss Saurabh Tiwary. The next over from Aaron O'Brien also produced two sixes and a wicket, making it 18 required off 12 balls. Tait then lasered Dilshan's stumps with a stunning yorker and got Daniel Vettori to miscue, before completing his five-for with Raju Bhatkal's wicket. That set up the last-over climax, Christian blinked after five balls, and Karthik held his nerve to complete the first win for an IPL side against an Australian team.
The performances from Tait and Karthik dominated the ending, but the contest got its substance from Harris and Kohli. Both produced innings that had no business featuring in an unabashed exhibition for T20 batting. Harris' effort stood out for the shots he didn't play - he went almost 18 overs without trying to hit a six, and yet coasted to a century with time to spare. Kohli's was elevated by the shots he chose to play. Faced with an asking-rate nearing 11, and with Gayle dismissed, Kohli unfurled a series of astonishingly correct strokes.
Equally telling were the chalk-and-cheese support acts from Ferguson and Dilshan. With the spinners pulling things back after Harris' Powerplay boundary blitz, Ferguson took his time settling in before opening up in style. Dilshan, on the other hand, ignited RCB's chase with a series of outrageous strokes, which included a couple of trademark scoops.
Gayle was more subdued at the start, but he gradually found his range to muscle three sixes, before Michael Klinger caught him in the deep even as he collided grievously with Tom Cooper. Kohli walked in like he belonged in the cauldron, and opened his account with a pulled six through wide long-on. The slowness of the pitch and the variations of the Redbacks attack could not stop him from hitting through the line, and repeatedly in front of the wicket. He charged out to O'Brien and launched him with the turn over long-off, before carving Richardson for the shot of the day - an inside-out six into the stands behind extra-cover. He then gave Harris a taste of his own medicine, taking him for two sixes and three fours in the 13th over to put RCB on course for a heist.
The script was completely different in the first half of the match as, for the second night on the trot, an IPL side took a hiding from an Australian batsman. Aravind's pathetic lengths made this considerably easy - he finished with figures of 4-0-69-0, the second worst in T20 history - but that could not take any credit away from Harris.
The floodgates opened in the second over, when Aravind sent down a series of slow freebies angled into the hitting zone. Harris gratefully opened up his stance and carved boundaries straight, square and fine through the off side to set the Redbacks on their way. Kohli missed a run-out in the next over, and Harris celebrated by smashing seven of his next eight balls for fours. Vettori daringly persisted with Aravind for the fourth over, only to see him repeat his predictable lengths from either side of the stumps. Harris indulged himself to move to 43 off 19 balls by the fourth over, and Vettori was left playing catch-up for the remaining 16.
With the spinners coming on, Harris settled into cruise-mode, while Ferguson assuredly got his eye in. Just when the momentum seemed to be flagging a touch Aravind returned, and the Redbacks resumed their run-glut. Having taken two fours and a six off Aravind's 16th over, Ferguson thumped Nannes emphatically for a six off the first ball off the 17th. He holed out in the 18th over, prompting Harris to finally attempt a big hit. He pounded Bhatkal over midwicket for his first six, before dumping Nannes behind square-leg to bring up the century. Incredibly, Aravind got the 20th over, and Christian duly bludgeoned five more fours to take the Redbacks to 214.
Twenty overs later, Christian and Aravind had their roles reversed. And how.
Nitin Sundar is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.flashback
April 2013 show with guest David Herzog and Paul Keith Davis nuclear war after financial crash. russian insider planned financial crash followed by sneak nuke attack.
WorldTruthTV A Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) “urgent bulletin” being sent to Embassies around the world today is advising both Russian citizens and companies to begin divesting their assets from Western banking and financial institutions “immediately” as Kremlin fears grow that both the European Union and United States are preparing for the largest theft of private wealth in modern history.According to this “urgent bulletin,” this warning is being made at the behest of Prime Minister Medvedev who warned against the Western banking systems actions against EU Member Cyprus by stating :“All possible mistakes that could be made have been made by them, the measure that was proposed is of a confiscation nature, and unprecedented in its character. I can’t compare it with anything but … decisions made by Soviet authorities … when they didn’t think much about the savings of their population. But we are living in the 21st century, under market economic conditions. Everybody has been insisting that ownership rights should be respected.”Medvedev’s statements echo those of President Putin who, likewise, warned about the EU’s unprecedented private asset grab in Cyprus calling it “ unjust, unprofessional, and dangerous. ”In our 17 March report “Europe Recoils In Shock After Bankster Raid, US Warned Is Next” we noted how Russian entities have €23-31 billion ($30-$40) in cross-border loans to Cypriot companies tied to Moscow, and €9 billion ($12 billion) on deposit with Cypriot banks [as compared to the €127 billion ($166 billion) being kept in similar circumstances by 60 of the United States largest corporations in offshore accounts to avoid paying American taxes ] which are in danger of being confiscated by EU banksters.Unbowed by the misery they have inflicted upon the entire continent, however, and in spite of Russian warnings, European Union officials hardened their stance against Cyprus today by announcing that if the Cypriot government did not allow the raiding of private bank accounts by Monday they would be forced to destroy their banks, which remain closed for the seventh straight day and have no signs of opening soon.In an editorial agreeing with Russian leaders anger against the EU over Cyprus, Canada’s Globe and Mail News Service further writes
“The parliament of Cyprus was right this week to reject a proposal to confiscate money from modest-sized bank deposits. The idea was a reductio ad absurdum of the euro zone’s policy on the sovereign debt of some of its member-countries.
It would be better for the government of Cyprus to default outright on some of its obligations rather than to seize part of the savings of the proverbial widows and orphans, as well as retirees or those approaching retirement – while purporting to levy a tax. This is especially true in a country that has deposit insurance for up to €100,000, in order to protect small savers.
Until a few years ago, Cyprus – which is really the ethnically Greek section of Cyprus, the Turkish section being a de facto protectorate of Turkey – had a fiscal surplus, but its close relationship to Greece resulted in a downturn when Greece fell into a severe recession. The government’s debt in itself is still manageable, but Cypriot banks have become shaky because of their loans to Greece.”
In the face of massive popular outrage, however, Cypriot MPs spectacularly voted earlier this week against the EU plan to steal their bank depositors money, thus leaving the Euro Zone reeling, a situation that was, in fact, created by European banksters who had forced Cyprus banks to lend money to nearly bankrupt Greece in the first place.
Even worse may be what is in store for the Americans, who on 31 January lost an unlimited US government guarantee that was granted on over $1.5 trillion of their bank deposits during the 2008 financial crisis to assure skittish customers that their cash was safe.
According to Kremlin sources, though, President Obama’s sudden visit to Israel, the first he has made since being elected in 2008, was to personally warn top Israelis of his regimes “plan” to begin confiscating his citizen’s bank deposits too.
Interesting to note is that the Obama regimes “master plan” to steal their citizen’s wealth that is no longer protected was detailed by the global management consulting giant, and the world’s leading advisor on business strategy, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) who in their 2011 September report titled Collateral Damage: Back to Mesopotamia? The Threat of Debt Restructuring warned of the US governments plan confiscate up to 30% of not just the Americans people bank accounts, but also of their other wealth.
The highly respected Zero Hedge financial newsletter in commenting on this dire BCG report grimly stated:
“Denial. Denial is safe. Comforting. Religiously and relentlessly abused by politicians who don’t want nor can face reality. A word synonymous with “muddle through.” Ah yes, that “muddle through” which so many C-grade economists and pundits believe is the long-term status quo for the US and the world just because it worked for Japan for the past three decades, or, said otherwise, “just because.”
Well, too bad. As the following absolutely must read report, which comes not from some trader of dubious credibility interviewed by BBC, nor even from an impassioned executive from a doomed Italian bank, but from consultancy powerhouse Boston Consulting Group confirms, the “muddle through” is dead. And now it is time to face the facts.
What facts? The facts which state that between household, corporate and government debt, the developed world has $20 trillion in debt over and above the sustainable threshold by the definition of “stable” debt to GDP of 180%.
The facts according to which all attempts to eliminate the excess debt have failed, and for now even the Fed’s relentless pursuit of inflating our way out this insurmountable debt load have been for nothing.
The facts which state that the only way to resolve the massive debt load is through a global coordinated debt restructuring (which would, among other things, push all global banks into bankruptcy) which, when all is said and done, will have to be funded by the world’s financial asset holders: the middle-and upper-class, which, if BCS is right, have a ~30% one-time tax on all their assets to look forward to as the great mean reversion finally arrives and the world is set back on a viable path.
But not before the biggest episode of “transitory” pain, misery and suffering in the history of mankind. Good luck, politicians and holders of financial assets, you will need it because after Denial comes Anger, and only long after does Acceptance finally arrive.”
To the evidence that the masses of Americans or Europeans average citizens will begin protecting themselves against this apocalyptic outcome their remains little evidence as their so-called “mainstream” media continues to cover-up this coming catastrophe. But, and as Russia has now warned, the time for protecting oneself is fast running out, and the only survivors will be those who listened.
Source:
http://www.eutimes.net
related news-Russian Pacific Fleet Warships to Enter MediterraneanThis afternoon Donald Trump received one of his worst political defeats yet, as his administration’s beleaguered Obamacare replacement was kicked within an inch of its life to a delayed vote because literally everybody on the planet hates it. This was partially due to the fact that Trump’s proposed replacement was an impossibility, and also an acknowledgment that, as Trump himself inimitably put it recently, health care is much more complicated than he initially understood. Also, perhaps Obamacare is a flawed but functioning and improving replacement to a broken system that was only vilified by an obstructionist, idea-less Republican party. Who knows!
Still, surprisingly, Trump has not responded to this setback by lashing out on Twitter or hunkering down with Paul Ryan to strategize a new bill that might better serve Americans, or, more specifically, the incredibly small slice of rich people that they consider Americans. No, instead Donald Trump has decided to have a good day. He is presently sitting in a big rig on the White House driveway pretending to be a truck driver. He is honking the horn and having a nice time. Evidence:
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Perhaps the truck was placed in the driveway as a distraction to keep Trump away from Twitter, or perhaps it was a reward for having been a good boy. This morning, many wondered why he was newly declaring his love for trucks:
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That question has now been answered. However, here’s a new question, relevant to the above: Has Donald Trump ever even driven a car?UKIP’s ethnic minority poster girl Sanya-Jeet Thandi has sensationally quit the party, slamming them for “descending into a form of racist populism”. The 21 year old LSE student claims that: “This anti-immigrant campaign undermines Ukip’s claim not to be a racist party. They are turning the election into a game of “us” and “them”. Well, I am with “them””:
“Yes, Ukip is still a relatively young party. No, that is not an excuse to allow racists to stand for election. Nor is it an excuse to exploit the ignorance in British society and indulge the racist vote by telling them “they’ll take your jobs”. Sorry Ukip, you’ve lost another vote.”
A regular on the airwaves, Thandi had been the TV front woman of UKIP’s youth movement for the last three years and was described by Nigel Farage as the ‘future face of UKIP’. This could be explosive.AT&T stores are being told to send back initial shipments of the Nexus 6 due to a software bug that Motorola has identified, according to multiple sources.
The bug renders a black screen and fails to connect to service when the device is powered on, essentially leaving the device useless. Only the initial batch of AT&T Nexus 6s were impacted and Motorola is currently working on shipments with corrected software. Unfortunately for customers, that means AT&T stores may not have Nexus 6 stock for a least a few days. As far as we know, this is only an issue with the AT&T units.
If you have experienced this issue, you should probably take your phone in to have it replaced by AT&T. At this time, we have yet to hear from anyone who has experienced the issue, so it may not be all that widespread.
At this time, AT&T will still accept Direct Fulfillment orders, which is there method of ordering a Nexus 6 for you.
Also, Best Buy is now selling the AT&T version of the Nexus 6, so you could always check there if an AT&T store is out.
Update: Since many are asking, no, we do not believe this has anything to do with the Nexus 6 outside of the AT&T units. We are talking specifically about Nexus 6 units that were sent to AT&T, which would be the branded AT&T models with all of AT&T’s carrier additions.Xeer (pronounced /ħeːr/) is the traditional legal system of Somalia, and one of the three systems from which formal Somali law draws its inspiration, the others being civil law and Islamic law.[1] It is believed to pre-date Islam, although it was influenced by Islam and retains many of the faith's conservative elements. Under this system, elders, known as the xeer begti serve as mediator judges and help settle court cases, taking precedent and custom into account.[2] Xeer is polycentric in that different groups within Somali society have different interpretations of xeer.
Application of xeer [ edit ]
Somali society is traditionally structured around a clan based system, subdivided into sub-clans, then lineages, and finally diyya groupings. These groups are bound together either by family ties or contract. Xeer justice usually revolves around the latter groups, as these are the smallest. In these groups, each member is responsible for the crimes of another, and must accordingly bear some fraction of any decided punishment. Within this system, only the victim or immediate family of a victim can bring criminal proceedings to xeer mediation. If the victim is a man, his father, brothers, or uncles can bring complaints forward. If the victim is a woman, complaints can be brought forward by the men in her family or the men in her husband's family.[3]
In xeer, crimes are defined in terms of being transgressions against property rights. Justice is directed in the form of material compensation to the victim. If the accused is found guilty, some form of material restitution must be paid. If restitution cannot be given, a diyya retribution is due, measured in terms of livestock (usually healthy female camels), to be paid to the victim or the victim's family. There is no concept of imprisonment under xeer. In some cases, elders may advise that neither side seeks restitution or retribution. The verdict is enforced by the victim's family or else by all able-bodied clansmen within the area wherein the verdict is to be executed.[3]
Xeer judges are made up of the heads of extended families. These family heads are chosen for their knowledge of law and wisdom, but otherwise there is no formal training, and each judge is allowed to formulate their own doctrines and legal principles. Multiple judges are chosen to preside over each case by the involved parties, with this delegation being called an "ergo".[4] The number of judges involved in a case is usually around ten, though it can be as few as two.[2]
In each case, the goal is to reach consensus between the parties. Arbitration traditionally takes place under a large tree, and the mediators ask each of the parties to submit to the ruling of the judges. In modern times, meeting halls are often used as opposed to sitting under a tree.[2] Each party has the right to appoint a representative to speak on its behalf, while a recorder loudly repeats any important points that are made. If a fact is disputed, its veracity must be obtained by the testimony of three witnesses. If this cannot be done, an oath must be sworn. Should proceedings become heated, the presiding judge may order a recess, wherein both parties discuss issues relating to the case in small informal groups. Once the mediation has been decided, an appeal may be requested, although this must be agreed to by all parties.[3]
Principles of xeer [ edit ]
Different groups within Somali society undertake oral agreements with each other to define xeer law.[2] Despite this informal nature, there is a series of generally accepted principles, agreements, and ideas that constitute xeer, referred to collectively as "xissi adkaaday". These are: the payment of diyya by the collective group (clan, sub-clan, lineage, or diyya group) from which an offender originates as compensation for the crimes of murder, bodily assault, theft, rape, and defamation of character, given to the victim or victim's family; the protection of vulnerable or respected members of society such as the elderly, women, children, poets, guests and religious people; obligations to the family such as the payment of a dowry to a bride; the rights of a widower to marry the dead wife's sister and the inheritance of a widow by the dead man's brother; the punishments for elopement; and the division and use of natural resources like water and land.[4]
Customary legal systems [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ](JTA) — A 95-year-old Florida man, a championship fencer in the 1950s, died after accidentally setting himself and his house alight with a Havdalah candle.
Byron Krieger of Boca Raton died early Monday morning from injuries sustained in the accident on Saturday night, the local news station WPTC reported.
His wife, Joyce, 92, suffered minor burns. They were married for 57 years.
Krieger competed as a foil fencer in the Olympics twice for the United States, in the 1952 Games in Helsinki and the 1956 Games in Melbourne. He did not medal in either the team or individual event.
In 1957, he won the gold medal in the foil and sabre at the Maccabiah Games. He was inducted into the Michigan Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1986.
Krieger, who attended Wayne State University in Michigan, was the NCAA champion in the foil in 1942, and won a gold medal in the team foil and team sabre at the 1951 Pan American Games.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by six children, 16 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. (BRAIN) — Perry Kramer, whose initials are immortalized in SE Bike's PK Ripper BMX model, is returning to the brand, which is now owned by ASI.
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One of the early heros in the sport, Kramer helped Scot Breithaupt launch SE Racing, as the brand was originally known. He was later a longtime sales rep for Giant Bicycle.
Kramer will now become the Southern California territory manager for ASI brands including SE Bikes.
SE is enjoying a surge in sales with its 29-inch Big Ripper, which is popular with the #bikelife community.
"It's definitely cool to sell a PK Ripper or a Floval Flyer race bike, as those are what I rode," Kramer said. "The bikes now relate to guys in my — old — age bracket. It really amazes me how many guys still are so connected to the SE brand, and I'm happy to be back and part of it."
Todd Lyons, SE brand manager and himself a past professional BMX rider, said Kramer's position will help the brand push deeper into the retro BMX market.
"It's super rad to have a BMX legend like Perry back on board with SE. Who better to sell a PK Ripper in Southern California than the man himself," Lyons said. "His addition to the team really falls in line with our push in the market and our relationships with other BMX greats like Stu Thomsen and Mike Buff. It really doesn't get any better than this."
Kramer said, "I see posts all the time of racers on their PK Ripper or Floval Flyer Elite bikes, or from the street-riding guys who trick their SE bikes out. BMX covers many styles of riding and SE appeals to most of the riders out there."• Nominate your book of the year in the form at the bottom of the article, for our readers’ choice list
It’s been a year of calls to action. Naomi Klein tackled climate change, Owen Jones got to grips with class politics, and Russell Brand preached revolution. Writers from Hilary Mantel to Lena Dunham recommend the titles that leaped out at them this year
Margaret Atwood | This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein
This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (Allen Lane): whatever you may think of her solutions, the problems – climate change, plus everything that is changing as a result, plus the increasing toxicity of the planet – can no longer be denied. This is a conversation that needs to happen on a large scale, and on a local scale, and on a personal scale, very soon. If the oceans die, so do we. It’s that simple.
Julian Barnes | You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There by Elizabeth Taylor
Mariusz Szczygiel’s Gottland (Melville House) is one of those delightfully unclassifiable books: a Polish journalist’s informal history of 20th-century Czechoslovakia. Like a non-fictional Bohumil Hrabal, Szczygiel is strange and funny, constantly off at jaunty tangents. He begins with 40 pages about the Bata shoe factory and ends with a brilliantly worked double narrative about a female burns doctor who translates Dick Francis in her spare time. And it’s all true, too.
Margaret Drabble’s selection of Elizabeth Taylor’s short stories, You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There (NYRB), shows a novelist entirely at ease with the shorter form: seemingly quiet and suburban tales that enclose rage and despair; Taylor is also very good on pubs and drinking.
Bob Mankoff’s How About Never – Is Never Good for You? (Henry Holt) is a charming autobiography that answers one of the minor yet gripping questions of magazine publishing: who gets to choose the cartoons in the New Yorker (he does), what’s it like to submit one (nerve-shredding), and what percentage gets chosen (infinitesimal). A cheering book, nonetheless.
Laura Bates | Probably Nothing by Matilda Tristram
The book that knocked me sideways this year was Matilda Tristram’s Probably Nothing (Viking) – an incredibly moving account of her experience of being diagnosed with bowel cancer while several months pregnant, told through the graphic memoir. It is at once heart-wrenching, hilarious and deliciously sardonic.
The other standout books of the year have been two wonderful but completely different poetry collections. Outside Looking On (Influx) by Chimene Suleyman presents startlingly perceptive snapshots of human experience, delving powerfully into themes that range from big-city loneliness and longing, to prejudice and love.
And When I Grow Up I Want to Be Mary Beard (Burning Eye), by student slam-poet sensation Megan Beech, is a vibrant and exciting exploration of gender inequality, modern feminism and what it means to be a young woman in the 21st century.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Probably nothing by Matilda Tristram Illustration: Matilda Tristram
Mary Beard | The Smile Revolution by Colin Jones
I’ve just read Colin Jones’s The Smile Revolution (Oxford) – on the changing protocols of smiling in 18th-century France. It’s about as hard a subject for “history” as you can imagine, but Jones does brilliantly by approaching it partly through the history of dentistry, with some extraordinary stories about 18th‑century teeth (or the lack of them).
For the future, trips out in Cambridge will be enhanced by Simon Bradley’s revision of the Pevsner (Buildings of England) Guide to Cambridgeshire (Yale). It was much in need of updating and Bradley manages it expertly, without destroying the sparky style of the original.
William Boyd | Letter to Vera, edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd
For Nabokovian completists (and I confess to being incurable) the great treat this year was Letters to Véra (Penguin Classics), edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd. Here is Nabokov with his guard down, writing for only one reader, but the literary guile remains as shrewd and uniquely individual as ever. The book is also quietly revelatory, with a fresh light shone on the mysterious Mrs Nabokov.
Sailing the Forest (Picador) by Robin Robertson is a wonderfully generous selected poems. Great precision of language, limpid observation and a rare ability to make the narrative of the poems resonate evocatively. A ripple-effect that is remarkably profound.
Craig Brown | The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (Vintage) is a pacy, conventional novel of American life, following six friends from their teens through to middle age, charting their interconnected hopes, triumphs and disappointments, but it’s all done with such an acute eye for detail, and such a rare combination of wit and wisdom that it becomes something new. I’m relieved to discover that, behind my back, Wolitzer has written nine more novels, so I can rest easy next year.
A fan once came up to Bob Dylan and said: “You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are.” To which Dylan replied: “Let’s keep it that way.” The Dylanologists (Atria) by David Kinney is a razor-sharp study of the crackpot world of the obsessive fan, by turns very funny and slightly scary. Dylan’s extreme standoffishness has only served to fuel his fans’ need to get closer to him; the obscurity of his lyrics increases his fans’ need to interpret them. The great man seems to love and loathe it all, in roughly equal measures.
Shami Chakrabarti | Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes
Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes (Bloomsbury): this wonderful biography of the great feminist, internationalist and trade unionist (who was so much more than her father’s youngest daughter) is as much a gripping family drama and whodunnit as a serious work of 19th-century history. And so relevant to many current challenges.
The Establishment (and How They Get Away with It) by Owen Jones (Allen Lane): at a time when politicians aspire to be pop stars and vice versa, it is refreshing that a genuine political writer and thinker can achieve such popular appeal. Whether you agree or disagree with the Jones analysis, I challenge you not to be captivated by the authenticity of his voice.
Josh Cohen | The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
The Iceberg (Atlantic), Marion Coutts’s memoir of her husband Tom Lubbock’s last days following the diagnosis of a brain tumour is as devastating as you might expect. Yet such is the intensity and passion of her writing, it’s also strangely exhilarating.
Leaving the Sea (Granta), Ben Marcus’s wonderfully various short-story collection, left me hungrily awaiting his next offering. And The Infatuations (Penguin) confirmed Javier Marías for me as among the best writers alive.
Marion Coutts with her husband Tom Lubbock and their son Ev. Photograph: Marion Coutts
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (Granta) is an account of a marriage in crisis and the pressures of motherhood, and is written with such clarity and poetry that at times it is almost unbearably moving. And yet it has some intensely funny and witty moments, too.
Spoiled Brats by Simon Rich (Serpent’s Tail) is a collection of offbeat, surreal short stories, some of which appeared in the New Yorker. “Sell Out”, the story of a simple man who falls into a vat of pickles and awakes in modern-day Brooklyn, is a very funny skewering of hipsterdom.
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison (Granta). To my mind, there aren’t enough British essayists, which is why, as a fan of Joan Didion and Nora Ephron, I turn so often to American writers. As the title suggests, this collection examines empathy and what it means to feel pain, and covers topics ranging from Morgellons to Nicaragua to a job Jamison once had as a medical actor for trainee doctors, and each essay is illuminating, stylish and a pleasure to read.
Lena Dunham | Women by Chloe Caldwell
I am currently obsessed with small-press books by women, most of which I bought at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon. Liz Scheid’s The Shape of Blue (The Lit Pub) is a book far smaller in size than it is in spirit. This slim volume of experimental prose examines motherhood, grief and the complex ways that both these states of being tint even our most mundane experiences. I touched my face, so absorbed in the subtle story (rich with poetic and scientific detail) that I hadn’t registered my own tears.
Chloe Caldwell’s Women (Hobart) is another deceptively teensy book. This is the tragicomic tale of the author’s doomed relationship with an older woman and it perfectly captures the way good sex can make us throw anything under the bus – even our identities.
Mira Gonzalez’s I’ll Never Be Beautiful Enough to Make Us Beautiful Together (Sorry House) brings experimental poetry into the internet age with dark, distinctly female riffs on ambition, depression and love.
John Gray | Mr Weston’s Good Wine by TF Powys
Now out in a new edition published by Vintage, Mr Weston’s Good Wine by TF Powys is one of the classics of English literature – and one of the strangest and most delightful books I’ve ever read. The story and the style are unfathomably simple. Accompanied by an assistant called Gabriel, a woolly-haired wine-seller drives into a small Dorset town called Folly Down. Time stops, and the sign on the battered van appears in the sky. Some in the town drink the light wine Mr Weston is selling, others the dark. Realising that the town is his own creation, the wine-seller longs to drink the dark wine himself. If you want to know how Mr Weston’s visit ends, you’ll have to read the book.
Translated into English for the first time by Siân Reynolds, The Mahe Circle (Penguin Classics) is one of Georges Simenon’s most powerful roman durs – the non-Maigret novels in which ordinary lives are suddenly, and at times seemingly inexplicably, unsettled and irrevocably changed. Written in Simenon’s spare signature style, it’s unputdownably gripping.
Anthony Powell’s What’s Become of Waring first appeared in 1939, and has been republished this year by the University of Chicago Press. Recognisably the work of the author of A Dance to the Music of Time, it’s lighter and funnier than the later 12-volume cycle. But in some ways it’s also more cruel – a tale of literary charlatanry, set in the decayed world of interwar London publishing. I found it irresistible, and wish it had been twice as long.
Owen Jones | Austerity Bites by Mary O’Hara
In a determined effort to win public acquiescence, if not active support, for austerity, both the government and its media apologists have tried to hide the human impact of slash-and-burn economics. Mary O’Hara’s superb Austerity Bites strips bare the reality of what Osbornomics means for human beings and, crucially, she gives a platform to voices that are otherwise unheard and deliberately ignored. Ever since the so-called “war on terror” was unleashed, Muslims have been widely demonised. All too often, they appear as terrorists, extremists and a threat to be contained.
Arun Kundnani’s The Muslims Are Coming is a fantastic counterblast to the rise of Islamophobia.
Philip Hensher | We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Michael H Kater’s history of Weimar, Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present (Yale), is a rivetingly unpleasant story, solidly and even wryly done here.
James Hamilton’s A Strange Business (Atlantic) is a brilliantly engaging account of the most interesting of all subjects: how artists make their money, in this case in 19th-century England. The book was published just in time to cast a curious light over the Tate’s splendid late-Turner show.
And the novel I liked best was Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Serpent’s Tail).
Naomi Klein | The Establishment by Owen Jones
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Faber) is one of those rare novels destined to become a lifelong companion. This magnificently written story of two sisters, one of whom is determined to take her own life and asks the other for assistance, is shockingly funny, deeply wise and utterly heartbreaking.
In non-fiction, Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide (Hamish Hamilton) has far more staying power than the ripped-from-his-own-headlines topic might suggest, laying out a powerful and persuasive case for the duty to defend our fast-disappearing privacy.
I’ll never look at UK class politics in the same way after Owen Jones’s bracing and principled The Establishment: How They Get Away With It.
The best kids’ book I read to my two-year-old son is the beautiful and playful Julia, Child by Kyo Maclear (Tundra).
Mark Lawson | Amnesia by Peter Carey
Simultaneously prompting sadness (because there will be no more work) and joy (the work is magnificent up to his final printed word “silently”), Seamus Heaney’s New Selected Poems: 1988-2013 (Faber) is a glorious memorial to a rare example of a great writer who was also a good man.
It’s unusual on these occasions to recommend books that are often almost unreadably revolting; but, if we have to try to understand what Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith did and why the British establishment let them, there are unlikely to be more thorough and troubling accounts than In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies (Quercus) and Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith by Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker (Biteback).
Linking the Assange and Snowden affairs with the UK crown’s coup against the Australian government in 1975, Peter Carey’s Amnesia (Faber) is a completely original political novel.
But the work to which I kept returning this year was KP: The Autobiography (Sphere), Kevin Pietersen’s report from the England cricket changing room: an eye-popping account of malicious secret dossiers, snitching team-mates and the search for a scapegoat to protect mediocre managers – all happening within one of the flagship clients of the Department for Culture Media and Sport.
Penelope Lively | On Silbury Hill by Adam Thorpe
Adam Thorpe’s On Silbury Hill (Little Toller) is about that mysterious Wiltshire mound – archaeology, history, landscape – but with an undertow of memoir: brilliant.
Margaret Forster’s My Life in Houses (Chatto & Windus) is such a clever idea. It’s a memoir sited in bricks and mortar, from childhood home to student lodging to marital home, to holiday cottage in Cumbria – social and personal history spliced together.
My roots are in West Somerset, so the new Somerset: South and West edition of Pevsner’s Buildings of England (Yale) is warmly welcome. The old one, by Pevsner alone, was somewhat skimpy; Julian Orbach’s revisit is huge, reflecting the architectural riches of the area, and there is wealth within – informative and scholarly text, handsome photographs.
Robert Macfarlane | A Book of Death and Fish by Ian Stephen
Ian Stephen |
. Particular attention is given to engineered landscapes in which the direct anthropic alteration of processes is significant. The last part of the review discusses future challenges.Photos by Anonymous
Anonymous stepped up operations in their #OpWhales campaign, shutting down almost every Icelandic government website for 13 hours in protest against the country’s whaling practices.
Late last night, hacktivist group Anonymous launched another DDOS attack in their #OpWhales campaign. The group effectively shut down every ministry’s website, with the exception of the Ministry of Welfare. RÚV reports these sites were offline for about 13 hours.
Although the sites are back online, Anonymous posted a video, which you can see below, promising that this latest attack is only the beginning.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDUF8U6QZ0&w=560&h=315]
The #OpWhales tag on Twitter also backs this up, as their official count vows to continue operations until whaling is ceased:
In addition to government websites, Anonymous also hit HB Grandi, the company which conducts fin whale hunting in Iceland:
Anonymous is also apparently reaching out to individual members of parliament, as Social Democrat MP Katrín Júlíusdóttir – who opposes whale hunting – took to Twitter to express her frustration, saying, “Getting endless spam-tweets against whaling. Tiresome. I have only one thing to say: You are preaching to the choir, people!”:
Fæ endalaus spam – tweet gegn hvalveiðum. Þreytandi. Hef eitt að segja: You are preaching to the choir people! #OpWhales #endangeredspecies — Katrín Júlíusdóttir (@katrinjul) November 28, 2015
While the campaign targets the hunting of any whales, Anonymous objects in particular to the hunting of fin whales. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has classified fin whales as endangered, with a moratorium put in place on the breed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986.Between 200 and 300 workers at the Irving-owned Halifax Shipyard walked off the job this morning, complaining of bullying by management.
The workers said they're upset by the death of a co-worker. Protesters said the worker, who had about 30 years of experience at the company, was recently suspended over a dispute about scaffolding safety.
He killed himself on Wednesday, CBC News has learned.
Ken Clark, who worked with the man for years, said it started over a trivial matter. The worker was in charge of building staging.
"It was the way he tapped in a lock on a piece of staging," said Clarke. "He used a metal wedge to do it instead of a hammer, that's all it started over."
Clarke said the man's work was witnessed by a supervisor who wrote him up. Several workers told CBC News that incident sparked nearly two months of threats of job ramifications from management. This week, the man was suspended for 30 days.
"They said he built unsafe staging," said Stan Chaulk, who has worked as a rigger for 44 years. "He didn't. We had an engineer brought in … and the staging was perfect."
Chaulk said he was sick to his stomach after hearing of his friend's death.
"He built staging for 38 years. He was up there from ship one. There was no problem."
"He was just trying to keep the boys safe," said Derrell Provo, a metal fabricator.
Irving Shipbuilding issued a statement Thursday afternoon.
"The Irving Shipbuilding family was devastated by the news of the death of Peter MacKenzie," Irving Shipbuilding wrote in a statement. "Our thoughts and hearts go out to Peter's family and friends, and to all here at the shipyard who worked with him."
But the company wouldn't discuss the allegations from the workers but said they had "no basis in fact."
"It is not appropriate to speak about details regarding individual employees — our objective here is to respect family and friends and the employee's memory," the statement said.
A second email to CBC News addressed the allegations of conflict over safety.
"We encourage employees to voice their concerns regarding safety and in fact, they are incentivized for doing so," wrote Deborah Page, a spokesperson for Irving Shipbuilding. "Our highest priority is the safety of our workforce and our actions are consistent with this commitment."
She said the company is working hard to create a positive, effective environment.
"For that, we need employees to be at work, and the union and company to work together."
The workers left the Halifax Shipyard just before 9 a.m. AT on Thursday and made their way down Barrington Street in downtown Halifax, blocking traffic in both directions.
"We're heartbroken … the boys are not going to put up with it anymore. This is absolutely intolerable," Bob Couture, a pipe fitter, told CBC's Maritime Noon.
"We'll never forget our brother."
Flags at the yard are flying at half-mast.
The union met with management on Thursday morning to try to get the workers back on the job.
Couture said the employees feel like management is trying to push out older workers.
"They have been firing boys left right and centre because of fights," he said.
"We're talking bullying, continuous bullying … when they’re not doing anything wrong and there’s a vendetta against them that’s not right.”
Other workers said the atmosphere at the shipyard has changed dramatically after new managers were hired.
"They're worried about what glasses you've got on, or what hat," said Chaulk. "They don't care about what work you can do … it's time for this bullying to stop."
Chaulk said he's seen some of the employees "tortured" by the treatment.
"It had to take a man's life to come this far."
"It shouldn't have had to come to that, for us to do this," said Darcy Baker-Mosher. "Everyone wants to work. We're excited for 30 years."UAE Embassy Attestation In India
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An individual can submit their own document and also they can submit the documents on behalf of their blood relatives along with identity proof and relation proof. There are many approved UAE Embassy attestation centers, through which the documents can also be submitted and rest is taken care by the centers. Ours is one of them and we take care of all your needs providing you amazing service and with prompt effectiveness for UAE Embassy attestation
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New Delhi (CNN) Africans living in northern India are locking themselves indoors in terror after a spate of mob attacks left several hospitalized.
Multiple attacks on Nigerian students have been reported this week in Greater Noida, 18 miles southeast of the capital New Delhi.
Nine Nigerians were attacked, including five who were wounded and two who were hospitalized with undisclosed injuries, said Abike Dabiri, Nigeria's special assistant on foreign affairs and diaspora.
A Kenyan woman who claimed that she was also attacked was found to have made up the incident, said Dharmendra Singh, a senior police superintendent in Noida. Police have since dropped the case.
Mob attacks
Police said the violence began over the weekend, following the death of a teenager in an alleged drug overdose.
His family filed a police report against five local Nigerian men, who have since been detained on suspicion of drug peddling, abduction and murder, police said.
A postmortem, however, did not confirm the theory of a drug overdose and the men were later released.
Following their arrest, African students gathered to peacefully demonstrate for their release, said Ezeugo Nnamdi Lawrence, university coordinator with the Association of African Students in India (AASI).
On Monday, a counterprotest by Indians turned violent. Police officer Amir Dikshit said about 500 to 600 people attacked two students in a shopping mall in Noida.
A shocking video posted online by AASI showed dozens of men hitting, kicking and hurling metal objects at a man lying apparently unconscious on the floor.
An hour earlier, in a separate incident, another group attacked another Nigerian man, 27-year-old Auwal Aliyu.
Aliyu said he had left home to get food when he saw a "gang of men" approaching him and fled inside a shop.
"I went inside looking for help (but) they chased me out," he said. He was badly beaten and hospitalized.
Dabiri told CNN the attacks were a case of "mob action."
"The Nigerians that were attacked were completely innocent, they just happened to be black... I have spoken to the leaders of the Nigerian community in India and a lot of them are indoors, they are scared," she said.
"They were worried about a mob that was gathering overnight."
She demanded the "prompt prosecution" of those involved in the attack.
Indian police transport African nationals in Greater Noida, during a violent rampage by local residents.
Fear
Police said five men have been arrested in connection with the shopping mall attack, while a Ministry of External Affairs spokesman said steps were being taken "to keep the situation under control."
"(Monday's) incident in Greater Noida, in which several people of African origin were injured, is deplorable," spokesman Gopal Baglay said.
"Law enforcement authorities of the district have made arrests and are investigating into this matter."
African students in the area however remain fearful.
Aliyu, a masters student studying biotechnology, said he had not left his room since he was discharged from hospital Tuesday. Although he has no food in the house except for some biscuits, he said he doesn't want to leave.
"I cannot take the risk, I have to be very careful," he said.
Ezeugo's organization is attempting to deliver food and other supplies to African students unable to leave their homes.
"With regards to food, and other daily home needs that might prompt anyone to go out, we are working towards creating a system to ensure that supplies gets across to you all," he said on Facebook.
"Please maintain and keep the peace, and discourage any form of retaliation towards Indians."
The AASI has also formed a committee to help students who have been attacked deal with the authorities.
People gather for a vigil for a teenage boy who died of a suspected drug overdose in Greater Noida, which later turned into a violent rampage against African nationals.
Racism
While Indian media have expressed horror at the attacks, some Africans say the topic of racism is being avoided or overlooked, at the cost of their safety.
"They don't want to call it a racist attack against Africans but that's what it is," said Ezeugo.
"Until the government has fully ensured our security, people should desist from coming here."
African students say they routinely face discrimination in India and sometimes even violence. Last year, a group of men beat a Congolese man to death in Delhi, according to The Hindu newspaper
A 2014 investigation by the Hindustan Times found that Africans across the country reported incidents of everyday racism, "from being overcharged by auto and taxi drivers to being the butt of racist jokes, the subject of racist comments based on their skin color, and being branded as 'drug-traffickers'."
That racism was at play in the attacks Monday. People spread rumors that the five Nigerian men were cannibals, said Singh, the police superintendent.
Speaking to her audience Tuesday, NDTV anchor Sonia Singh asked why the racism against Africans isn't considered "a national shame."
"Just look at how India reacts whenever there is any kind of racist attack against Indians in other parts of the world, but do we ever stop and think how we treat those of other nationalities who live in India," she said.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize – despite presiding over a rolling back of LGBT and human rights in recent years.
On Wednesday, the International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World nominated President Putin for his efforts in preventing US military again against Syria.
The organisation is on the list of those approved to make Nobel Peace Prize nominations and according to Vice President Beslan Kobakhiya, a letter of recommendation was received by the committee on 16 September.
It stated: “Being the leader of one of the leading nations of the world, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin makes efforts to maintain peace and tranquillity not only on the territory of his own country but also actively promotes settlement of all conflicts arising on the planet.”
“Peace and tranquillity” are not words generally associated with President Putin’s approach to Russia’s LGBT community.
A federal bill banning gay “propaganda” was signed into law by Mr Putin in June.
It prescribes fines for providing information about homosexuality to people under the age of 18 – ranging from 4,000 roubles (£78) for an individual to 1m roubles (£19,620) for organisations.
Campaigners note that there has been an increase in violence and state persecution against LGBT people in Russia following the passing of the laws.
In September, Mr Putin insisted that the legislation only bans the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors,” and argued that there was “no infringement on the rights of sexual minorities.”
Mr Putin added that although some European countries have introduced same-sex marriage, “the Europeans are dying out… and gay marriages don’t produce children.”
Mr Putin also defended former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – and claimed his friend would not have been prosecuted for tax evasion if he had been gay.
“If he was homosexual no one would have lifted a finger,” Mr Putin said.
Having lead Russia for 13 years, critics of President Putin say he has pursued a violent campaign against the separatist movement in Chechnya, a war in Chechnya, the curtailing of democratic freedoms in Russian society, and the apparent approval of state brutality against his opponents.
Speaking to PinkNews.co.uk in August, Stephen Fry described the Russian leader as a “tyrant”.
The Russian city of Sochi is hosting next year’s Winter Olympics and Fry said that athletes taking part should perform a simple gesture to show their solidarity with the LGBT community.Stream Above & Beyond’s new album in its entirety
It’s no coincidence that Above & Beyond have created one of the most loyal and loving fan bases in dance music. Their entire ethos is based around basic human principles of love and compassion, and as such, their music is instantly relatable.
The trio have been building anticipation for their third artist album We’re All We Need for over a year now, but next week the coveted release will finally see the light of day. In the run up to the album’s release on Monday, the group have offered an exclusive pre-listen through iTunes Radio. While much of the album will be familiar to A&B die-hards, there’s plenty of new material to speak of as well. In total, the album brings 16 tracks to the table, offering everything from trance to softer orchestral pieces.
Listen to We’re All We Need on iTunes Radio here.
Note: If the Listen in iTunes button doesn’t work initially, try opening up your iTunes Radio and then clicking the link.
Read More:
Above & Beyond release video for “All Over The World”
Watch Above & Beyond’s aftermovie from the Greek Theater
Above & Beyond to embark on North American We’re All We Need Tour
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F1 2014 - Bahrain GP / Battle Of The Silver Arrows
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The 2014 Bahrain Grand Prix, formally known as the 2014 Formula 1 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix, was a Formula One motor race held on 6 April 2014 at the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir, Bahrain. The 57-lap race was the third round of the 2014 season, and marked the tenth time that the Bahrain Grand Prix had been held as a round for the Formula One World Championship and the 900th World Championship event. The race was held as a night event, starting at 6:00pm local time under lights, similar to the Singapore Grand Prix. The decision to hold the race under lights was taken as a means of marking the tenth anniversary of the event. Lewis Hamilton of Mercedes won the race after starting 2nd and overtaking teammate Nico Rosberg at the start. Rosberg finished second, with Force India's Sergio Pérez finishing third, scoring Force India's second ever podium, and first podium since Giancarlo Fisichella at the 2009 Belgian Grand Prix. The race was notable for the race-long battle between Hamilton and Rosberg and a collision on lap 41 between the Lotus of Pastor Maldonado and the Sauber of Esteban Gutiérrez. Gutierrez was flipped over in a side impact caused by Maldonado; Maldonado served a 5 place grid penalty at the Chinese Grand Prix for causing the crash (Wikipedia, 2017).
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4,293Weekday system-level performance checks on the new signalling system for North-South Line (NSL) commenced on 29 May 2017. As the new signalling system is fine-tuned by engineers, commuters may expect teething issues from the new system while aboard NSL trains between Marina South Pier and Jurong East. This guide explains some of the situations you may encounter on the NSL during the signalling checks.
1. Why is SMRT Trains changing to a new signalling system? What are the benefits to commuters?
The new signalling system will be more efficient than the current system, which has been in use since 1987. We will be able to safely reduce the distance between trains travelling on the network, and further increase the number of trains. This means shorter waiting times for commuters.
2. Why does the train stop between stations?
For safety reasons, all trains are programmed to maintain a distance between one another. Trains will not proceed if there is another train up ahead.
3. Why did the train overshoot the platform and have to reverse?
The new signalling system comes with various pre-set programmes to run and stop trains at various speeds. These pre-set programmes are being fine-tuned to suit different weather conditions. For example, the braking distance for a train arriving at Ang Mo Kio MRT Station (aboveground) on a clear day, would differ from that required during a thunderstorm. Wet tracks would require a longer distance for trains to come to a stop.
Trains may therefore not align correctly at station platforms. It is important to note that passengers will remain safe, as all trains are programmed to maintain a safety distance between one another. Trains will not proceed if there is another train up ahead. If the alignment is incorrect, trains will reverse for passengers to board and alight. In the rare event that the misalignment is more than 15 metres, trains proceed to the next station as programmed.
4. Why do the doors close so fast?
As we work towards the target of having more trains, and shorter waiting times for commuters, trains will have to stop for fixed intervals at stations. The new signalling system will also open and close doors automatically. The dwell time (i.e. the duration of trains stopping at station platforms) remains the same. Doors continue to remain open for about 30 seconds at most stations.
Please do not rush to board the trains. Please look out for light indicators and audio chimes, which indicate that train doors are closing. Train doors will close automatically soon after the lights flash and door chimes go off.
5. Why did my train brake suddenly?
Signalling systems are used to direct railway traffic. Trains move when the system indicates so, and stop when they receive a signal from the system. Signalling systems are built with safety as the top priority. Emergency brakes are applied when trains receive incorrect or conflicting signals, do not receive any signals momentarily, or when there are trains ahead. The signalling system is then reset, to ensure trains only move according to assigned signals.
6. Why are the performance checks carried out during peak hours? Can’t the checks be done during off-peak hours?
Trains fitted with the new signalling system have been put through rigorous checks before they were cleared for passenger service. Earlier trials took place during the last hour of passenger service, and progressed to whole of Sundays. Unlike new MRT lines where intensive testing can be conducted with a single type of train before passenger service commences, we are testing the new signalling system on an existing line with various train fleets. As there are limited engineering hours each day (from 1.30am to 4.30am), it is not possible for us to accumulate adequate testing hours if we do not run the new signalling system during weekdays. The June school holidays present the best opportunity for us to do so. We have to conduct all-day performance checks to work out teething issues that may arise when a new signalling system is introduced to a train network. The system-level performance checks on weekdays will allow us to further intensify tests of the new signalling system’s reliability. Our engineers will continue to monitor the system’s response to different situations, and trains services’ adherence to their schedules.
7. There were delays on 1 & 2 June 2017. What happened?
The first incident at 6.20pm on 1 June 2017 was due to a glitch in the computer server used to manage train schedules. This unfortunately caused all trains on NSL to halt. Although the back-up server kicked in quickly, operations controllers needed 30 minutes to manually reassign train schedules.
On 2 June 2017, a signalling equipment known as the Movement Authority Unit (MAU) registered a fault at around 4.48pm. The MAU fault resulted in slower train movement between Kranji and Admiralty stations. Signalling trials are part and parcel of new signalling systems and carried out to help train operators identify and resolve teething problems that may occur. As we continue to intensify the testing of the new signalling system and until the system stabilises, there may potentially be more disruptions. We seek the understanding of commuters.WASHINGTON — A lawmaker leading a congressional inquiry into the Secret Service raised questions Thursday about a White House volunteer’s possible involvement in a prostitution scandal that rocked the agency two years ago.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on national security, said the White House had questions to answer in light of information he has received from Secret Service whistle-blowers, as well as a report in Thursday’s Washington Post.
Based on conversations with the whistle-blowers, Chaffetz, R-Utah, suggested the White House might be covering up information.
White House officials were adamant in denying involvement by anyone on their team in the incident. The scandal led to the firing of several Secret Service agents who had hired prostitutes while sent to Colombia with President Barack Obama for a 2012 summit.Cuban cigars for sale are displayed at a hotel in Havana on Friday. (Enrique De La Osa/Reuters)
American travel to Cuba has been on the rise in recent years, and now there are two more reasons for U.S. travelers to head to the island nation: rum and cigars.
The Obama administration on Friday lifted restrictions on how many cigars and bottles of rum Americans can bring back from Cuba, part of continuing efforts to mend more than five decades of strained relations between the nations.
“This is a big change and one that’s long overdue,” said David Savona, executive editor of Cigar Aficionado magazine. “For quite a long time, Americans have been prohibited from bringing back Cuban cigars, and this lifts many of those limitations.”
Under the new rules, which take effect Monday, Americans may bring back up to 100 Cuban cigars, whether purchased in Cuba or other countries, for personal consumption without paying customs taxes.
The administration is also clearing the way for cargo ships to travel between the two countries and making it easier for scientists from the United States and Cuba to partner on medical research.
The U.S. lifts limits on the amount of Cuban rum and cigars that travelers can bring back home to the states. (Reuters)
[U.S., Cuba stepping up efforts to save Hemingway artifacts]
“These amendments will create more opportunities for Cuban citizens to access American goods and services, further strengthening the ties between our two countries,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said in a statement. “More commercial activity between the U.S. and Cuba benefits our people and our economies.”
The number of Americans traveling to Cuba is expected to double this year, to 320,000, as the United States continues to loosen restrictions on tourism and commerce. Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide (now part of Marriott International) began operating its first hotel in Cuba this year. U.S. air carriers, including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, are set to begin offering service to Havana on Nov. 28.
“While it is too early to tell, we think this is positive news for our customers,” Martha Pantin, a spokeswoman for American Airlines, said in an email.
At Two Guys Smoke Shop in Nashua, N.H., owner David Garofalo said customers are already planning cigar-buying trips.
“They’re saying, ‘We can’t wait to go get some Cuban cigars,’ ” he said. “As great as that is, what this means for our shop is that business is going elsewhere, to another country.”
[Russia has its permanent air base in Syria. Now it’s looking at Cuba and Vietnam.]
Industry lobbyists say that the new measure deals a double whammy to American cigar manufacturers and retailers, which are scrambling to adhere to new regulations introduced by the Food and Drug Administration in March.
“What you’re doing is providing an incentive for American citizens to shop for cigars at foreign destinations,” said J. Glynn Loope, executive director of the lobbying group Cigar Rights of America. “And this is happening months after the same administration dropped 499 pages of new regulations on the industry.”
At Davidus Cigars, a chain of 11 Maryland stores with nearly $7 million in annual revenue, co-owner Stephen Castro said the new measure makes it harder to stay afloat.
“It’s good and bad,” he said. “I like to see we’re normalizing relations with Cuba, but if I can’t sell the cigars it hurts me as a retailer.”
Barry Stein, director of social media for Two Guys Smoke Shop, said he wasn’t as concerned.
“I don’t think it’ll end up making that much of a difference,” Stein said. “I mean, what percentage of customers are going to travel overseas to buy cigars?”
His boss, Garofalo, however, is bracing for as much as a 10 percent drop in business if regulars begin bringing back cigars from overseas travel.
“The thing is, right now the allure is that you can’t get it in the United States,” he said. “We want what we can’t have. That’s the big hook.”
But, he said, there is at least one upside: He will also be able to bring back stogies for himself. The first time he visited Havana two years ago, he was voracious in his pursuit of Cuban cigars. He said he smoked 50 cigars in seven days.
“I wanted to try everything I could,” he said. “I was smoking way too much, but it was like, let me get it in while I can. Who knows when I’ll get another one?”
For his next trip to Cuba, in February, Garofalo said, he will be a bit more relaxed knowing he can bring back 100 Cuban cigars.
“This time, I know I’ll have enough to last,” he said. “I’ll probably have to buy a bigger suitcase.”5 tips for using Slack at ~100 person companies.
Don Pinkus Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 19, 2017
Over the past two years, I’ve worked with ~20 companies as a contractor. Most used Slack. I’ve noticed 5 differences between the companies that use it well, and the ones that don’t.
One organization. Not multiple.
Not multiple. Create a channel per project. Not per team.
Not per team. Most conversations for a project go in that project’s channel. Not 1:1 chat.
Not 1:1 chat. Post your weekly meeting notes in the project channel.
Use Slack’s screenshare & call features.
First — why use Slack?
In short, if an email is responded to within an hour, it’s “fast”.
If a chat is responded to within an hour, it’s normal.
Which one do you want for your employees / team?
Here’s some specifics why Slack is better than e-mail:
Because “chat” is better than e-mail for conversations. (reading email threads sucks, reading chat histories is easy)
It’s also better for sharing files, finding files, and discussing files.
It’s also better for keeping a history of what’s been happening on a project.
It’s also better for onboarding new members of a project.
It’s also better for telling a team when your site is down, when new code has been changed, when a task deadline is coming up, when somebody is active / do not disturb, … the list goes on.
Ok here’s the tips.
Tip #1: One organization. Not multiple.
tl;dr If your company is “Awesome Corp”, then make awesome-corps.slack.com as your Slack organization. All employees are in it.
Do NOT break it out by team. Having awesome-qa.slack.com, awesome-eng.slack.com, awesome-sales.slack.com just ruined employees ability to easily chat cross-functionally. By splitting it up by team, you’re forcing your engineer to join awesome-sales.slack.com when they have a question relevant to sales. That’s annoying, and they probably won’t do it. Which means some important conversation isn’t happening, or it’s moving slowwww over email.
You can create channels that are private to specific members, like “exec team”, or “top-secret-pyramid scheme project”.
Tip #2: Create a channel per project. Not per team.
tl;dr Every time you start a new project, create a new channel and invite the relevant people to it.
If your company has a lot of projects, you will have a lot of channels. But people will only be in the ones that are relevant to them, so it’s fine.
Having project channels makes it SUPER easy to have people jump into a project just when they are relevant & easily read through a project’s history.
Projects end. That means channels will go dead. That’s fine — just archive them. And voila, now you have a history of what happened over the life of that project.
Do NOT create a channel for each team. There are a few reasons for this:
1. Team channels are too broad. Nobody will post except for “what are we getting for lunch” and “where is the team update meeting”.
2. Team channels are not encouraging cross-functional communication. Most of your employee’s projects are cross-functional. They need to communicate quickly with employees on other teams. Having a bunch of team channels doesn’t help this.
Tip #3: Most conversations for a project go in that project’s channel. Not in 1:1 chat.
tl;dr When two members on a project talk to eachother about something related to that project, in goes in the chat channel — not in 1:1 chat.
Why? Because now it is easy to reference conversations about a particular topic. Also you’ll be surprised how useful it is to know what 2 other people on your project are talking about today.
An added bonus is you get a really impressive project history. When you join a project channel where people have had most discussions in it, it is really easy to learn about the project / read through work that has been done.
Isn’t it annoying? Why would I discuss a bug in a channel if it only concerns one other person? No, it’s not annoying. You only get notified when your name / keywords come up in a channel. You’ll be surprised how much more aware of a project you are when you know your teammates have been discussing some bug for the past 4 hours.
Do NOT message other project members privately about an issue. You are not going to annoy team members by posting it in the project channel, but you will deprive them of awareness about what you are working on — and you will have a hard time referencing this knowledge to other people in the future.
Truth is, this is the tip that is the most “gray”. There are plenty of times to talk in 1:1, just most people will tend to talk in 1:1 when it would be useful for the project room. (e.g. discussing a design change, asking when they expect to have something complete, etc).
Tip #4: Post your weekly meeting notes in the project channel.
You probably have weekly update meetings for your project. You probably even take notes during it. Post those notes in the project’s channel.
You now have a summary of what’s being worked on each week that is easily searchable by you & your team. At the start of next week’s meeting or on Monday, people will look at the previous weeks notes.
The notes also act as a good marker for particular conversations — which is really useful when searching for a conversation a month or two later.
For example, if you remember a conversation about “UI refactor”, and find the meeting notes on 4/12/2017, then you scroll up a bit in the chat room and can see what was being talked about — even if the exact terms “ui refactor” were never used.
Tip #5: You can screen-share & talk over Slack.
That means when you’re chatting about a bug / design / document, you can screenshare mid-conversation if you need to.
It requires the paid plan which is $8 / employee, but considering what you’re probably paying your employees, the time they saved trying to get a Google Hangout set up just paid for itself.
Do NOT eat crackers in bed. Honestly, there’s not really a good “not” for this tip.
Alright hope that was helpful.
Again, these tips are obviously not universal truths. They are just patterns I’ve noticed that work well.
If you have other good advice for how your company uses Slack, you can comment here or msg me @whatsdonisdon.Majority of staff vote to join the News Guild, making Al Jazeera America the fifth digital newsroom to have launched a unionization effort this year
Staff members of the digital newsroom at Al Jazeera America said on Thursday that a majority have voted to unionize under the News Guild of New York, which is part of the Communications Workers of America union. Al Jazeera America is the fifth digital newsroom to have launched a unionization effort this year.
“We’re excited,” said Ned Resnikoff, a digital reporter at Al Jazeera America, in a statement. “We believe in Al Jazeera’s goal of delivering captivating, groundbreaking news, and the newsroom is really coming together to help the company further its journalistic mission. We welcome a constructive, amicable discussion with management to jointly address our concerns.”
Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) If you asked me a year ago to pick an industry where there'd be rapid shop-by-shop unionization, I wouldn't have picked the one I work in.
“By organizing, we’ve had the chance to more fully realize the value and excellence of our newsroom – something we’re all committed to improving,” said Caroline Preston, digital editor at Al Jazeera America.
Al Jazeera has yet to say whether it will recognize the union.
“We are currently considering the request to voluntarily recognize the News Guild as the exclusive bargaining representative of the digital department employees,” said an Al Jazeera spokeswoman. “We have no further comment at this time.”
Al Jazeera America CEO fired amid reports of turmoil in the newsroom Read more
The announcement comes four months after Al Jazeera America replaced Ehab Al Shihabi, its interim CEO. Al Shibabi’s departure was announced a day after the New York Times published a story about “turmoil” and “culture of fear” in the newsroom, which included details about a $15m lawsuit and resignations of three employees. The lawsuit alleged that employees were forced to work in a hostile environment.
In their mission statement released on Thursday, employees who decided to join the efforts to unionize said that they believe Al Jazeera America can “do better” and called upon Al Jazeera’s leadership to “uphold its mission, not just to its audience but also to its employees”.
“As we enter our third year in the public eye, a troubling lack of transparency, inconsistent management and lack of clear redress have persisted at AJAM Digital,” the staff said. “Discrepancies in salaries, responsibilities and the way job performance is evaluated undermine our work |
bright flash from the muzzle.[2]
When barrel lengths were dramatically decreased with the introduction of various shorter-barreled rifles and carbines, the flash became a serious problem during night-time combat, as the flash would imperil the shooter's night vision and would also make the shooter's position more apparent.[3] Originally limited to "special purpose" roles, it was now expected that all infantry weapons with shorter barrels would experience this problem, and thereby be of limited use in low-light situations. Flash suppressors became common on late-World War II and later assault rifle designs, and are almost universal on these weapons today. Some designs such as those found on the AKS-74U serve a dual-role as a gas expansion chamber helping the shortened weapon's gas system function properly.[4]
Military flash suppressors are designed to reduce the muzzle flash from the weapon to preserve the shooter's night vision, usually by diverting the incandescent gases to the sides, away from the line of sight of the shooter, and to secondarily reduce the flash visible to the enemy. Military forces engaging in night combat are still visible when firing, especially with night vision gear, and must move quickly after firing to avoid receiving return fire.
Limiting the amount of powder to what the length of a barrel can burn is one possible solution, but differences between individual cartridges mean that some cartridges will always have too much powder to be completely consumed, and the reduced powder load produces a lower projectile velocity. Muzzle flash can be controlled by using cartridges with a faster-burning propellant, so that the propellant gases will already have begun to cool by the time they exit the barrel, reducing flash intensities. Faster-burning powders, however, produce less projectile velocity, which reduces the accuracy, due to introducing a more parabolic bullet flight path in place of a "flat" trajectory, while also reducing the lethality of the weapon by reducing the distance of the projectile's penetration of the target.
Flash suppressors reduce, or in some cases eliminate, the flash by rapidly cooling the gases as they leave the end of the barrel. Although the overall amount of burning propellant is unchanged, the density and temperature are greatly reduced, as is the brightness of the flash.[2]
Types [ edit ]
A number of different flash suppressing designs have been used over the years. The simplest is a cone placed on the end of the barrel, which was used on the late-World War II jungle-combat versions of the Lee–Enfield, the No. 5 variant, intended for use in the Pacific (the jungles of Malaya). More modern solutions tend to use a "basket" with several slits or holes cut in it, as seen on the M16 and other small-bore weapons. Cone-shaped flash eliminators are also evident on the ZB vzor 26 machine gun, and on the turret-mounted aircraft machine guns of British WWII heavy bombers, which were used mostly at night.[2]
Duckbill flash suppressors have upper and lower "prongs" and direct gases to the sides. Early M60 machine guns and some early M16 models featured this type of flash suppressor. One disadvantage is that the prongs can become entangled with vines or other natural vegetation and objects in the field.
"Birdcage type" flash suppressors still have prongs, but feature a ring on the front to prevent vegetation entanglement between the prongs. The closed bottom port of the M16A2 design makes the device function as a compensator. Both designs require indexing with a crush washer which unfortunately contributes to flash signature.[5]
The Vortex Flash Hider is a design developed in 1984, with a patent secured in 1995. The Vortex is somewhat reminiscent of the original "three-prong flash hider" found on the original Vietnam-era M-16. However, the Vortex is more robust and makes use of four solid tines, which are equally spaced and angled 6° from a centerline, while the slots of the body incorporate a 5-, 10-, and 15-degree twisted helix design, which eliminates up to 99% of visible muzzle flash by having the flash break up at multiple locations and angles.
The Noveske KX-3 is a flash suppressor intended for use on shorter barreled rifles and aids in reliability. The back pressure generated through this type of flash suppressor helps to cycle the rifle. Noveske patterned this design on the Krinkov brake found on the Soviet AKS-74U carbine, where it was explicitly used for this purpose. Essentially it is the cone-shaped suppressor of the AKS-74U within a chamber.[6] Some other examples of cone-shaped hiders are found on the Bren machine gun, the.303 Rifle No 5 Mk 1 "Jungle Carbine" and some models of the RPK and German MG3.[2]
The XM177 Commando variant of the M16 rifle used a unique flash suppressor sometimes called a flash or sound moderator for its 10-inch barrel. This device is 4.2 inches long and was designed primarily as a counterbalance measure, as the shorter barrel made the weapon unwieldy.[7] This device reduced flash signature greatly and sound signature slightly, making the normally louder short barreled rifle sound like a longer barreled M16A1.[8] Although it has no internal baffles and does not completely reduce the sound signature to subsonic levels, because it alters the sound level of the weapon, the US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives has declared this device to be a sound suppressor and regulates its civilian purchase in the United States.[8]
There are also devices referred to as hybrids that function as both flash suppressors and muzzle rise/recoil compensators, such as the White Sound Defense FOSSA-556. The U.S. military A2 muzzle device is technically a hybrid device, as it has vents that are biased upwardly to reduce muzzle rise.[9]
Legality [ edit ]
New Zealand [ edit ]
Flash suppressors are seen as a "military" feature, and semi-automatic long guns with flash suppressors were defined as Military-Style Semi-Automatics in 1992, requiring a permit.
United States [ edit ]
Flash suppressors and barrel shrouds were seen as "military" features and were on the list of federally defined features that could cause a rifle to be defined as illegal, if the lower receiver was manufactured after the effective date of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that went into effect in 1994 in the United States.[10] In the context of that law, the National Rifle Association deemed flash suppressors a "cosmetic feature".[11] This ban expired in 2004, although some states, such as California, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, have similar bans in place restricting the use of flash suppressors.[12]
Germany & Australia [ edit ]
Flash suppressors and muzzle brakes can be legally acquired and used on all types of weapons, unless they are designed to significantly or predominantly reduce the sound.
See also [ edit ]I am going to eradicate the inbound Windows Support scam
UPDATE: This post is getting some traction on reddit (thanks reddit!), so I wanted to address a couple things. First, I love telecommunications and I vow to never use this technology for mischief or malice. I built these bots to handle INBOUND telemarketer scammers, but about 10 days ago I got a popup saying my computer was infected. I called it and confirmed it was “Microsoft Technical Department”. I called it a few more times from different caller-ids and got the same call center. So I pounded it into the ground. After about 300 calls, the number was disconnected. Here are the types of messages.
Hi all,
I’m getting ready for a major initiative to shut down Windows Support. It’s like wack-a-mole, but I’m getting close to going nuclear on them. As fast as you can report fake “you have a virus call this number now” messages to me, I will be able to hit them with thousands of calls from bots. It’s like when the pirate ship turns “broadside” on an enemy in order to attack with all cannons simultaneously. I’ll calling it a “Broadside” campaign against Windows Support and the fake IRS.
There are A LOT of moving pieces to getting this working. One of them is letting you hear the calls as they happen. This is a little post to test the html for the posted recordings. I really need to write a WordPress plugin to do it. For now, I have a script that generates this raw HTML for me to post here. Anyway, please enjoy these experimental calls and we can anticipate the day when these call centers are all gone because of one pirate attacking them safely from off-shore.
Calls for category ‘Windows Support’
This audio is 166 seconds
This is part of a small “Broadsides” campaign against a Windows Support number This audio is 376 seconds
This audio is 285 seconds
This audio is 441 seconds
This audio is 220 seconds
This audio is 280 seconds
This audio is 335 secondsSister cities or twin towns are a form of legal or social agreement between towns, cities, counties, oblasts, prefectures, provinces, regions, states, and even countries in geographically and politically distinct areas to promote cultural and commercial ties.[1] The modern concept of town twinning, conceived after the Second World War in 1947, was intended to foster friendship and understanding among different cultures and between former foes as an act of peace and reconciliation,[2][3] and to encourage trade and tourism.[1] By the 2000s, town twinning became increasingly used to form strategic international business links among member cities.[4][5]
Terminology [ edit ]
An example of a 'gemellaggio' (twinning) agreement between Castellabate, Italy and Blieskastel, Germany
In the United Kingdom, the term "twin towns" is most commonly used; the term "sister cities" is generally used for agreements with towns and cities in the Americas.[1][6] In mainland Europe, the most commonly used terms are "twin towns", "partnership towns", "partner towns", and "friendship towns". The European Commission uses the term "twinned towns" and refers to the process as "town twinning".[1][6] Spain uses the term "ciudades hermanadas", which means "sister cities". Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic use Partnerstadt (De) / miasto partnerskie (Pl) / partnerské město (Cz), which translate as "partner town or city". France uses ville jumelée (twinned town or city), and Italy has gemellaggio (twinning) and comune gemellato (twinned municipality).[7] In the Netherlands, the term is partnerstad or stedenband ("city bond", when providing mutual support). In Greece, the word αδελφοποίηση (adelfopiisi – fraternisation) has been adopted. In Iceland, the terms vinabæir (friend towns) and vinaborgir (friend cities) are used. In the former Soviet Bloc, "twin towns" and "twin cities" are used,[8] along with города-побратимы (Ru) (sworn brother cities).[9][10]
The Americas, South Asia, and Australasia use the term "sister cities" or "twin cities". In China, the term is 友好城市 (yǒuhǎo chéngshì – friendship city).[11] Sometimes, other government bodies enter into a twinning relationship, such as the agreement between the provinces of Hainan in China and Jeju-do in South Korea. The douzelage is a town twinning association with one town from each of the member states of the European Union.[1][12]
Despite the term often being used interchangeably, with the term "friendship city", this may mean a relationship with a more limited scope in comparison to a sister city relationship, and friendship city relationships are mayor-to-mayor agreements.[13]
City diplomacy [ edit ]
In recent years, the term "city diplomacy" has gained increased usage and acceptance, particularly as a strand of paradiplomacy and public diplomacy. It is formally used in the workings of the United Cities and Local Governments and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and recognised by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. A March 2014 debate in the British House of Lords acknowledged the evolution of town twinning into city diplomacy, particularly around trade and tourism, but also in culture and post-conflict reconciliation.[14] The importance of cities developing "their own foreign economic policies on trade, foreign investment, tourism and attracting foreign talent" has also been highlighted by the World Economic Forum.[15]
Europe [ edit ]
Column dedicated to Paris in Rome
The earliest known town twinning in Europe was between Paderborn, Germany, and Le Mans, France, in 836.[2][16] Starting in 1905, Keighley in West Yorkshire, England, had a twinning arrangement with French communities Suresnes and Puteaux.[17][18] The first recorded modern twinning agreement was between Keighley and Poix-du-Nord in Nord, France, in 1920 following the end of the First World War.[5][18][19][20] This was initially referred to as an adoption of the French town; formal twinning charters were not exchanged until 1986.[21]
The practice was continued after the Second World War as a way to promote mutual understanding and cross-border projects of mutual benefit.[1][2][22][23][24] For example, Coventry twinned with Stalingrad and later with Dresden as an act of peace and reconciliation, all three cities having been heavily bombed during the war.[1][20][25][26][27] The City of Bath formed an "Alkmaar Adoption committee" in March 1945, when the Dutch city was still occupied by the German Army in the final months of the war, and children from each city took part in exchanges in 1945 and 1946.[28] Similarly, in 1947, Bristol Corporation (later Bristol City Council) sent five 'leading citizens' on a goodwill mission to Hanover.[5][20] Reading in 1947 was the first British town to form links with a former "enemy" city – Düsseldorf. The link still exists (Reading-Düsseldorf Association: http://www.reading-dusseldorf.org.uk/). Since 9 April 1956 Rome and Paris have been exclusively and reciprocally twinned with each other, following the motto: "Only Paris is worthy of Rome; only Rome is worthy of Paris."[29][30]
Within Europe, town twinning is supported by the European Union.[1][2][5] The support scheme was established in 1989. In 2003 an annual budget of about €12 million was allocated to about 1,300 projects. The Council of European Municipalities and Regions also works closely with the Commission (DG Education and Culture) to promote modern, high quality twinning initiatives and exchanges that involve all sections of the community. It has launched a website dedicated to town twinning.[31] As of 1995, the European Union had more than 7,000 bilateral relationships involving almost 10,000 European municipalities, primarily French (2837 twinnings) and German (2485 twinnings).[24]
The painting of Gagny Sutton twin towns mural The painting of Minden
Public art has been used to celebrate twin town links, for instance in the form of seven mural paintings in the centre of the town of Sutton, Greater London. The five main paintings show a number of the main features of the London Borough of Sutton and its four twin towns, along with the heraldic shield of each above the other images. Each painting also features a plant as a visual representation of its town's environmental awareness.[32] In the case of Sutton this is in a separate smaller painting (above its main one) showing a beech tree, intended as a symbol of prosperity and from which Carshalton Beeches in the borough derives its name.[33]
Another example of the use of public art is the wall sculpture of the partner cities of Munich, Germany.
A recent study has concluded that geographical distance has very little, if any, influence upon communities' selections of a twin town.[34] Twinned towns are often chosen because of similarities between them; thus about 15 towns in Wales are twinned with towns in Brittany, and Oxford is with Bonn, Leiden, Grenoble and other university cities.[1] In Italy a good example of Twinnings is Rovigo with Viernheim, Bedford and Tulcea. Many former West German cities are twinned with former East German cities; these twinning links were established before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Famous examples are the partnerships of Hanover and Leipzig, both of which have important trade fair grounds, or between Hamburg and Dresden. The first US-German town twinning was in 1947 between Worthington, Minnesota and Crailsheim.[1] St Petersburg in Russia holds the record for the largest number of partnership arrangements with other communities.[34] In June 2012, the Scottish village of Dull and the US town of Boring, Oregon, agreed to twin their municipalities to promote tourism in both places, playing on their names.[35][36][37]
Recently some towns have made novelty twinning arrangements with fictional or virtual locations. Wincanton, England is partnered with Ankh-Morpork from Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.[38]
Town twinning has increasingly been used to form strategic international business links. For example, in the 1990s, when the Nottingham City Council in the UK considered installing a tram network, it consulted experts from its twin city of Karlsruhe, which has one of the most extensive and efficient tram networks in Germany. With assistance from Karlsruhe's specialist engineers, Nottingham completed its second tram line in 2013.[4] In 2014, Bristol and New Orleans announced their intention to form a 'tuning' partnership based on a shared musical heritage and culture offer, at the initiative of Bristol Mayor George Ferguson.[39] Annecy, France and Nerima, Tokyo have for several years shared a partnership based around their "co-existent animation industry".[40][41]
United States [ edit ]
Toledo, Ohio twinned with Toledo, Spain in 1931 and was the first city in North America to engage in town twinning. Denver, Colorado twinned with Brest, France was the second twinned city in North America. Liberal, Kansas was twinned with Olney, Buckinghamshire in 1950, and the cities have run a joint Pancake Day race ever since.[42][43] Littleton, CO twinned with Bega, Australia in 1961. Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan, was twinned with Seattle, Washington in 1973. Rochester, Minnesota and Knebworth, UK are both centers for primary medical research, and they twinned in 1967.
Town twinning begins for a variety of reasons. Generally, partner towns have similar demographics and size. They may arise from business connections, travel, similar industries, diaspora communities, or shared history. For example, the partnership between Portland, Oregon and Bologna, Italy arose from shared industries in biotechnology and education, and a "similar attitude towards food",[44] whereas Chicago's link with Warsaw, Poland began with Chicago's historic Polish community.[45] The twinning of Indianapolis with Monza, Italy is due to both cities' long association with auto racing. Mexico City is also one of Chicago's sister cities.
A twin towns program was instituted in the United States in 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed a citizen diplomacy initiative. Sister Cities International (SCI) was originally a program of the National League of Cities, but it became a separate corporation in 1967 due to the growth and popularity of the program.[46]
Twin town cultural events include the annual National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. honoring Washington's twin relationship with Tokyo City. Many twinned towns developed business agreements with their partners. For example, Vermont's Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream company opened a factory in the Republic of Karelia in Russia and offered the same profit-sharing plan to its Russian employees.
Asia [ edit ]
Town twinning is supported in Japan by the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, a joint agency of local governments established by the Japanese government in 1988 (similar to Sister Cities International, its counterpart in the US). More recently, Tokyo has begun to actively promote 'city diplomacy' with other global cities at the initiative of its governor Yoichi Masuzoe.[48]
Linguistic reasons [ edit ]
Relationships between communities can also arise because of shared names; they may be named after one community (as in the case of Córdoba), they may share names (as in the case of Santiago de Compostela), or their names may have a common etymology.
Road sign of Artieda de Aragón and Emiliano Zapata, an autonomous Zapatista municipality.
These similarities usually arise from sharing the same or related language, or from having been a colony or previously conquered.
Political significance [ edit ]
Twinning towns and cities is sometimes done for political purposes. The Hungarian city Gyöngyös was twinned with the Azerbaijani city of Shusha in 2013, signing the twinning agreement with representatives from the Azerbaijani government; Hungary recognises Shusha as part of Azerbaijan, even though since the end of the Karabakh War it has been controlled by the military forces of Armenia and the unrecognised Artsakh (de jure part of Azerbaijan).[49] An attempt was made in 2003 by Preston city councillors in England to twin with the Palestinian town of Nablus in the name of solidarity.[50]
Termination of sister city relationships as the result of a dispute [ edit ]
Gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]Come out and meet Anchorage table top game enthusiasts and have some fun!
This is the group in Anchorage for people interested in playing contemporary/modern board and table top games, from people who are new and interested in the hobby to those that don’t mind burning hours on an epic game of Twilight Imperium. As far as we know this is the largest and most established public group in Anchorage meeting up for this purpose and has been going on in some form since November 2011. We play a mix of the modern classics and hot things right off the gaming press. RPG's are good too. This is the destination for table top gaming of all types in Anchorage.
The typical meetup is on Sundays, but feel free to suggest whatever sounds good!Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
When newly elected prime minister Ehud Barak was about to arrive in Washington for his first meeting with US president Bill Clinton in July 1999, Clinton could hardly contain his ecstasy.
After enduring three years of tension with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Clinton actively worked to get Barak elected. He sent his top strategists, James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, to help Barak beat Netanyahu, and then told reporters that he was eager to work with Barak.
Clinton said he felt like “a kid with a new toy.”Seventeen long years later, Netanyahu is having a hard time hiding his joy over the change in power in Washington, and the prospects of working with US President-elect Donald Trump.Burned from accusations he interfered in American politics in the past, Netanyahu remained carefully neutral in the election. In private conversations, he sincerely praised Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, and expressed confidence that he would be able to get along much better with her than he did with current US President Barack Obama and with her husband, Bill.But Netanyahu, who looks, talks, and acts like a Republican, was obviously overjoyed when Pennsylvania, the state where he spent the formative years of his life, gave the presidency to Trump. It was the first time Pennsylvania had elected a Republican since November 1988, the month Netanyahu was elected to the Knesset for the first time.Netanyahu scolded ministers who released statements congratulating Trump on his victory before his own video congratulating Trump was ready to be posted on the Prime Minister’s Office website.Smiling broadly in the video, Netanyahu appeared downright giddy as he declared Trump “a great friend of Israel,” and said he looked forward to working with him to advance “security, prosperity and peace” – an order that might have been different had someone else been elected.Not stopping there, Netanyahu also posted to his Facebook page a video Trump released in 2013, in which he endorsed Netanyahu ahead of an Israeli election and praised him as “a great prime minister” and “a winner.”Netanyahu stopped short of posting the exclusive Jerusalem Post interview with Trump that same day in which he said he wished Netanyahu was running in his own country.“I think he would have been a great president of the United States,” Trump told the Post in what to this day is the last interview Trump has given any Israeli media outlet that is not owned by campaign contributor Sheldon Adelson.Mocking his trademark “you’re fired” line from his reality show The Apprentice, Trump said “Netanyahu will not be fired.” He added that he believed Netanyahu was respected by Obama, and that he did not think the prime minister had a bad relationship with Democrats in Washington.There are indeed plenty of Democrats whom Netanyahu got along with, but there were also Democrats who boycotted his speech to Congress last year. Ironically, in more than 10-and-a-half years in power, Netanyahu has never served a single day with a Republican president.More than one former Netanyahu adviser recently recounted past conversations in which the prime minister made the following incredible statement: “I want to know what it’s like for just one day to have a president who has my back.”That one day will arrive on January 20, the day Obama leaves and Trump is inaugurated. There are 71 days between today and then.That interregnum period between the election and the inauguration has been the subject of much speculation, because Obama could use it to push through anti-Israel policies unencumbered by political obligations.But now speculation will also begin on what Netanyahu will do during that period. Netanyahu has 71 days to figure out how to handle the potential of a US president who – if he keeps his campaign promises – will not pressure Israel in any way.Every day of his four terms as prime minister until now, whenever right-wing politicians pressured Netanyahu to build throughout Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, he would point to Washington and raise his hands.Now what will he say and do? Well, that depends on what his actual policies are in his heart of hearts, and with all due respect to current and former Netanyahu staffers, it is possible that no one knows that but Netanyahu himself.Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett, who as Netanyahu’s former chief of staff knows him pretty well, rushed to declare on Wednesday that the pursuit of a Palestinian state is over. That message was intended not only for the media, his constituents and the world, but also to get into Netanyahu’s head that he must use Trump’s victory to swerve rightward, or his political future could be jeopardized.Netanyahu’s Likud rival Gideon Sa’ar released his own statement to the right of Netanyahu, and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman is sure to follow.Netanyahu spoke on the phone Wednesday with Trump, who invited him to come to Washington as soon as possible. That could end up being at the end of March, when the AIPAC Policy Conference takes place in Washington.That would give Netanyahu two more months beyond the interregnum to figure out where he is heading. But then there will be no more stalling, and Netanyahu will have to have figured out his new toy’s instructions.Like an instant lottery winner, Netanyahu has never had to deal with such a new challenge of riches: the blessing of an American president who says he will not pressure Israel. But winning the lottery has proven to be a curse in disguise for many who could not handle the pressure.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>I love sports and have my whole life. Ask anyone who knows me. But thanks to my upbringing, I have never been one to lose perspective where athletics are concerned. My grandparents never let me think for a second, for instance, that playing was as important as studying and the lesson stuck. The state of big money college sports appalls me. That our society clearly values the contributions of jocks more than it does educators explains a lot about why we find ourselves in the predicament we’re in politically and economically. Millionaires and billionaires being unable to figure out a way to divvy up the GDP of Barbados has gotten so commonplace that you wonder why it’s even news.
So the Penn State sex abuse scandal, which last night claimed the jobs of university president Graham Spanier and head football coach Joe Paterno, at some level feels like more of the same. Sure, it involves a school that has historically run a clean athletics program (as far as we know). And the most visible player in the drama is hardly a fly-by-night with a suitcase full of cash. Unless you’re at least in your 70s, you have no real memory of a Nittany Lion football game without Joe Paterno on the sidelines. We toss terms like “epic” and “icon”around pretty casually these days, but JoePa is, by any definition, a legitimate sports icon. When you hear an outraged student being interviewed on ESPN saying that Paterno is Penn State football, that student is right. He or she may be wrong about a great many other things, of course…
In 2003, the St. Bonaventure University community was rocked by what OnlineColleges.net ranks as the seventh worst scandal in American collegiate sports history. I joined the faculty of that university the following year, after the school had cleaned house. I hadn’t paid much attention to the uproar when it happened. I knew about the Bonnies’ proud history, but a scandal at a small school in the A-10? Eh.
I arrived on campus, though, and began to meet people. The subject came up – invariably. I had a PhD from the University of Colorado, which was just above SBU at #6 on that list, providing a nice topic for polite conversation. I quickly came to understand that what had happened the previous year was more than just a little dustup in the hoops program. I realized that it had taken a serious emotional toll on the entire community, and you didn’t have to be a basketball freak to be affected. It was so bad that the chairman of the SBU board of trustees had taken his own life.
In short, the members of that community were in mourning. A couple of stupid people, trusted leaders who should have known better, decided to play fast and loose with a university’s reputation (and in that community, Bonas is the absolute center of the community’s life). When things blew up, people who prided themselves on character and integrity felt humiliated in front of the nation.
What happened in Olean, New York in 2003, of course, wasn’t a fraction as bad as what the Penn State community has to confront, though. It’s sort of like dealing with the loss of your beloved grandfather, except that your grandfather probably wasn’t complicit in covering for a pedophile.
I know a lot of people with Penn State ties (including my close friend Brian Angliss, one of the co-founders here at S&R). Some are obviously hurting, others are enraged, but all are stunned. All feel betrayed, and I don’t think any of them can quite believe that the institution they have always been so proud of is now a 24/7 media spectacle because one of its coaches is alleged to have been the lowest of the low and that the men entrusted with the integrity of the school’s most visible arm chose, at most, to live up only to their basic legal obligations.
I don’t think PSU is an outstanding institution because of its football program or because of the legacy of Joe Paterno. I think it because of the quality of the human beings that the school has produced. And because of that, I know this community will bounce back better than ever. Yes, St. Bonaventure and the University of Colorado, along with the Duke lacrosse team and the Georgia basketball team and the SMU football program, which was the first to receive the NCAA’s “death penalty,” and the other five schools on that list of infamy will all be moving down a notch, because what Jerry Sandusky allegedly did and what his superiors allegedly enabled is hands-down worse, by far, than any other scandal in American sports history. But the university will redeem itself.
In the meantime, I offer my condolences to all the men and women of character and integrity who are or have been associated with Penn State. I know you’re suffering in ways that most people around you don’t fully understand. And I know most of you are further bewildered by the behavior of some of the students last night.
But we don’t judge the school according to a few bad examples. All schools have those. We judge the school, instead, by you, and by that standard you should feel tremendous pride.Thursday on CNN’s “New Day,” Sen. Angus King (I-ME) reacted to the terrorist attack in New York City that killed eight people and President Donald Trump having said the United States’ criminal justice system was “a laughingstock” and calling suspects to be given the death penalty if found guilty.
King accused Trump of making an effort to “get rid” of the Constitution and constitutional rights.
King said, “A lot of it is just him. I think it just comes out. I think you’re overthinking it in terms of strategy and political strategy. He just comes out with what’s on the top of his head. And I think that’s the way he feels. I’ve got to say, he said a lot of things that bother a lot of people. And it bothered me, frankly over the last eight months. The idea of our criminal justice system being a joke and a laughingstock, you know, that is the FBI, it’s our U.S attorneys, judges, juries. That was just corrosive of understanding and support for the system, which is what we are supposed to be fighting for.”
He continued, “What we’re talking about here is the Constitution, and it’s not a pesky annoyance. It’s who we are. It’s what we fight for. It’s what the flag symbolizes. In effect, what he’s saying is—that pesky Constitution, and those constitutional rights, you know, we’ve got to get rid of them. That is just corrosive, and it undermines public respect for institutions generally, and I think that’s what bothers me.”
He added, “He is giving permission for an amount of people to say similar things or think similar things. It kind of opens the door. In my view, a president ought to be defending our institutions and talking about imperfections, if there are things in the justice system that we could improve. But that is a far cry from saying our criminal system and judicial system is a laughingstock. It doesn’t get us anywhere in terms of the unity and the ability of our country to deal with these kinds of problems.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNENCLAREMONT, N.H. — Republican front-runner Donald Trump said he believes President Obama’s executive order on guns will give his own supporters another reason to go to the polls.
“He shouldn’t be doing it by executive order,” Trump told the Herald backstage, moments before rallying supporters here last night. “I mean, you should be getting Congress together and there’s supposed to be agreement. All they’re doing is step-by-step, they’re hurting the Second Amendment, and that’s all they’re doing.”
Trump added: “You have to go out and you have to cajole and deal with Congress … and not just sign something you feel like signing. He has to be able to make deals and get the Republicans and Democrats together and make deals.”
Trump said Obama’s new gun rules could ultimately backfire, helping to get Trump’s supporters to the polls.
“I think it might,” said Trump. “We have such tremendous support, but I think something like that probably might …”
“Look at Paris,” he added. “If you had people in that room that had a revolver strapped to their belt, they had a gun strapped to someplace and … the good guys could do a little shooting back, it wouldn’t have been 130 people killed — that I can tell you.”
In the past few days, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has accused Trump of sexism and Trump has said former President Bill Clinton’s sex scandals are “fair game” on the campaign trail.
Trump and Bill Clinton were stumping just a few miles apart Monday night, but didn’t take shots at each other.
But Trump said last night, “When he puts himself out there, he becomes fair game. I think everybody saw that. Once he puts himself out there, he’s absolutely fair game.”
The big question for Trump — still leading polls nationally and in New Hampshire, including the latest Franklin Pierce University Boston Herald poll last month — is whether he can get his supporters to the polls.
Many haven’t voted in years, and Trump has been criticized for not having as strong a ground game as other candidates, such as Jeb Bush.
But Trump said, “I think we have a great ground game. Some of them are right here now. … And I think we’re going to do really well. New Hampshire’s been very strong. We’re leading in every poll by a lot, some numbers are by tremendous amounts.
“If everybody shows up, we’re going to have a great situation. We’re going to make America great again. It’s going to be very simple. There’s a lot of love in the air, I can tell you. There’s tremendous spirit for the country.”
Hundreds of Trump-backers waited in the cold — some for more than an hour — to get into the high school gymnasium here.
“Washington’s corrupt,” said Scott Lavertue, a disabled Navy veteran and Trump supporter from Quechee, Vt. “I can’t get even started, man. I’d love to see … Trump and Bill O’Reilly as his running mate. How’s that?”Many are feared dead following the train derailment (Picture: EPA)
At least 35 people are believed to have been killed after a high-speed train derailed in Spain.
The derailment of the train, which was headed to El Ferrol from Madrid |
lee Barnette, who interns at the LGBTA center. “It is a long and steady progress of change, but we are getting there, slowly but surely.”
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Tulane University, a private institution of about 6,500 students, has been a leader in policy and campus climate work in the South. The Louisiana school is one of only four campuses in the South to have a five-star score on the Campus Pride Index. This is due in large part to student activists who have dedicated their time and effort to making LGBTQ climate a priority on campus. Tulane established its Office of Multicultural Affairs in 1988 and has since added an Office for Gender and Sexual Diversity. Campus Pride has recognized Tulane for sending past students to Campus Pride’s annual Camp Pride for six consecutive years since 2008. Tulane students have also been recognized for their capacity-building and organizing work, such as Mark Labadorf, who was one of the 2013 Top 10 Student Leaders in Action.
Campus programming is a large focus of queer work at Tulane. From hosting the queer South Asian performance and literary arts duo Darkmatter to the annual Audre Lorde Week, there are always educational events available to Tulane students that can push the narrative about LGBTQ work further. Tulane offers a multicultural/LGBTIQA orientation, a peer mentoring program, a multicultural/LGBTIQA leadership retreat in Mississippi, a Safe Zone Ally program, and Pride Prom among many other things.
Tulane University demonstrates an institutional commitment with programs like Jubilee during freshman orientation. This is where all new students learn about intersectionality, microaggressions, and preferred gender pronouns. The regularity of LGBTQ events, including the LGBT film series and LGBT History Month, ensure that the messages from Jubilee are not lost on students and that the campus message of embracing diversity follows students from orientation to graduation.
The commitment to LGBTQ work is not limited only to the L, G, and B. Campus Pride’s Trans Policy Clearinghouse notes that the campus has a nondiscrimination policy inclusive of gender identity and expression, allows students to change name and gender on campus records, and provides student health insurance inclusive of transition-related medical expenses.
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While Virginia has not necessarily been the most LGBT-friendly place, this campus has been a “brave” beacon for LGBT advocacy in the state for decades. The University of Richmond's work to become an LGBTQ-inclusive campus began in the 1990s, when sexual orientation was added to its nondiscrimination policy and the school launched its Safe Zone initiative. Since then, the university has implemented same-sex domestic partner benefits for full-time faculty and staff members, added gender identity and expression to its nondiscrimination policy, received four stars on the Campus Pride Index, hired an associate director of LGBTQ life, and started hosting Lavender Graduations, among many other things. The University of Richmond is one of 29 Southern schools with a Campus Pride Index rating of four stars or higher.
In early February the university teamed up with Campus Pride to host the first-ever Campus Pride College Sports Summit. The summit was a two-day event that featured Sue Rankin, Kye Allums, Wade Davis, and even a world premiere screening of The Rugby Player. The event was focused on research findings from the Campus Pride report, LGBTQ student athlete experiences, training resources, and recommended best practices to prevent harassment in college sports. The event reached more than 100 coaches, staff, and student athletes.
In late March the University of Richmond hosted the Q-Summit: A Gathering of Queer Southern Youth. The event was a gathering of queer youth, ages 18-25, who are leaders within the South. The day was filled with movement-building, skill-sharing, and best-practices development that was led by people under the age of 25. The aim was to amplify the experiences of LGBTQ youth of color and trans* youth voices, while gathering to plan the future of their movement. The event welcomed over 130 queer youth activists and featured keynote speakers and presenters who were all 25 years old or younger.
In May the university was recognized by the Richmond Organization for Sexual Minority Youth with a 2014 Catalyst Award at the organization’s annual fundraiser. The Catalyst Award is given to institutions that work with LGBTQ youth and are champions for LGBTQ progress.
A mark of a “brave space” is unyielding advocacy in the face of adversity. As a public research institution, the University of Houston is known for a history of grassroots LGBTQ student organizing and activism.
This past year the University of Houston student senate passed the Josephine Tittsworth Act. The student bill is an attempt to address the safety concerns of transgender people on campus. The bill allows transgender students to use their proper name, title, and gender when completing official university documents.
Today the university boasts a full-service LGBT Resource Center with a program director, student staff, a large selection of annual programming, and an LGBT studies program. As stated, the mission of the center is “to launch the next generation of healthy, proud, academically successful LGBTQ citizens, leaders and advocates.” Some of the center’s key programs include a Peer Mentoring Program to help assist newly LGBTQ-identifying students, a speakers bureau, and a brown bag social lunch to help foster relationships between students and faculty. Programs for faculty and staff include the Cougar Ally Training on LGBTQ issues as well as multiple Cougar Ally Lunch ‘N’ Learns, which provide discussions on select LGBTQ issues.
The University of Houston is one of the two highest-ranked Texas schools listed on the Campus Pride Index, ranked at 4.5 stars out of 5 stars. The campus also has made significant strides on transgender concerns, adding “gender identity/expression” to its nondiscrimination statement and having a gender-inclusive restroom policy that allows students and faculty to use the restroom of their choice. Beginning this fall, the campus has also added transgender-inclusive student health insurance for medical expenses related to hormones and surgery.
PagesThere is not "one of the Muslim nations" that doesn't have "discrimination against women, discrimination against gays, subjugation of other religious beliefs."
Muslim values are inconsistent with American values, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said recently.
Carson has been on the defense for saying he doesn’t believe a Muslim should be president. A couple of days later, in a Sept. 22 interview with Fox’s Megyn Kelly, the former neurosurgeon justified his position by criticizing the governments of Muslim countries for their human rights records.
"If you look throughout the world at Muslim government, I see discrimination against women, discrimination against gays, subjugation of other religious beliefs," said Carson, a resident of West Palm Beach, Fla. "And I would be very interested in somebody showing me one of the Muslim nations where that is not occurring. I haven't seen it."
We decided to help Carson out and look into whether there are Muslim countries -- that is, those with a majority-Muslim population -- with governments that don’t discriminate against women, members of the LGBT community and religious minorities.
Carson does have a point that a majority of the 50-odd Muslim countries do have poor records in all three categories. However, he overlooks some important exceptions.
Women’s rights
To assess women’s rights in these countries, we turned to the World Economic Forum’s 2014 Global Gender Gap Index, as well as the 2014 Social Institutions and Gender Index report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.
The Gender Gap Index ranks 142 countries based on gender disparities within each nation, including economic opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health. The United States is No. 20, while Iceland is No. 1.
By this measure, the 34 Muslim countries on this list don’t have a solid record on gender equality. Just eight crack the top 100 -- Kazakhstan (43), Kyrgyzstan (67), Bangladesh (68), Senegal (77), Albania (83), Azerbaijan (94), Indonesia (97) and Brunei (98).
The OECD index instead measures how much gender discrimination a country’s institutions project. Although it isn’t ranked on the overall index list, the United States is listed as "low" or "very low" discrimination in all categories except "civil liberties," for which it is labeled "medium" discrimination -- for reasons such as low numbers of female elected leaders and no national paid maternity or paternity leave.
Of the 43 Muslim countries included in the report, most have "high" to "very high" levels of institutional discrimination in most categories. Just three are categorized as "low" discrimination across the board -- Kazakhstan, Morocco and Turkey. Labeled "medium" are Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Senegal and Indonesia.
It’s also worth noting that multiple Muslim countries have had female heads of government or heads of state, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Turkey, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan and Senegal.
Zakia Salime, an expert in gender and Islam at Rutgers University, also pointed out that numerous Muslim countries signed the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, while the United States did not. She added that abortion is legal in some Muslim countries, including Turkey.
LGBT rights
We had a little more trouble pinning down which, if any, Muslim countries have little institutional discrimination against the LGBT community. We did, at least, figure out which ones criminalize homosexuality, according to the Human Rights Campaign and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, both advocacy groups.
Of 48 majority-Muslim countries, homosexual relations are legal in 13: Albania, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Tajikistan and Turkey.
In some of these countries where homosexual activity is legal, there is still some institutional discrimination against LGBT people -- such as a ban on cross-dressing in Bahrain. In some other Muslim nations, homosexuality is legal in parts of the country.
As for same-sex marriage, it is not legal in any majority-Muslim nation.
Religious freedom
As far as institutional challenges to religious freedom, we looked at democracy advocacy group Freedom House’s 2015 Freedom in the World report.
In coming up with their overall freedom index, Freedom House scored each of the countries it assessed based on "freedom of expression and belief." The United States scored a 15 out of 16 in this category.
Of the 47 Muslim countries included in the study, nine got a score higher than 10 out of 16 in "freedom of expression and belief": Tunisia (13), Sierra Leone (12), Senegal (15), Niger (11), Mali (11), Lebanon (11), Indonesia (12), Burkina Faso (13) and Albania (13).
Notably, Senegal received the same score as the United States. But many Muslim countries got low scores in this category -- including seven nations that scored just a one or two.
We also looked at Muslim countries in the State Department’s 2013 Religious Freedom Report. The department reported a vast majority of these countries as having some institutional restrictions on religious freedom. But the report said several Muslim countries had no significant restrictions -- mostly overlapping with the countries that received high scores on the Freedom House list.
In sum
While there are many majority-Muslim nations that do have a record of institutional discrimination against women, members of the LGBT community and religious groups, there are plenty of exceptions.
These exceptions are enough to call into question Carson’s implication that none of the nearly 50 Muslim countries -- and by extension the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims -- respect these rights.
Many Muslim countries have a longstanding tradition of democratic rule, particularly in the Far East, such as Bangladesh, said Ahmed Souaiaia, a professor of Islamic law and human rights at the University of Iowa. Souaiaia said he has conducted research in Tunisia, where religious minorities and women’s rights are protected in the country’s constitution.
"To reduce the actions, beliefs and views of 1.7 billion people to a stereotype is stunning," Souaiaia said.
Our ruling
Ben Carson said there is not "one of the Muslim nations" that doesn't have "discrimination against women, discrimination against gays, subjugation of other religious beliefs."
Carson has a point that many countries with a majority-Muslim population do have poor records on institutional discrimination against women, members of the LGBT community and religious minorities. However, his broad-brush statement glosses over the fact that such policies are not universal. Numerous Muslim countries offer freedoms in each category. We rate the claim Mostly False.
CLARIFICATION, Nov. 24, 2015: We've updated this article in response to a reader's suggestion, clarifying that the list of Muslim countries that have had female leaders includes both heads of state and heads of government.Winter Anime 2018 Roundup!
“Love Japanese Anime, but it is difficult to follow them …”
Four seasons in a year, many Japanese animation are broadcasted on TV for more than 12 episodes. Meanwhile, various manga, Light novel and games are newly born as “original work”. It is certainly difficult to chase all that information!
We decided to start “TOKYO Anime Log 2017” which roughly summarizes the weekly animated news on a trial basis.
As this year will be over soon, we would like to post the 1st issue of December
Winter Anime 2018 Roundup!
“Overlord II” PV released.
From the TV animation “Overlord II” broadcasting from January 2018, the latest key visuals and PV were released. In addition, five additional actors and actresses including Sora Amamiya, Kiyono Yasuno, Ryota Osaka, Koji Ishii, Naomi Kusumi, Hiroki Touchi, etc. were announced as additional casts.
“Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san” Collaboration Ramen restaurant in Akihabara.
A collaboration campaign with “AKIBA MENGEKI” will be held from TV anime “Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san” broadcasting in January 2018. Twitter campaign to win the cast’s autographed anime official poster, as well as a full-wrapping ramen stall “Koizumi-san stand” will be displayed.
“Märchen Mädchen” the 2nd version PV released.
From the TV anime “Märchen Mädchen” starts broadcasting in January 2018, the second PV was released. In the released PV, you can also listen to the OP theme song “Watashi no Tameno Monogatari ~ My Uncompleted Story ~”.
Upcoming news
“Alice or Alice” Visual released
From the comic series “Alice or Alice” which decided to make TV animation, the key visual for TV animation was released. Official website was also opened.
“SERVAMP” the movie premiere on 4th April 2018
The date for movie premiore and screening theaters were decided for “SERVAMP – Alice in the Garden -” which starts screening from Saturday, April 7, 2018. Theater viewing advance tickets will start selling on theaters nationwide from Saturday, December 23rd.
“Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san” TV broadcasting in the summer 2018
TV anime “Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san” Broadcast starting in the summer of 2018. Also, according to the announcement, information on key visual, PV, main staffs was also announced. In the main cast, Yuuki Ono, Miyuri Shimabukuro, Eri Suzuki, Rie Takiahashi.
“Rizu to Aoi tori” Visual and PV released
A key visual of the theater animation “Rizu to Aoi tori” and a new image was released. The story is based on Ayano Takeda’s novel “Hibike! Euphonium Novel Volume 2”, and Kyoto animation is in charge of animation. Director Naoko Yamada and by Reiko Yoshida tagged with all the regular members of Kyo Animation.
Movie premiore is scheduled for Saturday, April 21, 2018.
“Shinmai Maou no Testament DEPARTURES Teaser movie is released.
2Teaser movie of the theater animation “Shinmai Maou no Testament DEPARTURES” scheduled to screen from January 27 (Sat) 2018 was released. It will be screened for two weeks limitedly at Kadokawa Cinema Shinjuku and elsewhere.
Source: Anime information site “Anibu”WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Sunday chose former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the new agency charged with protecting U.S. consumers from abusive mortgage lending practices and hidden credit card fees.
The pick allows Obama to sidestep some of the controversy he would have faced had he nominated Elizabeth Warren, who is credited with conceiving the idea for the new consumer agency but is viewed by many on Wall Street as a foe.
The president is still likely to face a big fight with Republicans on the pick of Cordray, a close Warren ally who has a record of cracking down on the financial industry. His selection requires Senate confirmation.
“He’s from the same mold as Elizabeth Warren but he is easier to get approved,” said Matt McCormick, portfolio manager at Bahl & Gaynor Investment Counsel Inc in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He said Obama was “bowing to the inevitable” in choosing the lesser-known Cordray over the more controversial Warren.
Though Obama’s fellow Democrats control the Senate, Republicans could use a procedural move to block a confirmation vote. An event is planned at the White House on Monday at 1:05 p.m. ET to formally roll out Obama’s choice.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will open its doors on Thursday, the one-year anniversary of Obama’s signing of the Dodd-Frank financial oversight law.
Obama will meet on Monday with heads of financial regulatory agencies to hear updates on the law’s implementation.
Republicans and the banking industry have disparaged the consumer agency as an unnecessary layer of regulation that, if overzealous, could restrict consumer choice and lending.
Senate Republicans signaled on Sunday they would be reluctant to confirm a new head of the bureau unless their demands were met for major changes to the agency’s structure.
As an adviser to Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Warren has led the effort to set up the new agency.
Her outspoken criticism of Wall Street has made her a lightning rod for conservatives and the industry.
But Warren is a hero to many Democrats and consumer advocates who were disappointed at Obama’s decision not to name her. She welcomed Cordray’s nomination in a statement in which she called him tough and smart — “exactly the combination this new agency needs.”
Warren will leave her role in the Obama administration, a U.S. official said. A professor of law, Warren will return to Harvard University after helping with the agency’s transition, a person familiar with the matter said.
Some Democrats are urging Warren to challenge Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown, whose seat is up for re-election in 2012.
‘BEST QUALIFIED’
“With her track record of standing up to Wall Street and fighting for consumers, Elizabeth Warren was the best qualified to lead this bureau that she conceived,” said Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. She said she hoped Cordray would continue Warren’s legacy.
Cordray — whom one bank lobbyist called “all the hard edge and ambition of Warren without the charm” — is known as a vocal critic of the banking industry.
“I would not expect a ton of pro-business policies. I would expect him to be very aggressive,” Bahl & Gaynor’s McCormick said about Cordray, who is a five-time champion of the television game show “Jeopardy,” which tests contestants’ knowledge.
In Ohio, Cordray was known as a leader among state attorneys general in a probe of dubious mortgage foreclosure practices. He lost his re-election bid last year and in December, joined Warren’s team working on enforcement matters for the new consumer agency.
In a 2009 interview, Cordray told Reuters it was his duty as Ohio attorney general to hold Wall Street to account. He said taxpayers were focused on creating wealth while banks, brokerages and insurers were trying to shuffle around that wealth for their own profit.
“It’s a badge of honor for us,” Cordray said then about his litigation against major financial firms, including Bank of America.
Obama views the consumer bureau as one of the most important parts of the landmark financial regulation law he signed in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 markets meltdown.
“American families and consumers bore the brunt of the financial crisis and are still struggling in its aftermath to find jobs, stay in their homes, and make ends meet,” Obama said in a statement on Sunday. He said Cordray had “spent his career advocating for middle class families.”
In May, 44 Senate Republicans vowed to block confirmation unless the consumer agency’s leadership was changed to a board instead of a single director and other changes are made.
“Congress raised concerns about the lack of transparency and accountability, but the Obama administration still hasn’t addressed those concerns,” John Ashbrook, a spokesman for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, said in a statement after the news broke that Cordray would get the nomination.CHICAGO -- Chicago Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer says the team isn’t close to making a big move but anticipates action over the next 14 days, which includes the winter meetings in Nashville.
“Over the next two weeks, there will be a lot of activity,” Hoyer said on ESPN 1000 in Chicago on Monday. “I expect as the market picks up, we’ll be part of that market.”
Will the Cubs make a move for an elite player, such as David Price? Nick Turchiaro/USA TODAY Sports
Hoyer couldn’t pin down whether the Cubs would add via trade or free agency, calling both markets “developing.” Several free agents have signed contracts, including pitcher Jordan Zimmermann, who agreed on a deal with Detroit over the weekend. The big question for the Cubs has been whether to spend a limited increase in their budget mostly on one player or to spread it around to various needs, which include center field and starting pitching.
“Those are the philosophical questions we’ve all been having over the last couple of months,” Hoyer said. “There’s good with both. Elite players can change a team.”
The “elite” players on the market who the Cubs have been tied to include pitcher David Price and outfielder Jason Heyward, but Hoyer indicated it’s the smaller moves that are sometimes just as important. The Cubs have signed or picked up several relievers over the last few weeks but still haven’t made the one or two big moves many are expecting.
“Depth is underrated, especially in the winter,” Hoyer explained. “Everyone will write out lineups in the offseason and they don’t focus on bench, they don’t focus on the bullpen, they don’t focus on guys in Triple-A that are going up and down. Over the course of six months, those are the little moves that make a huge difference.”
One notion Hoyer stressed was staying ready for the unexpected. That’s likely to happen in Nashville where all 30 teams plus many agents will congregate next Monday through Thursday.
“You have to stay nimble and know things will come at you that you might not have expected,” Hoyer said. “Some team will throw an idea at us that we never thought about.”
In the meantime, the Cubs will continue to explore both the free-agent and trade markets for a center fielder as well as both starting and relief pitching.
“Both those markets are still developing,” Hoyer said. “I think moves (in baseball) will start to happen this week and next week.
“Being prepared for Nashville is the most important thing. I'm sure it’s going to be a fascinating week.”Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.
In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.
In his book, titled "Decision Points," Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was "Damn right" and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book.
Bush previously had acknowledged endorsing what he described as the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation techniques - a term meant to encompass irregular, coercive methods - after Justice Department officials and other top aides assured him they were legal. "I was a big supporter of waterboarding," Vice President Richard B. Cheney acknowledged in a television interview in February.
The Justice Department later repudiated some of the underlying legal analysis for the CIA effort. But Bush told an interviewer a week before leaving the White House that "I firmly reject the word 'torture,' " and he reiterates that view in the book. Reuters and the New York Times first published accounts of the book's contents Tuesday evening.
Since the 2003 waterboarding of Mohammed and similar interrogations of two other CIA detainees in 2002 and 2003, the agency has forsworn the technique, which involves pouring water onto someone's face while strapped to a board, to convince them they will shortly drown.
President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. have both said waterboarding is an act of torture proscribed by international law, a viewpoint supported by a handful of Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and opposed by other Republicans. But the Obama administration has not sought to punish former Bush administration officials for approving it.
The 26-year-old United Nations Convention Against Torture requires that all parties to it seek to enforce its provisions, even for acts committed elsewhere. That provision, known as universal jurisdiction, has been cited in the past by prosecutors in Spain and Belgium to justify investigations of acts by foreign officials. But no such trials have occurred in foreign courts.
Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said, "Waterboarding is broadly seen by legal experts around the world as torture, and it is universally prosecutable as a crime. The fact that none of us expect any serious consequences from this admission is what is most interesting."
M. Cherif Boussiani, an emeritus law professor at DePaul University who co-chaired the U.N. experts committee that drafted the torture convention, said that Bush's admission could theoretically expose him to prosecution. But he also said Bush must have presumed that he would have the government's backing in any confrontation with others' courts.
Georgetown University law professor David Cole, a long-standing critic of Bush's interrogation and detention policies, called prosecution unlikely. "The fact that he did admit it suggests he believes he is politically immune from being held accountable.... But politics can change."Crosby is a finalist alongside the Edmonton Oilers Connor McDavid and San Jose Sharks blueliner Brent Burns.
Crosby is a three-time winner of the Ted Lindsay Award, having captured it in back-to-back seasons in 2013 and '14, and also in 2007 when it was known as the Lester B. Pearson Award.
Only two players in NHL history have won the Lindsay/Pearson Award four times: Mario Lemieux (4 times) and Wayne Gretzky (5 times).
Already the winner of Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy after leading the NHL with 44 goals in the regular season, Crosby has also been nominated for the Hart Trophy, which goes to the NHL's MVP as voted by the Professional Hockey Writers' Association.
All award winners will be announced on June 21 at the NHL Awards Show held at T-Mobile Arena.The White House on Tuesday sought to contain the damage caused by Michael Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser, insisting he did not break the law in his conversations with Russia.
Rather than putting the matter to rest, however, White House press secretary Sean Spicer raised more questions by confirming that Trump knew for “weeks” that Flynn had misled Vice President Pence and others about his dealings with Russia before his ouster on Monday.
Spicer attempted to quiet calls for investigations into Flynn as Democrats howled for an independent probe into links between Trump’s team and Russia — including when the president first learned his national security adviser discussed sanctions with Moscow’s U.S. envoy before the inauguration.
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He said Trump had fired Flynn not because of his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, but because Trump felt that his trust in Flynn had “eroded.”
“There is not a legal issue but rather a trust issue,” Spicer said, who added that the circumstances created a “critical mass and an unsustainable situation.”
“The president must have complete and unwavering trust for the person in that position,” he said.
The spokesman strongly suggested a congressional probe isn’t necessary because the matter was handled after a “very thorough review” by the president and his legal team, which he said determined no laws were broken.
He said Trump “instinctively thought” that Flynn did not act illegally after he was informed of the matter and that the review “corroborated that.”
Spicer said Trump didn’t ask Flynn to speak about sanctions with the Russian diplomat.
“No, absolutely not,” he said. “No, no, no.”
While the White House insisted Flynn had broken no laws, The New York Times reported that FBI agents interviewed Flynn when he was still national security adviser in the first days of the Trump administration. If Flynn was untruthful during the interviews, it could leave him vulnerable to criminal charges.
In his final interview as national security adviser, Flynn said he “crossed no lines” in his talks with Kislyak.
“If I did, believe me, the FBI would be down my throat, my clearances would be pulled,” he told the conservative Daily Caller News Foundation. The interview was conducted before he resigned Monday, and published Tuesday.
In his conversation with Kislyak, Flynn said he briefly discussed the 35 Russian diplomats expelled by then-President Obama over the country’s election-related hacking, but denied speaking about financial sanctions against Moscow’s intelligence services.
“It was basically, ‘Look, I know this happened. We’ll review everything,’ ” Flynn said. “I never said anything such as, ‘We’re going to review sanctions,’ or anything like that.”
Spicer’s account added to the confusion surrounding Flynn’s sudden departure just 24 days into the Trump administration, which has been consumed by chaos and self-inflicted wounds during its first three weeks.
After acting Attorney General Sally Yates informed White House Counsel Don McGahn of inconsistencies in Flynn’s story on Jan. 26, Spicer said, Trump was briefed “immediately” that his national security adviser had discussed U.S. sanctions with the Russian ambassador.
“We have been reviewing and evaluating this issue with respect to Gen. Flynn on a general basis for a few weeks trying to ascertain the truth,” Spicer said.
That contradicted Friday’s comments by Trump aboard Air Force One, when he said he wasn’t familiar with a Washington Post report asserting Flynn misled top Trump officials.
“I don’t know about that,” Trump said when asked about the article. “I haven’t seen it. What report is that? I haven’t seen that. I’ll look into that.”
Spicer said the president’s comments strictly pertained to the Post report and that he was personally involved in the inquiry into Flynn. He said it would have been an affront to “due process” had he chosen to immediately dismiss the retired Army lieutenant general.
There were also conflicting accounts about who initiated Flynn’s exit.
Hours before Spicer spoke to reporters, senior counselor Kellyanne Conway suggested the former national security adviser offered to resign.
“Mike Flynn had decided it was best to resign,” she said on NBC’s “Today” show. “He knew he had become a lighting rod and he made that decision.”
But Spicer said it was Trump who asked for Flynn’s resignation.
NBC News reported that Pence was only informed of the Justice Department’s warning about Flynn’s phone call on Feb. 9, two weeks after Trump and other senior officials knew.
Flynn’s resignation is breathing new life into scrutiny of the Trump team’s ties to Russia.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are reportedly investigating financial and business ties between Russian officials and other Trump associates, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Spicer claimed Trump has been “incredibly tough on Russia,” citing his private talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on issues like Crimea.
But the president has repeatedly praised Putin and said he wants to pursue a close relationship with the country.
Trump has not commented personally on Flynn’s resignation, other than to say the news media should be focused on the leaks that ultimately led to his departure.
“The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?” he tweeted Tuesday.
The GOP-controlled Congress appears unlikely for the time being to launch a separate inquiry into Flynn.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Senate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Ky.) said Tuesday it’s “highly likely” the chamber’s intelligence panel will look into the Flynn controversy as part of its broader inquiry into Russia’s election interference.
Politically, Republicans in Congress say it’s yet another example of how chaos within the White House has served as a distraction from pursuing major legislation.
Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.), a frequent Trump critic, said the constant controversy “sucks the oxygen out of the room.”
“We should be talking about replacing ObamaCare [and] tax reform,” he said at the Capitol.DreamWorks
Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ most recent collaboration, Bridge of Spies, opens in theaters today and tells the story of a lawyer tasked with negotiating the return of an American pilot imprisoned by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This marks the pair’s sixth time working together, either as director and actor or co-producers, on projects like Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, and Band of Brothers.
Hanks and Spielberg first collaborated on Saving Private Ryan. The film assembled an ensemble cast that included Matt Damon, Vin Diesel, Ed Burns, Tom Sizemore, and Barry Pepper, just to name a few. It tells the story of a group of World War II soldiers assigned to retrieve Private Ryan (Damon) back home after all three of his brothers had been killed in action.
While many have come to love the film over the years, there’s still plenty the casual fan doesn’t know. So, here’s a list of interesting facts about Saving Private Ryan.Appalachian Bear Rescue releases four bears back into the wild Copyright by WATE - All rights reserved (source: Appalachian Bear Rescue) [ + - ] Video
TOWNSEND (WATE) - Monday was a big day for Appalachian Bear Rescue because they sent four of the bear cubs there back out into the wild.
This year they have some new technology to help them track those bears success. They put tracking collars on all of them and say it will help them know how successful these bears are once they are back in the wild.
"We don't want these bears to be captive, and we never forget why we're taking care of them," said ABR Curator Janet Dalton.
https://www.facebook.com/AppalachianBearRescue/videos/1084649911547600/
They arrived as tiny, malnourished cubs fighting for life. Some of them weighed less than 10 pounds, each with a different back story. One was rescued from a river. Another was orphaned after her mother was hit by a car.
"They came in very dehydrated, very weak," said Dalton.
After several months living inside Appalachian Bear Rescue's wild enclosure, some of the bears are getting a new lease on life.
"They've been with us. They've been thriving, and they were all very healthy," said Dalton.
Photo gallery: Appalachian Bear Rescue cubs
Now weighing between 70 and 100 pounds the four healthiest cubs - Marvin, Carter, Sola and Noli - were set free Monday. They are the first of any of the bears released from ABR to be given GPS collars to track their movements in the wild.
"We need to gauge ourselves, how well are we doing, how effective is our program. So this is one way to do that to see if we need to make any changes, and we just need to know to make sure that we're doing all that we can to give them a second chance," said ABR Curator Coy Blair.
Curators say they will get updates on the cubs' locations every three hours and are hoping to follow them through a successful life as they grow into adult bears.
"Each morning when I get up, it'll be the first thing I do before I get coffee or anything. I'll upload the locations since the last time I did it, and they'll pop right on to Google Earth," said Blair.
Dalton added that seeing the bears released is always a day they look forward to, "This is the culmination of what we do. It's actually a happy day for us, very happy, because we've been able to give them their freedom."
ABR has cared for more than 20 bears so far this year, and they say at least six of them will have to stay over the winter here at the rescue. They say having bears stay over the winter at the rescue is highly unusual. Curators say this is not the most bears they have cared for in one year, but they say it is on the higher end. They say a low food supply in the wild could be to blame.By
Americans are suddenly flabbergasted that a foreign government may have inserted itself into the recent presidential election. This reaction is both absurd and ironic considering the U.S. has made election meddling and regime change a permanent fixture of foreign policy.
It was August 15, 1953, the start of Iranian coup d’état, also known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup. The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom sought to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. This was part of the West’s attempt to enhance Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s stranglehold to the nation’s monarchy and prevent the government from examining the British-owned oil companies.
This event was historical because it was the first time that the U.S., a country that had mostly embraced a non-interventionist foreign policy, had interfered into the affairs of another nation unprovoked.
Why does this historical account matter? For weeks now, the mainstream media, known for its full support of toppling foreign governments and cheering on war, has peddled the idea that the Russian government interfered into the 2016 |
"He already fought top-rank opponents, and he's not in a position to fight them again. This fight against me will irritate him a lot. Now he has to fight with [low-rank] fighters, and he unfortunately picked the most difficult opponent he could in this group."Choi believes the American has lost his killer edge and that his past few fights haven't been impressive."He had a three-fight winning streak of knockouts in 2012," Choi said. "Since then, you can see in his recent fights that he no longer has that killer instinct. Against Hacran Dias and Tatsuya Kawajiri, he only managed to win by close decisions. If it were me, I would have knocked them out.[instagram url="https://www.instagram.com/p/BLlaQUmgAOK/" hide_caption="0"]"If he watches my recent fights, he would notice who the real 'killer' here is. I would say Swanson is more of a'veteran' than a 'killer' these days."The South-Korean then said he welcomed Swanson's aggression and challenged him to stand toe-to-toe with him in Toronto."Just like he said, I also expect him to be aggressive and try and finish the fight," Choi said. "He's more than welcome to try do that. My aim always is to finish my opponent, and I will enjoy going head-to-head. Let's see who is going to be the last man standing in the Octagon."Boyfriend twins.
Screenshot of the BoyfriendTwin Tumblr
They have matching puffed-out chests, green plaid shirts, and endearing bedhead. Their facial hair was carved by the same blade. When they kiss, they look like they’re doing an especially salacious rendition of the Marx Brothers mirror routine. Forget the homonymous gay couples, with their quaint troubles of shared first names and confused friends. Behold the boyfriend twin.
As the Tumblr that appeared recently asks, “What’s sexier than dating yourself?” Boyfriend Twin’s ever-growing scroll of photos seems to have charmed and terrified its devoted audience in equal measure, scratching at unconscious fears about how we choose our mates. In one portrait after another, two men with similar expressions pose for the camera with complementary profiles that match all the way down to the chest hair. Straight couples who are confused for siblings have been ticklish fodder for lifestyle stories for years, but the boyfriend twins take that a step further, suggesting that what we’re really searching for is our own romantic clone.
This anxiety, of course, long predates the Tumblr, as its anonymous creator has acknowledged, telling BuzzFeed loftily that the photos are intended to spark a conversation about “narcissism, exhibitionism, and sexuality.” For every gay guy who laughs it off, the boyfriend twin is another one’s worst fear realized. One Slate colleague told me his partner will demand a wardrobe change if the two men so much as wear the same fabric on the same day. His fear? “It confirms the whole dumb Freudian model of homosexuality as a kind of narcissism.” Is that really it? Is the lookalike lover a symptom of excessive self-regard, or is it something more elusive?
The answer depends on whom you ask, and there’s plenty of disagreement, even among people who make a living studying such things. But two things are clear: This phenomenon is not particular to gay men, and people do tend to be drawn sexually to people who look similar to them. The real question is why and how that works.
“There’s a lot of work suggesting that people are, in fact, attracted to people who look like them, and this is true over a wide swath of characteristics, from physical characteristics to morals and religious characteristics,” says R. Chris Fraley, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research included a study that morphed a subject’s face into the face of a stranger, then asked the subject to evaluate the resulting face’s attractiveness on a computer screen. Sure enough, subjects favored faces that included their own features. Fraley thinks this tendency traces back to the environment where we grew up and points to preliminary findings about race and attractiveness: People reared in more racially diverse environments appear more likely to find people of other races attractive than people who grew up in racially homogeneous environments. (Though much of the research in this area focuses on opposite-sex attraction, Fraley says he’s found no reason to assume this system works differently for gay men.)
Debra Lieberman, an assistant professor at the University of Miami, is skeptical of facial-recognition theories, but she agrees that there’s an underlying mechanism that leads people to date others who look similar to them. She refers to what she calls “template formation,” or the assembly of traits we learn to look for in romantic partners when we’re young. “The information is not genetically stored, because you can learn it socially every generation,” she says. “Family members, by virtue of the fact that you’re around them so much when you’re young, they fill out that template.” So in Lieberman’s view, the boyfriend twins might not really want to date themselves—they want to date men who have similar attributes as their paternal figures growing up. Does that comfort you?
It’s worth emphasizing that such connections go far beyond physical appearance. Another researcher pointed me to the charmingly titled paper “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Js: Implicit Egotism and Interpersonal Attraction,” which found that people are more likely to be drawn to others who share factors as superficial as similar birthdays and common letters in surnames. The full paper is well worth a read, if only for the surprising (and slightly depressing) conclusions it draws about how our decisions can be unconsciously influenced by the most mundane of personal factors.
Given all this, it’s easy to understand why our first reaction to the boyfriend twins Tumblr is some version of “We don’t know how to feel about this.” But we can rest assured that our complex romantic palates can’t be reduced too neatly. Many of the Tumblr’s more provocative photos strike me as performance art, the couple deliberately drawing on “twincest” taboos to make a humorous point about how much they look alike—and that seems like a more reasonable approach than making your boyfriend avoid cashmere just because you’re wearing it. At least some of our ability to discriminate between partners appears to have been decided a long time ago, so we may as well embrace it. And happily, many of us are: The boyfriend twin photos keep pouring in.
Thanks to Paul Eastwick of the University of Texas at Austin.The Winter Olympics in Sochi have given western journalists no end of fodder for outrage and absurdity – at the cost of accuracy. Despite the just concern about gay rights and entertaining tweets about Sochi’s half-built hotels, a number of persistent stories about Russia and its dissidents could use a little clearing up.
To that end, consider the following …
1. Vladimir Putin probably doesn’t care about LGBT rights, one way or another
As plenty of astute observers have noted, Putin doesn’t tailor domestic policy to international demands. Russia’s gay community, like its immigrant community, is being used as a scapegoat in an attempt to quash domestic dissent. By pointing fingers, to distract and divide, Putin has tried to defuse urban protests against him and rally his conservative supporters.
First up were the Americans (remember when he blamed Hillary Clinton for protests?) and despite his hard work, Ambassador Michael McFaul has become the fall guy for strained US-Russian relations. Then the government targeted immigrants, most non-ethnically Russian, and violent riots broke out between nationalists and immigrants. Finally, the LGBT community landed in legislators’ sights, largely because it fits with religious discomfort over gay rights – religion is a powerful card in Russia, bound up with national identity. Russia’s anti-LGBT laws are more a political card than a symptom of Putin’s own bigotry. His government, which only concerns itself with power, is encouraging bigoted Russians.
1a. These aren’t unfamiliar tactics. American and British politicians have stirred up xenophobia for centuries and the culture war over same-sex marriage, even after a breaking point in the US supreme court last year, continues across the US. But American and British laws protect minorities as equal citizens, while Russian courts routinely circumvent the law as needed, and police corruption means minorities cannot expect safety.
1b. Though Putin signed the provocative anti-LGBT bill into law, he never overtly instigates violence arising from it. Rather, his supporters in the Duma (Russia’s parliament) propose plans, and he approves or freezes them. As Peter Pomerantsev brilliantly describes, Putin’s crony politics grew into what Russians call “the System”, which runs on corruption so pervasive that it implicates even those who would resist it. Of course, this system is also why Sochi has famously cost so much, and why journalists’ hotels were not a priority.
The point here is that it’s not just Putin. A massive system of corruption allows hate and violence to persist against gay people, non-white people and even women and foreigners. The blame lands most on Putin, but the System includes any number of power players (siloviki), petty bureaucrats (chinovniki), complicit businessmen (the infamous oligarchs) and corrupt cops. This is why Putin’s nemesis, Alexei Navalny, won fame for his anti-corruption efforts, and why Putin has a weird tic of being pathologically averse to saying Navalny’s name.
2. Pussy Riot isn’t a band
Madonna introduces Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova at an Amnesty International concert in New York. Photograph: Jason Szenes/EPA
At least not in the sense of a band which sings songs and plays music, it’s not. As a group of art-collective dissidents, sort of Robin Hood merry, anti-capitalist feminists – sure, you can call them a band.
Pussy Riot is a political art group with punk and Slavoj Zizek as philosophical touchstones. It split off from a street art group called Voina (War), which has painted phalluses on drawbridges and staged an orgy in a museum (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, before her political prisoner fame, took part). When members in Russia say Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina aren’t Pussy Riot, they’re clarifying something that has long been obvious.
In their infamous cathedral performance, you’ll notice that they’re not playing instruments – they’re simply shouting political verses. Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina have even said they’re not in a band, and that they’re now fighting for the rights of political prisoners – an admirable and daunting goal, especially given the harrowing time in prison they have endured. But they’re not going to sing about it.
2a. Westerners should rightly feel outraged about Russia’s crackdown on free speech, but should also keep perspective about why Pussy Riot is controversial at home. Russia is by and large a very conservative country and religion is almost untouchable, politically. This should also sound familiar. Imagine how Catholics might feel if people in ski masks ran into St Peter’s and shouted about cardinals’ ties to Berlusconi, or if protesters disparaged Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women’s rights in a major mosque. When was the last time you heard a US president criticize Christianity?
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina have expressed regret about offending Orthodox Christians, and made clear that their trial was reprehensible because it showed how Russian’s vague “hooliganism” law can be bent to prosecute anyone for anything.
3. Putin’s big amnesty wasn’t just a PR move
The Olympic rings in Sochi. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
It was another domestic ploy. As noted, Putin cares about international politics insofar as he can use them – Exhibit A being the clever way he brokered half-measures over Syria and its chemical weapons. Those negotiations let Putin have it both ways: he kept a military strike off Bashar al-Assad and he got to play peacemaker against a would-be hegemonic US. It’s a story Putin wants to sink in.
The amnesty deal, like the Syria talks, lets Putin have his cake and eat it: by forgiving his opponents, he disarms some criticism while also keeping the status quo (protesters are still being prosecuted). Because of the crony system, Putin can say that he’s forgiving people who were rightly convicted by a justice system that acted independently of him. Meanwhile, he puts freed prisoners in the awkward position of being in his debt, always aware that they could go back to prison.
Of those released, only Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an ex-oligarch who served almost a decade behind bars, poses a credible political threat to Putin. Immediately after his special pardon, he left the country. As far as Putin is concerned, these prison sentences served their purpose (to punish and intimidate), and pardons are the natural conclusion of the play. He using false generosity to assert control and political flexibility.
4. Russians are hunting dogs all over the country
Unfortunately, gangs have been killing strays for several years now – it’s not just the government contracting a pest control service in Sochi. The good news here is that lots of Russians are also outraged, and are working to stop it.
5. Russia won’t let Americans eat yogurt
OK, this one probably is just a petty way to mess with Americans, especially US senator and part-time yogurt salesman Chuck Schumer, who is angry that athletes have been kept from receiving this “nutritious and delicious food”.
6. Sochi’s hotels, services and infrastructure are a mess
As countless reporters’ tweets attest, this is true. As the New Republic’s Julia Ioffe thoughtfully counters, though, this is beside the point and verging on schadenfreude. Given collapsing bridges and power outages in cities that weren’t built by the will of one man, the US should probably get its own act together.
7. Sochi matters to Putin because of his bad record on terrorism
Police patrol outside the Olympic Park. Photograph: David Goldman/AP
Amid all the talk of these Olympics as Putin’s baby, legacy and dacha by the sea, there is a deeper narrative at stake: stability v chaos.
Putin’s won his first election on the promise that he would end the strife and economic madness of the 1990s, and over the past 12 years he’s done that – at the price of corruption and authoritarianism. The wars in the Caucasus, a region that abuts Sochi, were largely won by Putin during a long and bloody campaign, but his use of warlords (eg: the terrifying and absurd Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya), has apparently only diffused extremism.
As Christian Caryl argues, this makes Sochi a powerful symbol of 90s chaos versus Putin’s dysfunctional peace today. The theater of the Olympics is a way for Putin to sell himself to the world as Russia’s triumph, and also to Russians feeling ambivalent about another 10 years of his presidency.
But terrorism in Putin’s Russia is real and storied, from the theater hostage crisis in 2002 to the Moscow metro bombings in 2010 and the Volgograd bombings last December. Despite the sweeping measures Putin has taken, warlords, secret police and the System have proven tenuous protections at best. Sochi is a chance to show off that these tactics do work, and by extension that Putinism, despite its $51bn price tag here, also works. Putinism doesn’t work, of course, but because everyone wants a safe, triumphant Olympics, everyone has to root for Russia while figuring out ways to protest its practices.
In other words, Russia matters whether the world likes it or not, and it will keep finding ways to matter. For every stereotype that fits the bill, there’s another that defies it. Russia is a strange, remarkable country that’s endured horrific wars and oppression while also creating some of the world’s greatest achievements in art and science.
It has produced Chekhov, Tchaikovsky and a men’s police choir singing Daft Punk. It’s complicated, so let’s treat it that way.In an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, attorney general Loretta Lynch used Sandra Bland’s tragic death as a launch pad to discuss police training tactics.
Bland, who was found dead in a Texas jail cell earlier this month, was recorded being violently arrested three days before her death. Both police dash cam footage and a bystander’s video shows Officer Brian Encinia ordering Bland to exit her car, and later kneeling on her back while he handcuffs her. Lynch said that the footage highlights minorities’ fears of interacting with police officers.
“Many people see this situation escalating, and I think it shows the frustration that many minority communities feel when they feel that, you know, maybe it wouldn’t have escalated in a different community,” Lynch said. “I hope that that can bring this situation to light as well, so that people understand the frustration that many minority members feel when they’re stopped by the police.”
Since Lynch was confirmed in April, she has advocated for police reform. She spoke on the unrest in Baltimore shortly after Freddie Gray died, and she has advocated for universal police body cams and an overhaul in police training programs.
In the interview, which aired earlier today, Lynch said that she hopes that Bland’s death will jumpstart de-escalation training within law enforcement departments.
“Many of the things that we see police departments doing across the country, frankly, is working on exactly the type of techniques that would have been helpful here,” she said. “As part of my community policing tour, I’ve talked to officers who have said one of the things that they have appreciate most is training in de-escalation tactics to sort of get away from the classic ‘let’s just stop and arrest’ or ‘chase and arrest’ and figure out how we can calm a situation down.”The Catholic diocese of Orlando, Florida, says it has reprimanded a teacher at a Catholic school in the state for giving his sixth-grade religion class an anti-Muslim reading assignment.
Mark Smythe, a religion and social studies teacher at Blessed Trinity Catholic School in Ocala, gave students printouts of a 19th-century Catholic text that refers to Islam as a “monstrous mixture” of faiths. It also calls the doctrines of the Prophet Muhammad “ridiculous, immoral and corrupting.”
“We have spoken to the principal of Blessed Trinity Catholic School, Ocala and to the teacher in question and have reprimanded the teacher for this unfortunate exhibit of disrespect,” Jacquelyn Flanigan, an associate superintendent at the Diocese of Orlando’s Catholic school system, said in a statement.
America does not do a good job of tracking incidents of hate and bias. We need your help to create a database of such incidents, so we all know what’s going on. Tell us your story.
Flanigan didn’t elaborate on what she meant by “reprimanded.” Smythe did not respond to a request for comment.
A concerned mother with a child in Smythe’s class gave copies of the reading assignment to a friend, who then sent the copies to The Huffington Post through the Documenting Hate project.
“[The mother] shared this with me while she could not stop crying,” the friend wrote.
The reading assignment appears to be an excerpt from an 1853 text about Islam by priest Giovanni Bosco, who later became a saint.
In the imagined dialogue between a father and his sons, the father explains how Jesus Christ is superior to the Prophet Muhammad, who “degrades and dishonors human nature and by placing all happiness in sensual pleasures, reduces man to the level of filthy animals.”
Elsewhere in the text, Muhammad is described as a “charlatan,” “villain,” “ignoramus,” “imposter” and “false prophet” who “couldn’t even write” and “propagated his religion, not through miracles or persuasive words, but by military force.”
The Quran, the holy book of Islam, is also called “a series of errors, the most enormous ones being against morality and the worship of the true God.”
An internet search for Bosco’s take on Islam shows it is primarily referenced on fringe conservative Catholic sites and in the comment sections of anti-Muslim hate sites.
Humeraa and Asad Qamar
Humeraa and Asad Qamar
Leaders within Ocala’s interfaith community said they were shocked and upset to see the reading assignment.
Humeraa Qamar, who is Muslim and whose Muslim daughter once attended Blessed Trinity, emailed the school to say the assignment “caused a lot of distress to the students in [the] class and also understandingly to the Muslim Americans living in Ocala, Fl including our family.”
Rabbi David Kaiman of the Congregation B’nai Israel in Gainesville also emailed the school, writing that the reading was “dangerous and destructive and feeds those who seek to hate vilify,” and that it “expresses a hate language that is disturbing.”
He added that the “tone and factual content is outdated and not reflective of Catholic doctrine,” and pointed to statements from a long succession of popes expressing love and respect for Muslims and the Islamic faith.
“I take pride to quote the words of John Paul II in speaking of Islam in 1985,” Kaiman wrote. “’[There] are the important differences which we can accept with the humility and respect, in mutual tolerance; this is a mystery about which, I am certain, God will one day enlighten us.’”
Flanigan, the associate superintendent of Orlando Diocese schools, said “the information provided in the sixth grade class is not consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
She pointed to Nostra Aetate, an official Vatican document Pope Paul VI released on Oct. 28, 1965. It stated that the Catholic Church regards Muslims “with esteem” and urged Catholics to work with Muslims for peace and social justice.
Jordan Denari Duffner, a Catholic research fellow at Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative who studies Islamophobia, said it’s not uncommon for people on some conservative websites to selectively cite centuries-old anti-Muslim texts written by Catholic scholars and saints.
“It’s a general trend that I’ve noticed,” she said of people preferring “the particular saints from earlier in church history over the Vatican II’s take on Islam.”
The Vatican II, or The Second Vatican Council, was a meeting of all Catholic bishops in the early 1960s. It ushered in a series of reforms to liberalize and modernize the Church, including a move to more warmly embrace Muslims and Islam.
But a September 2016 survey from the Bridge Initiative found that 30 percent of Catholics in America have unfavorable views of Muslims, with only 14 percent saying they had favorable views. It also found that people “who consume content from Catholic media outlets have more unfavorable views” of Muslims than those who don’t.
Smythe is among a handful of teachers across the country who have been reprimanded over the last year for distributing racist or anti-Muslim reading material to students.
Disturbing, racist and Islamophobic material from a teacher at Monroe High School in Michigan. pic.twitter.com/mATiVPef73 — CAIR-MI (@CAIRMI) November 15, 2016
Last year in Texas, a teacher was disciplined for a handout ― printed off anti-Muslim hate sites ― that described Islam as an “ideology of war” led by the “false prophet” Muhammad.
A teacher in Michigan was suspended for passing out an assignment called “The Top 10 Talents Of Miss Iraq,” which listed “Blowing self up in a car in a parking lot,” “Describing what they would look like in a bathing suit if they were permitted to wear one” and “Withstanding the kick of a donkey.”
Parents across the country have also launched campaigns to either eliminate school lessons about Islam, or to remove positive depictions of Islam from school textbooks.
When a high school teacher in Virginia had students copy the Shahada, the Islamic statement of faith, as part of a calligraphy lesson, parents accused the teacher of trying to indoctrinate their children. The backlash became so heated that district closed schools across the county for a day.
In Texas, protesters stood outside the first day of a kindergarten class that included an Arabic immersion program. And in Tennessee, state legislators introduced legislation “to officially stop Islamic religious indoctrination in Tennessee schools” after outcry over an innocuous lessons about the Five Pillars of Islam.In a rebel-held neighborhood in the east of Syria's second city Aleppo, more than 100 people are lined up outside a bakery, hoping to get a daily ration of bread.
At another nearby bakery, the queue is even longer, with some 200 people gathered.
Since mid-2012, it has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east, and has suffered enormous destruction in the war that has killed more than 280,000 people nationwide.
Abu Mohammad was combing through a nearby half-empty vegetable market in a bid to find potatoes, which now go for five times the price they did last week – about 500 Syrian pounds ($1) a kilo.
The price of a kilo of dates has doubled to 800 Syrian pounds ($3.70), while a kilo of tomatoes has gone from 100 to 600 Syrian pounds.
...The Vast Majority of Perpetrators Will Not Go to Jail or Prison
Perpetrators of sexual violence are less likely to go to jail or prison than other criminals.
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The Majority of Sexual Assaults Are Not Reported to the Police
Only 230 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are reported to police. That means about 3 out of 4 go unreported.1
Individuals of college-age 2 Female Students: 20% report Female Non-Students: 32% report
The elderly: 28% report 3
28% report Members of the military: 43% of female victims and 10% of male victims reported.4
Reasons Victims Choose to Report—or Not
Of the sexual violence crimes reported to police from 2005-2010, the survivor reporting gave the following reasons for doing so:5
28% to protect the household or victim from further crimes by the offender
25% to stop the incident or prevent recurrence or escalation
21% to improve police surveillance or they believed they had a duty to do so
17% to catch/punish/prevent offender from reoffending
6% gave a different answer, or declined to cite one reason
3% did so to get help or recover loss
Of the sexual violence crimes not reported to police from 2005-2010, the victim gave the following reasons for not reporting:5
20% feared retaliation
13% believed the police would not do anything to help
13% believed it was a personal matter
8% reported to a different official
8% believed it was not important enough to report
7% did not want to get the perpetrator in trouble
2% believed the police could not do anything to help
30% gave another reason, or did not cite one reason
Read more statistics about perpetrators of sexual violence.
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Understanding RAINN’s statistics
Sexual violence is notoriously difficult to measure, and there is no single source of data that provides a complete picture of the crime. On RAINN’s website, we have tried to select the most reliable source of statistics for each topic. The primary data source we use is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is an annual study conducted by the Justice Department. To conduct NCVS, researchers interview tens of thousands of Americans each year to learn about crimes that they’ve experienced. Based on those interviews, the study provides estimates of the total number of crimes, including those that were not reported to police. While NCVS has a number of limitations (most importantly, children under age 12 are not included), overall, it is the most reliable source of crime statistics in the U.S.
We have also relied on other Justice Department studies, as well as data from the Department of Health and Human Services and other government and academic sources. When assembling these statistics, we have generally retained the wording used by the authors. Statistics are presented for educational purposes only. Each statistic includes a footnote citation for the original source, where you can find information about the methodology and a definition of terms.
Learn more about RAINN's statistics.This interview almost did not happen.
The morning that I was supposed to speak with Kam Perez, a contestant on the reality show Whodunnit? where each episode plays out like CSI with contestants scrambling to figure out the "murder" of the last eliminated contestant, my computer appeared lifeless. While noting the irony, I panicked. Fortunately, there were embers of life to the device, and my husband, somewhat of an "amateur sleuth," placed my laptop in the freezer. It had overheated and he brought it back to life. Much like the safe contestants on each episode of this innovative interactive reality show (ABC, Sunday 9 p.m.), my computer had been "spared"... at least for another week.
In case you haven't tuned in,, Whodunnit?, created by the brainchild of CSI, shows contestants employing crime scene investigation techniques to uncover a "murder" in each episode. Contestants are eliminated -- in the truest sense of the word - based on who did the worst job at figuring out the crime. Then their "murder" is the focus of the subsequent episode. In the finale, when three players are to remain, one will reveal the killer's identity and walk away with $250,000.
...And as for the killer? Well we have to assume that something is in it for him/her too. Following is a Q&A with Kam Perez, who works for Homeland Security and has "lived" past episodes 1-5 to tell his tale of life in the harrowing WhoDunnit? house.
SHW:
You came on knowing that you would be solving a mystery? What type of reality show did you think you were in for?
KP:
We knew that the show was looking for "amateur sleuths" so it was going to be something related to some kind of Sherlock Homes/crime type of thing. We didn't really understand that we would be trapped in the kind of situation we ended up in. I was expecting a traditional reality show where you spend a day learning an investigative technique and at the end there's a challenge where you put it all into practice. They threw us in on the deep end. From the very get-go, you are on your own investigating these crimes and what you are supposed to look for is up to you.
SHW:
How did you feel when the first murder occurred? Did you have any inking that something was going to go that way?
KP:
We knew there was going to be some kind of an event. That was the catchphrase: "There will be an event." We didn't know what it was going to be or what to expect. When it happened, we went there, but we all weren't sure it was actually Sheri. It was in fact her lying on the floor, surrounded by a broken fish tank and live wires (and then the contestants witnessed her getting electrocuted).
SHW:
Many presume Sheri, as the first'murdered' contestant, was simply an actress.
KP:
No. She signed up to be a contestant just like the rest of us, and that's really where the game got scary.
SHW:
Whoah. I was sure she was an actress and can't believe I was wrong. As a contestant, you've got to have acting chops to be on the show.
(There was no direct comment from Kam on this, but the PR rep for the show says she is pretty certain that Sheri has no prior acting experience.)
KP:
With that first crime scene, Melina, Lindsey, Dontae and myself came from outside of the house and we all ran in and almost stepped on that live wire. That's where you see the fear in our faces, the jumping around and the screaming at the sparks as Sheri appears to be electrocuted -The fear you see on our faces is completely real. Later on, as a contestant figuring out how the crime played out, you become really immersed in the whole fantasy. You forget there are cameras. We didn't know there was going to be any danger once we arrived, and then we were scared of that danger...You have to play it out as if there is a real murder because figuring it all out is key to staying. There is probably an expert somewhere nearby that knew exactly what to do to protect us against those live wires, for instance, but at the time, we were not thinking of that.
You don't have time to do a reality check and remind yourself that it's all costume. You end up playing it out in your head as if it's a real murder.
SHW:
What was your first impression of "Giles," the English butler and host (played by British actor Gildart Jackson)?
KP:
Melina caught right away that he was 'creepy' when she spotted him first. When you see him, he looks like a proper British butler that you see in so many movies. It wasn't until later on with his puns that he really started to give me the creeps.
SHW:
After each murder, players fill out a questionnaire (not shown on TV) and subsequently present (orally) to viewers how they think the crime played out, and who they believe the killer is. Based on how well they score on the questionnaire, their chance of being "killed off" is lessened. How did you hypothesize who the killer was - Was that decision based on 'gut instinct' or observations about the crime?
KP:
I used a lot of the facts of the murder and observations of everybody's behavior to come up with my hypotheses. I'm sure some people went based on gut instinct, or something the person was wearing, but I was conscious of (contestants') behaviors and what type of person it would take to carry out the murder. My suspect all along at this point (in what has aired) has been Geno. Early on, it was based on the angle of the shot Sheri took from the slingshot. You would have to be very tall to get that shot, and of the tall players, it was down to Geno, Ulysses and me. Ulysses doesn't seem to possess the killer instinct, so I concluded it was Geno.
We all at one point asked out loud if it was possible that Giles could be behind it - with the old notion and cliché that 'the butler did it.'
SHW:
Don pretended to be a football coach/teacher when he is in reality a retired cop. None of you went for his football coach story - which was actually very funny to watch. You were all certain, without a doubt, that he had been a cop. What made you 100 percent sure in order to call his bluff?
KP:
He used cop lingo (i.e. "bleeding out") and wore the'retired detective uniform.' When we arrived at the first crime scene, the first thing he did was lean down to sift through shards of glass with a pen! - That was clearly to avoid leaving fingerprints behind. To me, that was a dead giveaway. Also, the entire time he was wearing a ring that looks like a police academy 25 year service ring. It definitely wasn't from a high school football championship or anything along those lines! I don't think he even realized he was wearing it - because certainly, if he was trying to hide it, he would have taken it off.
SHW:
With 'Dontae's inferno,' you must have been scared out of your wits (watching a contestant running on fire towards the pool) - even though you knew this was a'reality show.' Can you tell me a bit about what truly was going on in the contestants' minds?
KP:
More than Sheri's murder, this is really what set the tone for us. Obviously we know no one was actually going to die, but when we saw Dantae running on fire, we had no idea it was a stunt double. We thought it was actually Dontae! I thought to myself 'They're going to set me on fire if I fail at this. I might actually die.' I felt a real reason to have to stay alive because I had no idea what stunts they had planned for me. I didn't want to go out like Dontae did!
SHW:
Nothing tipped you off with regard to what you had to sign before going on the show?
KP:
There was a point where they asked us to sign for insurance so, yeah, that certainly doesn't inspire confidence in your own personal safety!
SHW:
Many suspect you are the killer, which you can neither confirm nor deny to me. After the first killing, what were the dynamics in the house like behind the scenes in terms of suspicions towards one another and regard for one's fellow competitors?
KP:
There was definitely some tension just because of the nature of the competition, but not necessarily suspicions of one being the killer that really affected dynamics in the house. We were careful about the information we shared with one another, knowing that sharing can potentially come back to haunt you if you give somebody an advantage in the game. With me personally, my idea from the get-go was that from what we knew, the killer's motivation was to find the best investigator. So it didn't seem like it would make any sense for the killer to be sabotaging us along the way. There was no reason to hide anything from the killer because the killer knows how the murder was committed. There's no reason for the killer to deceive anyone either because by purposely manipulating information, the killer ends up skewing the results of his experiment to find the best investigator. I never had any issue with trusting anyone based on suspicions about whether they may or may not be the killer.
SHW:
So essentially, the killer is playing his own game to develop his own strategy at keeping competitors guessing?
WhoDunnit? PR Rep Interruption:
Correct (At this point, I knew that the rest of this answer would remain a mystery til the series wraps.)
SHW:
We see you becoming somewhat 'cliquey,' forming your alliance (with Ulysses and Geno) and keeping Adrianna out in an early episode. At that point, did you suspect Adrianna (a contestant who suspiciously sounds and acts like Nancy Grace in my opinion) as a killer, or did you just find her distracting to solving the murders?
KP:
The answer is: neither. My plan was to make as small a group as necessary. Three are all you need to cover everything. The more secretive that any one fact is, the more valuable it is, so the idea with my group of three was to limit information to those three. Everybody else can fight it out amongst themselves. Adrianna came off as offering nothing in exchange for my information, just wanting to devalue it for no reason.
SHW:
I know that you are an attorney for Homeland Security, but what exactly is your |
suggested by data from Cassini's radio science team.
Scientists tweaked the model until they were able to build mountains on the surface similar to those Cassini had seen. They found the conditions were met when they assumed the deep interior was surrounded by a very dense layer of high-pressure water ice, then a subsurface liquid-water-and-ammonia ocean and an outer water-ice shell. So the model, Mitri explained, also supports the existence of a subsurface ocean.
Each successive layer of Titan's interior is colder than the one just inside it, with the outermost surface averaging a chilly 94 Kelvin (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit). So cooling of the moon causes a partial freezing of the subsurface liquid ocean and thickening of the outer water ice shell. It also thickens the high-pressure ice. Because the ice on the crust is less dense than the liquid ocean and the liquid ocean is less dense than the high-pressure ice, the cooling means the interior layers lose volume and the top "skin" of ice puckers and folds.
Since the formation of Titan, which scientists believe occurred around four billion years ago, the moon's interior has cooled significantly. But the moon is still releasing hundreds of gigawatts of power, some of which may be available for geologic activity. The result, according to the model, was a shortening of the radius of the moon by about seven kilometers (four miles) and a decrease in volume of about one percent.
"These results suggest that Titan's geologic history has been different from that of its Jovian cousins, thanks, perhaps, to an interior ocean of water and ammonia," said Jonathan Lunine, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist for Titan and co-author on the new paper. Lunine is currently based at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Italy. "As Cassini continues to map Titan, we will learn more about the extent and height of mountains across its diverse surface."
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the United States and several European countries. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
More Cassini information is available, at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
News Media Contact
Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.jia-rui.c.cook@jpl.nasa.gov2010-266In the first seven weeks of the Donald Trump administration, Russia has been as hot an issue as it gets. Amid the scramble to do damage control, the most reasonable advice for Washington is to take a breath, sort out the sequence of moves, and draw appropriate “red lines.” It’s often assumed that the Russian leadership will merely wait for the whirlwind of scandals to blow over—but there’s a real risk that President Vladimir Putin will take a proactive stance and throw another of his trademark surprises.
In principle (which in Russian political lingo means “in a different world”), it makes perfect sense for Moscow to be patient. The scarlet letter marking He-Who-Spoke-With-The-Ambassador will fade, to be replaced by interactions with reliable interlocutors in the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, many experts in Moscow are now inclined to argue that the chance of striking a deal with Trump’s team is lost, and that only tough tests of will are forthcoming.
Putin, quite possibly, holds a different opinion. Doing deals is what he understands best and excels at—he’d be reluctant to give up on Trump as a negotiating partner. Putin’s recent meeting with Darren Woods, ExxonMobil’s new CEO, was probably intended as a signal to U.S. State Secretary Rex Tillerson and his boss about Russia’s readiness to bargain. He probably is, but he might be pushed in a different direction.
Forget the tweets—watch the deeds
Knowing little about social networks, Putin may be inclined to disregard the daily flow of tweets coming from the White House. What he certainly takes seriously are the decisions that point to new policy priorities, muddled as they might seem now. Four such decisions should be matters of serious concern in the Kremlin.
First of all, the intention to increase the U.S. defense budget by some $54 billion comes as a grave warning. Russia has been investing heavily in modernizing its military machine for the last five years, but now the country’s protracted economic decline has necessitated cuts to the over-ambitious defense plans. Many half-accomplished programs—like the Yasen-class nuclear submarine or the “fifth generation” PAK-FA fighter—have been delayed, while the costs of ongoing interventions in places such as Syria and Ukraine keep piling up. Trump’s resolution to boost U.S. military capabilities is not only a reminder of Russia’s military-industrial inferiority, but also a confirmation of his proposition to deal with Russia “from a position of strength.” This doesn’t sit well in Moscow at all.
Second, Trump’s stated disinclination to engage in talks on strategic arms control caught Putin by surprise in the first (and so far only) telephone conversation since Trump moved into the Oval Office. The Russian leader had turned down every proposition from President Barack Obama on possible new cuts of nuclear arsenals, expecting it to be a more favorable topic for conversation with his successor. Now he has to assess the scope of U.S. nuclear modernization. On top of that, there is a substantiated accusation that Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which Moscow cannot make disappear by flat denials.
Third, Russian experts had eagerly predicted a deepening discord between the United States and its European allies and a profound confusion inside NATO. Instead, firm assertions by the vice president, secretary of state, and others on the U.S. commitment to the alliance have been accompanied by the demand that NATO allies increase defense spending. The Europeans see the need to take this demand seriously, and every euro of additional investments in their long-starved militaries buys new capabilities for containing the Russian threat. The top brass in Moscow are not amused, in particular, by NATO’s determined build-up of collective defense assets in the Baltic theater.
Fourth, there is now strong U.S. pressure on Russia’s most sensitive pain point: the price of oil. For many months, Moscow had been in negotiation with OPEC about production cuts, seeking to achieve some upward trend in this market—only to experience another price drop in the last couple of weeks. The primary driver of this volatility is the relaxation of regulations in the United States, bringing new drilling, which over-compensates all the OPEC cartel machinations. The Russian ruble has duly depreciated, and any promised economic stabilization before next year’s national election is unlikely at best. The economy will continue to stagnate.
The joy of playing white
There were two kinds of optimistic expectations in Moscow regarding the Trump era: deal-making and confusion. The first expectation, which is fading under the impact of accumulating disappointments, would translate into a policy of patience and preparation for pragmatic bargaining. The second expectation—which presumes confusion in alliances and a weakening of U.S. leadership—instead points to the need to exploit early opportunities. Putin generally prefers bargaining, but he has also developed a taste for proactive moves and enjoys watching his counterparts’ resulting dismay. His frustration at not receiving “proper attention” (in his view) from Washington may lead him to conclude that now is the time for catching the wavering West by surprise.
Putin doesn’t have that many options for a forceful move. In some easily accessible places, particularly around the three Baltic states, NATO’s “red lines” have already been drawn quite firmly. The intervention in Syria remains a useful tool, and there has been a flurry of Middle Eastern intrigues in Moscow recently. This region contains, however, the most promising targets for cooperation with the United States (as the second meeting between top generals—Valery Gerasimov and Joseph Dunford—confirms). Spoiling this interesting beginning with an aggressive move, for instance in Libya, would not be smart.
Predicting Putin’s specific move is a conundrum, but expecting him to do nothing is a fallacy.
There is always Ukraine, where nothing resembling a ceasefire in the Donbass war zone has been established, and the Minsk process is both hopelessly deadlocked (yet still the only hope). Putin could launch a spring offensive aimed at expanding the rump “Novorossiya,” which is too small to make strategic sense but too big to keep on Russian budget books. Georgia also is a convenient and easy-to-reach target, and even friendly Belarus is worried about Russian military pressure.
Predicting Putin’s specific move is a conundrum, but expecting him to do nothing is a fallacy. He has reasons to assume that Ukraine fatigue in the West is growing and that the Trump administration is not ready to meet a sudden challenge—which would aggravate the confusion in NATO to the point of shambles. Faced with this prospect, it is time for Washington and the West to deliver some convincing dissuasion.Anthropologist David Graeber explores the theology of debt.
The Bible is peppered with the language of debt. Sin, forgiveness, reckoning, redemption - all of these words actually derive from the language of ancient finance. What's more, this seems to be true in all the great religious traditions - not just Judaism and Christianity, but Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam - all of their texts are filled with financial metaphors, many of which relate to issues surrounding debt.
We tend to think of these religions as teaching us that we must repay our debts. But the truth is that the financial metaphors in religious texts are oddly ambivalent. The original translation of the Lord's Prayer from 1381 reads "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors". But do we forgive our debtors? Actually, most of us don't.
David Graeber explains that the great religions talk about the forgiveness of debt more than the repayment of debt and that the deeper teachings they offer is that it is the annihilation of debt which is ultimately divine. To understand why all the religious texts discuss the forgiveness of debt with such frequency, David examines the historical context of when these works were written and reveals that, in the ancient world, the institutionalised forgiveness of debts was commonplace.
Producer: Max O'Brien
A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.Muay Thai Switch Kick Drill & Technique Against Punchers
How To Use The Muay Thai Switch Kick Against Aggressive Punchers
Dealing with aggressive, hard-hitting punchers can be difficult to deal with if you’re not sure what techniques or strategies are most effective against these types of fighters.
One of the best ways to deter a powerful boxer from moving forward and throwing his heavy hands is to pepper their body and their forearms with repeated switch kicks. Throwing switch kicks at your opponents body will force your opponents to defend using their forearms, which in turn can eventually lead to damaging their arms so much that they won’t be able to use their punching effectively later on in the fight.
To practice and perfect the timing and technique of the Muay Thai switch kick, try implementing this partner drill taught by Chris Romulo of CROM Physical Culture.
Muay Thai Switch Kick Drill
Drilling this type of switch kick to the body and forearms over and over again will help you fend off aggressive, forward moving boxers who are always looking to unload their hands.
Don’t believe me? The great Buakaw demonstrates how effective and damaging the Muay Thai switch kick can be against his tough, hard-hitting kickboxing opponent, “Iron” Mike Zambidis in their K-1 bout:
Buakaw Breakdown: Shutting Down “Iron” Mike Zambidis
If you’re looking to improve the power, speed and technique in your kicks, then make sure you download these free 3 Killer Kicking Drills!
There are NEW Muay Thai videos released on my Youtube channel every week! Make sure to keep checking back and subscribe to my channel for updates on new Muay Thai techniques, workouts, drills and combos!
If you want more in-depth technique tutorials, video breakdowns, training tips and more, then you gotta check out NakMuayNation.com.
Like these Muay Thai technique tutorials and breakdowns? Comment below and share with us your thoughts!
Also, make sure to share it with your training partners and instructors so you can try it out during your next training session.
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Like this: Like Loading...openSUSE 12.3 review - Okay
Updated: April 15, 2013
My first Linux distro was openSUSE, and things sort of worked well for some five years. Then, come version 12, everything went downhill, the sort of push an old lady downhill kind of thing. The last two editions of this distro failed to satisfy the geek in me. Which means, grab your forks and knives, because it's openSUSE 12.3 review time!
I will show you if and how openSUSE 12.3 can redeem itself. Naturally, we will go with the KDE desktop, because Gnome is not an option anymore. My test box will be the same T61 laptop, featuring two SSD for local storage, 2GB RAM, and a simple, generic Intel graphics card. And so we commence.
Live session
Booted swell. Before me eyes, I saw a very stylish desktop - that would not let me connect to my Wireless access points. For some obscure reason, the network was down. And the network manager applet was hovering about 70px above the bottom panel.
Trying to click the Enable networking button did not work. I was actually forced to open the command line and start the network from there. Then, the Wireless networking option was still disabled in the NetworkManager and I had to tick it to get things going.
KDEWallet interfered at this stage, and naturally the NetworkManager complained about failed connections, even though I had not yet initiated them, which makes the experience somewhat of a C.L.U.S.T.E.R. crap. It worked, but then getting molested by a drunk hobo at a random metro station in Toronto is also an option.
Look & feel - delicious!
Back to the matter of style. openSUSE 12.3 brings a new theme, new design, and it's really fabulous. You get the combination of black and white, with flat yet meaningful icons, and some color, just a dash of green to spice things up. This is KDE at its best.
The Activity Manager also looks dandier than before. And you have a wider range of widgets, some of which are quite useful.
Program integration is rather good, too. For example, Amarok comes with a new icon that is inline with the overall system theme. It will display little clues whether it's currently playing tracks, stopped, paused, and more. I'm melting from so much aesthetics.
Other things
Well, there's the rub. Like Ubuntu, you don't get any fun until after the installation, so music, Flash and such are out of the question right now. However, I would expect a somewhat more robust mechanism of notifying users that this is the case.
For Flash, no need to offer the missing plugins wizard, because it will stall unnecessarily, making things look and feel cheap. For MP3 plugins, the no package found popup inside Amarok is equally annoying.
Which means we ought to install openSUSE 12.3 to disk.
Installation
Uneventful, precise and smart. That's how I have always labeled the openSUSE installer, and this version is no different. Truthful to its safe and sane configuration, it offered the correct root and home partitions, without trying to format the wrong ones, and whatnot. For noobs, this is the best there is.
Now, I did slightly change the layout to suit my own needs, replacing /dev/sda1 as designated root to /dev/sda2, but the initial guess by the installer was just as good. It also offered to use both swap partitions, which is not what most distributions do. And then, the bootloader setup was equally considerate. For those of you who care, UEFI is fully supported, so you need not worry about that. Well, the truth is, you need not worry anyhow, but then, people like drama in their lives.
And then...
Something naughty happened. On the very first boot, openSUSE froze. No virtual console would respond, and I had to reboot. On the second boot, it threw an error about some KDE configuration problem. The keyboard did not work at this stage. Restarting the X solved the keyboard thingie, but my logins as a user failed. I only managed to login as root. Then, I discovered that my user had not been created, and that only the root was available. Holy banana, why.
On top of that, Wireless + KDEWallet woes resumed. The hateful little wallet software kept pestering me, while the NetworkManager kept throwing the connection failed errors, even before I managed to type my passphrase even once. Eventually, it worked, but not before souring my mood.
However, I decided to persist and initiated a short pimping session. KDE4 on openSUSE 12.3 looks awesome, and you really do not need any of the alternative desktop environments to make things better, like we did in the past.
Multimedia, take two
I tried playing music and Flash again, to no avail. The worst part is, using zypper from the command line, I could see the relevant plugins, but the programs failed to find them. I assumed this had to do with the repositories, so I decided to add a few.
Package management
I added several community repositories, including Packman, LibreOffice, Mozilla and such, so I could get the latest versions of programs. Moreover, the Main Update repository was disabled, which is really curious. However, on the bright side, YaST was so much more responsive than in the past. On that same note, zypper is also zyppier. Get it? Hihi.
Multimedia, take three
Eventually, I was forced to install the Gstreamer plugin and the Adobe Flash from the command line. No other method worked. Looking back at my experience with both openSUSE 12.1 and 12.2, the trend of annoying the users continues.
Again, on the bright side, Amarok looks cool in the system area:
Applications
For a distro that weights 950MB in its live CD edition, openSUSE 12.3 KDE comes with a very decent bunch of programs. You have the full LibreOffice suite, Firefox AND Konqueror, GwenView, Shotwell, digiKam, K3b, Marble, and quite a few more. Balanced and useful.
Printing
Here's a sore one. Even though there's an option to configure Samba printers, the wizard would not ungray out some of its buttons, and thus I was unable to proceed, because frankly, I did not really remember the full printer name string and all the little geeky options. I expected the wizard to let me browse my Windows network and mouse-click the desired devices. The firewall is off by default, so this wasn't the reason. Overall, the printing utility seems somewhat simplified visually, but it did not work.
Fingerprint reader - oh, really?
Aha. Well, it worked. And while it used to be clunky once, this time, the feature was both easy to configure and use. The only complaint I have is that the fingerprint reader PAM is active in the console too, so if you try to switch to other users, you will get an innocent but unnecessary prompt.
System resources, responsiveness
Now, here's an interesting development. openSUSE 12.3 is much more responsive than previous versions. It is smoother, faster, snappier, more elegant. Even though the memory usage is not the best, the CPU is rather quiet, and applications respond instantly. This is a great improvement. Remember my woes with openSUSE 12.1, especially with the BTRFS partitions. Not any more.
Desktop effects - bling, bling!
Lovely jubbly. Again, faster, smoother than ever before.
Stability, suspend & resume
openSUSE 12.3 worked without a single crash, if we forgive the Wireless nonsense, which cannot be really classified as crashes, per se. Suspend & resume also worked great. And again, a new record, when it comes to the time it took the laptop to go to sleep and wake. Not more than one or two seconds, in the worst case. To top things nicely, the fingerprint reader doubled the password authentication on screen lock when coming awake from the sleep state, which is rather nice.
Conclusion
Methinks openSUSE 11.4 was the best openSUSE so far. And had this latest version somehow managed to have more streamlined networking and multimedia stacks, it could have topped that. Seriously, what's wrong with some automation on codecs configuration and making sure the NetworkManager does not vomit like some bulimic equivalent of C++ and Python. Because it USED to work well in the past.
On the positive side, openSUSE 12.3 is a thing of beauty. It's stylish, elegant and very fast. Plus, it's stable and robust, and generally works very well. The installer is also very safe. However, we cannot ignore the user setup problems, or the few random seizures that occurred before the first session.
My suggestion is not using the KDEWallet in either the live session or the installed desktop, and it will instantly improve the networking stack. Then, make sure the right repositories are marked, properly enabled and refreshed, and that users need not go to some online 1-click wizard, when they can achieve the same from their desktop. Reduce the verbosity of various prompts and error messages, make it all the more streamlined. And finally, sort the printing thing, because it's unprofessional.
All in all, this openSUSE deserves around 7.5/10. It's much better than its predecessor, and it comes with a few really awesome, killer features. Alas, they do not come to bear enough, and there are other less killer features that kill the fun. Or should we call them bugs? So hard work engage, and let's see what happens come the autumn.
Cheers.On December 13, actor Kim Min Suk took to his Instagram to dispel any false rumors regarding him having filmed a similar nude video to that associated with popular actor “A.”
Previously, “A” was speculated to be in a nude video that was spread to various online community sites. Following this, other similar videos supposedly depicting other male celebrities – idol member “B” and actor “C” – were reportedly leaked while being secretly sold to others.
With several people suggesting actor “C” may be him, Kim Min Suk firmly denied any possibility and involvement.
He stated, “People keep contacting me. What nude [cam]? They keep asking if I’ve ever filmed something strange like this..Do I have to sue? Who started such a unbelievable, baseless rumor like this? This world is really becoming crazy. I just came to eat cold buckwheat noodle soup with [INFINITE’s] Sunggyu. I’ve never done anything like [film a nude video].”
Meanwhile, actor “A” has yet to speak out about this matter, and his agency has stated they have not received any explanation as of yet.
Source (1) (2)Recently, Ivy Villaflores, bubbly Filipino-American publicist and former journalism student, had an experience in Target that went viral for her quick thinking and sharp wit.
Villaflores was in the checkout line of an Arizona Target, speaking to her mother on the phone in Bisaya, a Filipino dialect. She was approached by the woman behind her who asked her what language she was speaking. When she informed the woman that she was speaking a Filipino dialect, the woman instantly connected her heritage with that of Marilou Danley, the girlfriend of the Las Vegas shooter. Noticing the negative implications the woman was insinuating, Villaflores turned the tables back on her, pointing out that she shared the same ethnic heritage as the actual shooter — the man who killed 58 people and wounded 489 before turning the gun on himself. The awkward conversation quickly ended, but Villaflores was still upset by the exchange so she took to Facebook to voice her frustrations.
The next morning, Villaflores received a message from a former coworker about the incident.
The woman, who Villaflores confirmed was also Caucasian, rushed to her friend’s defense:
“Hi Ivy. If you were at the Target off Warner, then I believe that was my friend you had an interaction with. I’m sorry if you felt offended but I think we can agree that times are scary and she probably wanted to be aware of her surroundings, no one can trust anyone anymore and we still do not know who this girlfriend from the Phillippines was to this man. Perhaps your response was a bit harsh and not worthy of blasting her on social media. I know immigrants have it tough these days but we need to put America first., we all have a right to feel safe.”
Villaflores responded to her:
“Hi <name has been redacted>…yes, that was the Target, what a small world. I didn’t realize having a conversation with my mom in English/Bisaya about sting cheese & yogurt was cause for alarm. Quick fact for you: I was born in Salt Lake City. That’s in Utah. Which is in the United States. Also, it’s spelled Philippines, one L. One day I’m going to have an epic Gangsta Puppy Party. I won’t be inviting you. Have a great day, xoxo!”
Villaflores told NextShark that the friend of the woman reached out to her after the other woman posted her side of the story on her own Facebook.
“I guess the lady at Target was a friend of hers who posted about her interaction with me at Target. World is small, Arizona is smaller. Bleh!”
Although her original post caught the attention of many, it wasn’t until another person, Alex Allan, posted the exchange to his FaceBook that it truly went viral.
While the post received a lot of praise from netizens, Villaflores was upset that Allan changed some of the details — specifically, that he said she was speaking Tagalog and not Bisaya. Finding this edit “super disheartening, especially because it’s Filipino American History Month”, she took to Allan’s now-viral FaceBook post in protest of the changes.
Allan defended his writing, saying he found the original comment from another person, Alex Siegel. Siegel, it seems, did not change the wording of the story and instead published a screenshot of Villaflores’ post.
Villaflores took to FaceBook to explain why this small change was so upsetting:
She also spoke with NextShark about her frustrations with Allan changing the wording to reflect a different dialect:
“I was never looking to be credited. I am just surprised why a journalist would take something he wasn’t sure was true or not, and then change my dialect. Especially a fellow Filipino. I thought we were respectful of each other, including celebrating different dialects. I was taught to be accurate in journalism school myself, and to make a correction if something was wrong. Social media is still media.
“I’ll still invite the journalist to my gangsta puppy party, though. He can try some Bisaya-style lechon, it’s really good.”
Although some people have been sending Villaflores kind messages agreeing with the problematic erasure of a minority culture, many have questioned the importance of her stance on the matter — still, that hasn’t deterred her from finding the positive in this situation.
“I’ve made some really cool connections with people of all dialects/backgrounds reaching out who get why changing the dialect was wrong. Yay!”
Feature Image via FaceBook / Ivy VillafloresTo celebrate the Elysium expansion, MMOBomb.com and Perfect World Entertainment have partnered up to give 1000 of you access to the Dreamchaser Booster pack and the Dark Abyss Mount in the free-to-play MMORPG Perfect World International. To get your code key you just need to click on the button below. Get your key now while supplies last!
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PWI is a thrilling free-to-play MMORPG featuring diverse gameplay and unparalleled character customization across six races and 12 distinct classes. Inhabitants of the pristine Perfect World must discover their place in a struggle for power, while uniting to battle the Wraith – undead creatures who seek to destroy everything the immortal god Pan Gu has created. Amidst a realm of stunningly rich environments, players can fly freely through the skies, explore dangerous dungeons and join intense PvP battles for power and land.
How to get and use your Key:
1. Log in to your MMOBomb account to get your key. If you don’t have one, register for free HERE.
2. Click on the big yellow button at the top. Copy and paste your key to a safe place as you may not be able to retrieve it once closing your browser.
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7. Enjoy the game! Have Fun!
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Having problems with your key? Please visit our help center HERE.One of the hottest devices of 2017, the Wismec Reuleaux RX GEN3 300W Box Mod is the latest from the Reuleaux series and US vendor Fire Vapor has them available for only $33.99! The Reuleaux Gen 3 Mod is powered by three 18650 batteries, just like its predecessor, but it’s smaller and lighter, includes some subtle design changes and is even more intelligent with the latest BESPOKE firmware. It offers up to 300W of output with a full temperature control suite (Ni/Ti/SS/TCR) and includes a huge 1.3 inch OLED display, flip-open battery cover and a wide array advanced features and safety protections.
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Wismec Reuleaux RX GEN3 Review by Suck My Mod:As President Donald Trump prepares to unveil his administration’s diplomatic policy towards Cuba, expected to repeal reforms that had made it easier for Americans to give money to the repressive Castro regime, corporations and lobbyists that have benefitted from Obama’s “normalization” have gone into attack mode.
The hotel monolith Mariott’s chief executive is personally demanding Trump not enact pro-human rights policies that could jeopardize the company’s bottom line. The New York Times, which published the lies that made it possible for Fidel Castro to become the island’s dictator, laments that “the United States Congress, businesses and other interested groups,” including the Cuban government, may not be pleased by the changes (this is, the Times posits, a bad thing).
The foreboding tone of American liberal media coverage surrounding the potential repeal of Obama’s 2014 “normalization” effort demands selective memory of the Obama era’s effect on the Cuban people to take seriously. His policies may have prompted optimism among the CEOs of companies like AirBNB and Carnival Cruises.
But Cuban dissidents report skyrocketing rates of arbitrary arrests and an ever-growing disregard for human rights in a country that already held one of the world’s worst records on the matter before 2014.
Below, eleven images that capture the suffering of the Cuban people following President Obama’s call for bilateral ties with the Castro regime, and the callous disregard the White House showed towards these consequences as they became impossible to ignore.
February 2015: President Obama announced he would re-establish friendly ties with the Castro regime in December 2014. Two months later, the regime challenged the call for treating dissidents with respect by not only beating and arresting members of the Ladies in White – a dissident group whose sole act of protest is silently attending Catholic Mass on Sundays dressed in white and holding the photos of political prisoners – but tarring one of their members, Digna Rodríguez Ibañez. Photo via Twitter.
September 2015: In a move meant to signal to the international community that they could ease the pressure on the Castro regime, Cuba invited Pope Francis to tour the city of Havana and the eastern regional capital of Santiago de Cuba.
The government did not use the occasion of the pontiff’s presence on the island to cease repressing dissidents, however. Zaqueo Báez, a member of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), approached the papal convoy in Havana and shouted “freedom!” within earshot of the Pope.
He was beaten in front of the pope and whisked away into a police vehicle. Pope Francis later denied knowledge of the incident, though video proved he was feet away as Báez was beaten. The photo below shows Báez being taken away from Pope Francis. AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa
December 2015: 70-year-old Cuban-American Francisco Morales had traveled to his home country every Christmas for the past decade to set up a Christmas display for the children of his Havana neighborhood without incident.
After President Obama announced his “normalization” measures, however, Morales was arrested for setting up animated characters like Santa Claus and Mickey Mouse on the roof of his family home.
Cuba is an atheist state that has persecuted and tortured Christians since the 1960s and only allowed leftist Liberation Theologists and Jesuit Catholics to operate unperturbed on the island in recent years. Evangelical Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-Day Adventists are especially subject to arrest and other state abuse. Twitter/@CubanetNoticias
January 2016: Cuban dissidents from a number of prominent groups on the island regularly suffer actos de repudio, “acts of rejection,” in which the government sends angry mobs to their homes to intimidate and insult them.
In a particularly brazen rejection of international human rights norms, one acto de repudio featured a bonfire made up of copies of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Marti Noticias.
March 2016: President Obama’s trip to Cuba triggered some of the Cuban government’s most aggressive abuses against dissidents. Below, the mass arrests of dozens of Ladies in White, grabbed by the clothes and hair and beaten into submission, shortly before the president’s arrival. Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images
March 2016: The oppression was not limited to Ladies in White. One Cuban dissident succeeded in using the occasion of President Obama’s visit to protest live on American television. Yasser Rivero Boní, the son of a Lady in White who has lost most of his vision following beatings by Castro police, ran onto the set of ESPN and interrupted Bob Ley’s live broadcast to call for freedom on the island. Within seconds, a sqaud of plain-clothes Cuban police apprehended and whisked him away. ESPN/Screencap.
March 2016: President Obama was not the only high-profile visitor to the island this month. The Rolling Stones, a British band that Fidel Castro had banned from the island for their “imperialist” music, played a “historic” concert for those in the government’s good graces that month.
Naturally, this irked Cuba’s punk rock community, and in particular the band Porno para Ricardo, who writes punk music against the regime. In protest, they played a “concert” titled “Public Scandal,” in which they stood in silence, holding their instruments, for the duration of a concert. Porno Para Ricardo social media
March 2016: President Obama completed his itinerary in Cuba, delivering a speech in which he quoted poet José Martí, stopping for photo-ops under the image of Castro butcher Ernesto “Che” Guevara at the Plaza of the Revolution, and attending a baseball game with Raúl Castro. In the below image, the president does “the wave” with the Cuban dictator. White House/Pete Souza
August 2016: Cuban dissident Guillermo Fariñas is an award-winning pacifist human rights activists. In the below photo, he was conducting his 23rd hunger strike against the Castro regime. In this one, he also refused water. The below photo shows friendly trying to carry him to a local hospital after he had lost mobility. Cuban hospitals rejected Fariñas before ultimately taking him in as a patient, responding to international pressure. elblogdegeronimo.wordpress.com via Cubanet
May 2017: The Cuban dissident Daniel Llorente, who does not belong to any dissident groups, is carried away from the streets of Havana |
a lot of problems but you don't think about all the people that care about him and you don't know how they got there, to that point in their life."In 1786, 14-year-old Marie Anne Lenormand ran away from the convent school where she was raised. Lenormand set off to Paris on her own, where she learned the art of cartomancy—divination using a deck of cards. She worked for 40 years as a cartomancer and fortune-teller, advising Joséphine de Beauharnais (Napoleon’s wife), Robespierre, Marat, and other important figures on their fates.
Thirty years later, when Lenormand was 44 years old, she met with a young Frances, Lady Shelley, a socialite, aristocrat, and friend of the Duke of Wellington. The two met in Lenormand’s luxurious boudoir, but, as Shelley recounts in her diary, she was soon drawn into Lenormand’s cabinet d’étude to have her fortune read. Lenormand asked her date of birth, then the first letter of her name, the first letter of her birthplace, and then her favorite animal, color, and number. “After about a quarter of an hour of this mummery, during which time she had arranged all the cards in order upon the table, she made an examination of my head,” Shelley wrote. “Suddenly she began, in a sort of measured prose, and with great rapidity and distinct articulation, to describe my character and past life, in which she was so accurate and so successful, even to minute particulars, that I was spellbound at the manner in which she had discovered all she knew.”
What made Lenormand rich in eighteenth-century France—and what has made fortune-telling and games of chance mainstays of human society for more than six millennia—is that sometimes the possibility proposed by the fortune-teller is, in fact, perfectly spot-on. Sometimes what is predicted happens; sometimes our lottery ticket is the winner; sometimes we beat the odds. Games of chance point toward the correct value just often enough to keep us intrigued. In so doing, they have acted as social and political tools that play upon some of our greatest aspirations—that we’ll catch a “big break,” or that the poor can suddenly become rich. “Ability,” Napoleon famously said, “is of little account without opportunity.”
* * *
Upon Lenormand’s death at the age of 71, her nephew, a devout Catholic, inherited her possessions and extensive capital, valued at an estimated 500,000 francs. He pocketed the cash and burned all of her cards, crystals, and fortune-telling paraphernalia, according to Michael Dummett, a former professor of logic at Oxford, who co-wrote a book on the subject. Yet Lenormand’s legacy has persisted, particularly via Lenormand cards, an altered set of tarot cards commonly used by contemporary fortune-tellers.
Tarot cards, with their amalgam of ancient mythologies and pagan beliefs, may be a bridge toward Catholicism itself.
Like Lenormand’s nephew, most Catholics in the region despised fortune games, which represented unknowability in a supposedly all-knowable world, one in which God pulls the strings. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius introduces a character called Lady Philosophy who explains that “chance” is “an empty word…what room can there be for random events since God keeps all things in order?” Similarly, in Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” the first of The Canterbury Tales, Theseus reminds his subjects after a series of misfortunes that “the First Mover of the First Cause” determines all outcomes in accordance with an overarching plan. This is the same notion that Voltaire would later satirize in Candide. The wise man, Voltaire argued, realizes that a reversal of fortune is not part of a divine plan, but rather a kind of horrible happenstance that sometimes befalls one, based on no wish or advice of divine beings.
By providing an alternative to God’s omniscience, fortune-telling menaced the legitimacy of religion: Foreknowledge was the exclusive realm of God, and claims from anyone else—cartomancers or fortune-tellers, for instance—were a threat.
But there’s an acute irony to be found in the similarities between fortune-telling apparatus and Catholicism itself. Tarot cards, with their amalgam of ancient mythologies and pagan beliefs, can be viewed as a bridge toward Catholicism. The patron saints and icons of Catholicism, each of whom has defining characteristics, occupations, and symbols, mirror the characters of the tarot. For instance, in the Catholic faith there is the Archangel Gabriel. His symbol: archangel. His patronage: telecommunication workers and stamp collectors. His attributes: carries a trumpet; is clothed in white and blue. In standard tarot decks, there is the High Priestess. Her symbol: Holy Mother Church. Her patronage: a link to the subconscious. Her attributes: wears a Papal tiara; is clothed in white and blue.
* * *
What is perhaps most salient within the history of fortune-telling is the way it both reifies and subverts capitalist economics. Its subversion can be seen when one thinks of the ideological scandal that would ensue if one indeed had the ability to predict the outcome of the lottery, a feature of most capitalist societies. The capitalist ethos of self-mastery is undermined by the possibility of luck leading to success without proportional labor. As a result, games of luck tend to be sidelined in capitalist societies, looked down upon as pastimes of the poor and lazy.
“Patience, and shuffle the cards,” Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote. This notion serves as the foundation for the American myth of self-made success: One must work for success, but at the same time, anyone can achieve it. The American myth of the self-made man therefore creates a double bind: One must work, but one might also get lucky. As a result, those in inferior socioeconomic positions can feel that they still have the possibility of ascending by means of luck, while those in superior socioeconomic positions can feel deserving of their success as a result of their supposed hard work.
Through games of luck comes the notion of the “big break,” an idea that has been fundamental to diffusing socioeconomic frustrations for centuries, first observed by Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America. In the many hundreds of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European stories and fairy tales first told by the lower classes, one finds that the peasants never look to alter the royal system that oppresses them; rather, a happy ending occurs when the peasant himself becomes the king through a series of chance events. That’s to say, the occurrence of “big breaks,” however seldom, is enough to keep the masses contented with an unjust social system; they angle to be at the top of the current society, rather than looking to do away with the society entirely.
The market is chance rebranded as morally righteous labor.
What has proven trickier for social elites to justify are the games of chance that are fundamental to their own success, the modern stock market being the quintessential example. How does a capitalist society make playing the stock market look like labor, so that the high earnings that often come from it appear to be derived from proportional work? How do the affluent “cleanse” their earnings, overcoming the taint of chance through the appearance of work, thereby conferring moral legitimacy on their positions of power? The elite solution has been to disguise the stock market as a place of complex probabilities and algorithms rather than what it fundamentally is: luck. It is chance rebranded as morally righteous labor.
While lotteries and games of chance have often been a vehicle for the elite to extract money from the less-informed masses without upsetting them (a disguised regressive tax, as pointed out by the sociologist Roberto Garvia), in certain circumstances, lotteries have also been used as a political tool—a patronage benefit for the politically useful.
Although lotteries in Europe date back to the sixteenth century, it was later, in 1694, that a “lottery craze” swept through Europe, according to Roger Pearson, a French historian at Oxford. This craze followed a familiar pattern: democratic possibility (anyone could theoretically become rich) mixed with aristocratic reality (those who already had access to capital and political connections stood a significantly better chance of winning). In a peculiar turn, it was Voltaire who saw that, for various reasons, the prize in each Parisian district was greater than the total cost of all its lottery tickets. By buying up as many bonds as possible from the Paris mayor’s office, he stood to win the lottery with near certainty and make out with more money than he’d put in.
In his autobiographical Historical Commentary on the Works of the Author of La Henriade, Voltaire wrote, “The authorities issued tickets in exchange for Hôtel de Ville bonds, and winning lots were paid in cash and all in such a way that any group of people who had bought all the tickets stood to win a million francs.”
But it wasn’t just his craftiness that helped Voltaire in his “infamous lottery and market speculation,” as referred to by the historian W. Johnson in “Voltaire after 300 Years;” it was his connections as well. As Pearson has pointed out: “Clearly [Voltaire] had an understanding of sorts with the notaries appointed to sell the tickets, and it seems that he did not have to pay the full price of the tickets, so certain were he and his associates—and perhaps the notaries selling the tickets, presumably cut in on the action—of winning.”
Fortune-telling is simply an exhibition of one of many possibilities, rather than the absolute truth.
Voltaire, therefore, exploited his political connections and presumably bribed the notaries—two groups of people who were surely more willing to work with him given his fame—in order to win what eventually amounted to be about 7.5 million francs, an exorbitant sum that allowed him never to work, to buy up châteaux, and generally live as a king might. It is hard to understate the extent to which there was a double standard in games of chance: The poor who engage in games of chance are looked down upon, whereas the well-known had games of chance intentionally turned toward their advantage.
* * *
But what, ultimately, is chance? What is this unpredictable, unknowable element that beguiled Frances, Lady Shelley, Marat, Robespierre, and Lenormand’s other patrons?
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle declares that, “Everything in the world looks coincidental by any current observation method, since any law or principle is expressed only probabilistically. No one can say whether a thing has absolute inevitability.” In this sense, a fortune-telling is simply an exhibition of one of many possibilities, rather than the absolute truth. It is, therefore, never really wrong, and although it affects core tenants of society—religion, economics—it is only ever absolutely correct by chance.The Prime Minister has used his Conservative Senate majority to rig Senate rules, shut down debate and force through Bill C-377.
“Several senators tried to do their job and demonstrate that the Senate really is a chamber of second sober thought, but Prime Minister Harper appears to have thrown a temper tantrum, stepping in to rig the rules, shut down debate, and make things go his way,” said CLC president Hassan Yussuff.
“It’s a corrupt, cynical move that once more demonstrates that unions are far more democratic, transparent and accountable to their members than this prime minister and his government are to taxpayers,” he added.
The Conservatives have tried to spin Bill C-377 as being about union transparency, but experts from across the spectrum agree that it’s really about red tape, that will force unions, their suppliers and other businesses they work with to spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours producing and processing expense reports to be reviewed and filed at taxpayer expense.
The bill has been opposed by everyone from the NHL Players Association to Conservative and Liberal senators, constitutional experts, Canada's privacy commissioner, the Canadian Bar Association, the insurance and mutual fund industry, seven provinces, and a long and diverse list of others in the business, financial, professional, legal, labour, and academic communities, private and public, federal and provincial.
Yussuff thanked the minority of Senators who listened to the experts, stood their ground and opposed the legislation.
“What’s happened in the Senate is just one more reason that we’ll be working hard to win a new government this fall, one that prioritizes the economy, jobs and health care over political manoeuvring,” said Yussuff.
“The CLC and its affiliates will be going to court to challenge the legality and the constitutionality of this legislation,” he added.Editor's note: Wanderlust is a regular GlobalPost series on global sex and relationship issues written by Iva Skoch, who is now traveling the world writing a book on the subject.
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — In some of the roughest neighborhoods of Cape Town, as minivan taxis line up to pick up kids and take them to school in the morning, drivers or their assistants routinely select a pretty school girl — some as young as 12 years old — who would be their “queen” for the day.
She'll sit in the passenger seat, act as eye candy and be in charge of the stereo, which is widely considered to be a high-status gig.
Once declared taxi queen material, the girl is allowed to ride the minibus for free, saving the equivalent of about $1 a day, not an insignificant amount of money for children from impoverished urban neighborhoods. The girls may feel indebted, which is about the point where the problems with seemingly mutually beneficial “transactional relationships” begin to unfold.
Howard, 41, who refused to give his last name because of fears of gang retaliation, said the relationship between drivers and taxi queens is based on a simple formula. “The drivers are used by the girls to get free rides and the girls are used by taxi drivers for sex. Everyone uses everyone,” he said. “Life is a vicious cycle.”
Very little academic research exists about taxi queens in South Africa, yet experts agree that the cross-generational nature of these relationships makes it a problem of massive proportions. In the country’s latest HIV/AIDS report, inter-generational sex was highlighted as one of the main sources of HIV transmission in the country, said Anna Strebel, a gender and sexuality researcher.
“Young women have the highest rate of infection,” Strebel said. “Their concern is mainly about getting pregnant, not about AIDS, even among university students, which is staggering.”
Strebel recently interviewed a large number of taxi queens in the Western Cape area for a study. She was surprised to find how widespread the practice of a transactional relationship between older drivers and young girls was. “Wherever there are taxi drivers, it exists,” she said.
While girls from poor families might engage in the practice, sometimes referred to as “survival sex,” to get essentials such as food and free rides, other girls do it to be able to afford designer clothes. Strebel said the phenomenon isn’t linked directly to poverty. Still, anecdotal evidence suggests the term was coined in Mitchell’s Plain, one of Cape Town’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods.
Elaine Salo, director of the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Pretoria, said taxi queens emerged when minibus taxis became popular after the apartheid-era bus boycotts, sometime in the 1980s, and the transactional nature of the relationship between adolescent girls and older taxi drivers gave practical benefits to both parties involved.
Today, the term “taxi queen” is considered derogatory because it’s now generally agreed the practice stigmatizes and exploits women, most of whom are too young to make informed choices.
Howard, who used to work as an assistant driver and fare collector, or “guardtjie” in Afrikaans, explained the process by which a schoolgirl becomes a taxi queen without a speck of emotion.
“The key is getting them hooked on tik,” he said. Tik is what South Africans call the methamphetamine Americans refer to as “crystal meth,” and since taxi drivers are widely known to be the city’s most prominent dealers of “straw,” or hits of tik packaged in cut up, inch-long transparent straws, the opportunities for school girls to sample the drug are endless.
Before things turn ugly, however, the young women enjoy a period of intense courtship, which can arguably be just as addictive as tik.
“You don’t have to pay today for the bus, sweetheart. It’s on me,” Howard said he or his driver used to tell the schoolgirls, inviting them to sit up front and asking them what they were doing later. Some girls got lured quickly by the status that becoming a taxi queen brings, especially if it is a new car with a loud stereo system. But many girls were well aware of the slippery slope and rejected free fares and romantic proposals.
According to Howard, however, they had little chance.
“Once they set their eyes on somebody, drivers are very persistent,” Howard said. “They know where the girl lives and where she goes to school, so they wait for her to fetch her every day and they bring her presents until she agrees.”
The presents are simple, but effective: mobile phone vouchers, beer, flowers. It typically takes only a few days before the relationship turns sexual. Once that happens, the driver is quickly onto another girl. In the community of taxi drivers, it is fashionable to regularly upgrade taxi queens and bring their favorite ones to parties at the end of the week.
Howard said that some girls hold out too long. That’s when the white pills he calls “Rescue” come into play. “They make them sleepy,” he said. Because sleepy means obedient, it makes it easier to get them addicted to tik. Once hooked, they might become dealers or prostitutes to support the habit.
Howard estimates that during his three-year stint in the taxi business, he had sex with close to 1,000 girls. Some did it voluntarily, some when they were asleep, others in exchange for beer, sometimes half a beer, or a straw.
Patrik Solomons, director of Molo Songoglolo, a children's rights foundation, said teenage girls are often sexually abused by taxi drivers or their assistants. But many don’t see it as abuse because they were raised in a culture where violence, sexual abuse and injustice are the norm.
“Teenagers don’t just wake up one day and think 'I think I’ll become a taxi queen.' Children are groomed into these scenarios,” he said, adding that some teens are encouraged by their families to get as many material gifts as possible and be friendly with taxi drivers — who are typically gang members — to assure gang protection for all of them.
And there’s no shortage of gangs in the Western Cape. Out of the dozens of gangs that operate in the Cape Flats, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods, the most notorious are the Hardlivings, Nice Time Kids, Cisco Yukkies, Jesters, Scorpions, Naughty Boys, School Boys, Sad Lives and the most feared of all, the Americans. Because minivan taxis are a cash business, subsidized by drug sales, it’s one of the most effective ways to launder money and fund gang activity.
The roots of the taxi queen phenonenon, however, go beyond economics and crime. Solomons said that in South African society, men are given a license to do anything they please.
“These kids develop very strange ideas of what love is,” he said. “Teenagers are very vulnerable. Like everywhere else in the world, teenagers here like to be treated as adults. And taxi drivers are treating them as adults.”
Other Wanderlust columns:
It's pronounced "fooking"
Designer vaginas, anyone?
Sex ed, in pictures
Catholic priest becomes unlikely sex guru
Bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan
Gay-4-Pay in Prague
The world's eight strangest sex remediesThe four men are members of Mugitu, a group formed to fight against the development of a high-speed train network which would run through forestland in the Pyrenees.
They stand accused of "energetically hurling pies in the face of Yolanda Barcina Angulo", president of the north-eastern Spanish region of Navarre.
The right-wing Popular Party leader was attending a public meeting in Toulouse (France) in October 2011 when group leader Gorka Ovejero approached her with a pie concealed in a file.
Spain’s Public Ministry reported Barcina was left “dazed and disoriented” when first Ovejero pummelled her in “an energetic fashion” and then the three attackers covered her face and clothes with white cream pies.
The pastry might have been easy to shift, but the “humiliation” she suffered could land the men some serious jail time.
Gorka Ovejero Gamboa, a politician with Basque nationalist Abertzale connections, faces up to nine years in prison; his other pie-hurling colleagues Julio Martín Villanueva, Ibón García Garrido and Mikel Álvarez Forcada could get six years.
At a time when numerous political and royal corruption scandals in Spain have made world headlines for the lack of punitive action taken against the alleged culprits, the objectivity of Spain’s judicial system is being widely called into question.
"This case reveals the very worst side of the Spanish judicial system and its total lack of contact with reality,” defence lawyer Gonzalo Boye told the UK’s The Guardian.
“It shows a corrupt judicial and political class prepared to use public resources to try people that have done nothing more than demonstrate their opposition to the destruction of the forest.
"If these people are convicted, the court will look like a tribunal during the Inquisition rather than a modern court of law."
Spanish online newspaper El Diario reported Ovejero as saying the Mugitu members had never expected to face jail time as they had looked into similar cases in other democratic countries where prison sentences were not given.
"In Belgium (the writer and activist) Nöel Godin and his group have thrown more than 100 pies in the face of important people and they have always been understood to be expressions of surrealist art," Ovejero told El Diario.
"In Spain, authority figures are protected as much, if not more, as they were under the dictatorship. If you throw a pie in the face of your local barber, nothing will happen. But if you do it to a public official, you'll find the great weight of the law coming down on top of you," Ovejero said.
The names of countless Popular Party politicians or Spain’s Princess Cristina are just some of the examples of what Ovejero and his lawyer may have been referring to.
An even more recent example of judicial impunity for critics is that of the Prestige, where an 11-year investigation into the spill of 50,000 tonnes of crude oil on Galician fishing waters and beaches ended with no one being found criminally responsible.This article by Marcel Stoetzler* was originally published on openDemocracy.
Seventy years ago, Querido Verlag published a densely written book that has become a key title of modern social philosophy. Underneath its pessimistic granite surface a strangely sanguine message awaits us.
How do you make an argument against social domination when the very terms, concepts and languages at your disposal are shaped by, and in turn serve that same social domination? Probably in the way you would light a fire in a wooden stove. How would you write a book about the impossibility of writing just that book? Like a poem about the pointlessness of poems. What if your enemies’ enemies are your own worst enemies? Can you defend liberal society from its fascist enemies when you know it is the wrong state of things? You must, but dialectics may well ‘make cowards of us all’ and spoil our ‘native hue of resolution’.
Dialectic of Enlightenment[1] is a very strange book, and although it was published, in 1947, by the leading publishing house for exiled, German-language anti-fascist literature, the Querido Verlag in Amsterdam, alongside many of the biggest literary names of the time, no-one will have expected that it gradually became one of the classics of modern social philosophy.
It is a book that commits all the sins editors tend to warn against: its chapters are about wildly differing subject matters; the writing is repetitive, circular and fragmented; no argument ever seems exhausted or final and there are no explicitly stated conclusions, and certainly no trace of a policy impact trajectory. Arguments start somewhere, suddenly come to a halt and then move on to something else. If this sounds like the script for a Soviet film from the revolutionary period, then that is not totally coincidental: it is an avant-garde montage film, transcribed into philosophy.It is an avant-garde montage film, transcribed into philosophy.
Unsurprisingly, given that it was written during WW2 in American exile and published at the beginning of the Cold War, it does not carry its Marxism on its sleeves, but it gives clear enough hints: in the preface, Horkheimer and Adorno state that the aim of the book is ‘to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’. This addresses the dialectic referenced in the title of the book. The important bit here is the ‘instead of’: the reality of barbarism was undeniable and clearly visible, but the originality of the formulation lies in its implication that humanity could have been expected to enter ‘a truly human state’ sometime earlier in the twentieth century, leaving behind its not so human state.
The promise of progress towards humanity, held by socialists (and some liberals), blew up in their faces. It would have been easy and straightforward then to write a book arguing against the holding of such hope, but this would not have been a dialectical book; Dialectic of Enlightenment undertakes to rescue this hope by looking at why progress tipped over into its opposite.
Whose barbarism?
A number of propositions have been made, at the time and later, as to who or what is to be blamed for the barbarism. Capitalism was an obvious answer, but then, capitalism does not typically and all the time produce Holocausts (and capitalists could be found among the victims). Others pointed at ‘the Germans’ and their peculiar intellectual and social history; this, too, is neither an entirely wrong nor a quite satisfying answer. Again others pointed at ‘the bureaucracy’ and modern statecraft. These surely played a role but there are plenty of state bureaucracies that do not engage in genocides and world wars, most of the time. Horkheimer and Adorno made a much stranger, more abstract and strangely radical proposition: the barbarism that destroyed civilization was a product of civilization as such. It is civilization’s self-destruction.
The attempt to formulate a theory of barbarism as the product of civilization creates a very thorny problem, though: theorizing, the attempt to bring about enlightenment, is very much the stuff of civilization, as it involves thinking, language, perceptions, concepts, images, ideas, judgements, ‘spirit’ (which in the philosophical tradition Horkheimer and Adorno came from means as much as ‘culture’). Dialectic of Enlightenment blames the destruction of enlightenment on enlightenment, i.e. on itself. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas some decades later cleverly pointed out that this is a bit of a contradiction. That was exactly the point, though: the hint is in the title, in the word ‘Dialectic’.
The book’s painful starting point is described in the preface: Horkheimer and Adorno looked for a position from which to confront fascism and found that ‘in reflecting on its own guilt’, thought finds that it lacks a language.
In the name of what exactly is it possible to challenge fascism effectively? In the languages of sociology, psychology, history, philosophy? The discourses of truth, freedom, human rights?Barbarism… is civilization’s self-destruction.
Here is the rub: in the period in which fascism took power these sounded hollow as they had been stripped of their authority. If this sounds familiar, it is because, almost a century later, we are in a not so different situation. Horkheimer and Adorno state – still in the preface – that fascist demagogues and liberal intellectuals feed off the same (positivist) zeitgeist, marked by the ‘self-destruction of the enlightenment’. Science and scholarship are not potent weapons against fascism anymore, and this even affects tendencies that are opposed to ‘official’, positivistic science.
The basic point here is that scientific, materialist, technological rationality is a force for good only when it is linked to the idealistic notion of general human emancipation, the goal of full rich lives for all, without suffering, exploitation and oppression. (Using a word they had good reasons to avoid, this is what Marx would have called ‘communism’). Only this link gives empirical and rationalist science its truth and significance: enlightenment needs to be ‘transcendental’, i.e. something that points beyond the actually existing reality, not unlike metaphysics in traditional philosophy. It needs to be critical, that is, in opposition to reality as it is.
The principal thesis of the book is that enlightenment purged itself of this connection to society-transcending, non-empirical, critical truth, and as early as on the second page of the preface Horkheimer and Adorno are happy to name the thinker who exemplifies for them this fatal development: Auguste Comte, the founder of positivist philosophy. They assert that in the hostile and brutal conditions of the eighteenth century – the period often described as that of ‘the Enlightenment’ – philosophy had dared to challenge the ‘infamy’ (as Voltaire called it) of the church and the society it helped maintain, while in the aftermath of the French Revolution philosophy switched sides and put itself at the service of the state. This was of course, by now, the modernising state, but still the same state. They write that the Comtean school of positivism – ‘apologists’ of the modern, capitalist society that emerged in the nineteenth century – ‘usurped’ the succession to the genuine Enlighteners, and reconciled philosophy with the forces it previously had opposed, such as the Catholic church.
Horkheimer and Adorno mention in this context the ultra-nationalist organisation Action Française, whose chief ideologist Charles Maurras had been an ardent admirer of Comte. This hint helps understand what kind of historical developments they had on their minds: while Comte himself surely saw himself in good faith as a protagonist of social reform meant to overcome-but-preserve the achievements of the Revolution, and his translation of enlightenment empiricism into the system of ‘positivist philosophy’ as a contribution to the process of modernization, his followers in many ways contributed to the development of the modern authoritarian state and, as in the case of Maurras, proto-fascism.
The elements of these subsequent developments can be found in Comte’s own writings, which makes his ambiguities a suitable illustration of the dialectic of enlightenment. (The Action Française is mentioned only in a version of the text published in 1944 that was mostly circulated informally; it was not included in the definitive publication of 1947. The authors might have assumed few people would understand the connection to Comte without further explanation.)
Reason, data, and the rejection of metaphysics
As elsewhere in Horkheimer and Adorno’s writings, there is a lot of polemic against ‘positivism’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Mostly the target of their critique is the ‘logical positivism’ of their own time, but they seem to see the latter as a logical extension or modification of the older Comtean positivism that was a much more ambitious and comprehensive proposition.
There is no detailed engagement with Comte but it is clear that the principal point of attack is Comte’s rejection of metaphysics: when the eighteenth-century enlightenment was a combination, or perhaps more often an assemblage, of empiricism and rationalism, Comte aimed to boil it down to strictly positivist empiricism that observes the ‘positively’ givens (in Latin: data) and derives ‘laws’ from them that can be used to predict and adapt to, perchance slightly tweak, whatever reality has in store for us. And that is that.
The metaphysical ideas that had been useful in bringing down feudalism and the old regime – the likes of freedom, individualism, emancipation – need to be abandoned as they are the playthings of troublemakers, irritants that could endanger the consolidation of the post-revolutionary new order. Positivism in Comte’s sense is essentially the scientific basis of governance by experts, while twentieth-century ‘logical positivism’ is its epistemological complement. When Horkheimer and Adorno attack the latter, they see it as continuous with the former.They wanted to be the troublemakers…
The attack on metaphysics was a central theme of German philosophy in the 1920s, and helped weaken the defences against fascism across the political spectrum. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the cult of facts and probabilities has flushed out conceptual thinking, and as humans generally have a need to explain to themselves conceptually why they should be bothered to do anything, or resist doing something that society expects them to do, the denunciation and elimination of concepts as ‘metaphysical’ promotes a passive and fatalistic going-with-the-flow. The ‘blocking of the theoretical imagination has paved the way for political delusion’, which in the context meant fascism.
Again, many contemporaries were happy back then to argue for the reconstruction of some kind of metaphysical system – theological, neo-Platonic, neo-Aristotelian or whatever else. They had a relatively easy task of this in the context of WWII as such philosophical or theological systems are something one can hold on to: they can help one to weather the brute modernizing nihilism of the fascist barbarians, and after their defeat provide a handy identity narrative.
The easy option of a return to traditional metaphysics was not open, though, to the Frankfurt School theorists who saw themselves within the tradition of the radical strand of the Enlightenment. Their main thrust was to attack its domesticated version, the ‘positivism’ that puts itself and its expertise at the service of domination. Far from writing against the Enlightenment, they wanted to restore it to its complex form that contained traces of the transcendental that Comte – quite correctly – saw as trouble. They wanted to be the troublemakers whom Comte thought he had exorcised from the Enlightenment.
Nursing unacted desires
As Horkheimer and Adorno state, the ‘self-destruction of enlightenment’ that frustrated the writing of the book they initially had in mind – probably a fine scholarly tome on the role of dialectical logic in a variety of academic disciplines – came to provide the principal subject matter of the book they did write. The second line of the title, ‘Philosophical Fragments’, indicated that they were then still thinking of it as a halfway house on the way towards writing the real thing. This never happened, so it is what it is: an assertion that ‘thinking that aims at enlightenment’ is inseparably linked to freedom in society, but the admission that enlightenment also ‘already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today’. This is the project of an enlightenment mindful of the antagonisms that drive it, as opposed to a smug and arrogant one that feels good about itself lecturing the unenlightened.
If this sounds a bit hippy-ish, then this is because there is in fact a sort of romantic aspect to all this. It is most evident on the very last pages of the book, in the last of the twenty-four short pieces that make up the sixth chapter (‘Notes and Sketches’), titled ‘On the genesis of stupidity’. This, the final statement, begins with a very striking image: ‘The emblem of intelligence is the antenna of the snail’.‘The emblem of intelligence is the antenna of the snail’.
Horkheimer and Adorno do not provide any reference in support of this claim, but one could think for example of a famous letter by Keats that mentions the ‘trembling and delicate snail-horn perception of beauty’. The antenna, or horn, of the snail represents the good kind of enlightenment we should aspire to: trembling and delicate, as in Keats. (See also here.)
Horkheimer and Adorno use the image, though, to make an anthropological argument about the emergence of intelligence: ‘Meeting an obstacle, the antenna is immediately withdrawn into the protection of the body, it becomes one with the whole until it ventures forth again only timidly as an independent organ. If the danger is still present, it disappears once more, and the intervals between the attempts grow longer’.
They argue here that the development of human mental life is precariously physical and depends on the freedom to exercise the organs of perception. Evolution only takes place when ‘antennae were once stretched out in new directions and not repulsed’. Stupidity, by contrast, ‘is a scar’: ‘Every partial stupidity in a human being marks a spot where the awakening play of muscles has been inhibited instead of fostered’.
Switching to a psychoanalytical argument, Horkheimer and Adorno write that the inhibition leads to automatized repetitions of the aborted attempt, such as in neurotic repetitions of a ‘defence reaction which has already proved futile’, and ultimately produces a numb spot where the scar is, a deformation. All the deformations we accumulate during individual and species evolution translate into well-adapted, functioning ‘characters’, stupidity, impotence or spiteful fanaticism, or any combination thereof. They are so many monuments to arrested hope.
This is how the book ends: it is implied that the answer to stupidity, including those of fascism and antisemitism, but also their contemporary second cousins such as ‘post-truth’, resentment-driven politics from Hindutva to Brexit, those myriads of irrational particularisms that gang up on particulars and individuals, ultimately can be defeated only by more freedom of movement for our antennas and other muscles, and the production of fewer scars on our various tissues.
Marxism and anthropology
One of the stupidest things is antisemitism. The fifth chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘Elements of antisemitism. Limits of Enlightenment’, is easily the most complex, ambitious and challenging text ever written on this particular subject.
The same peculiarity that characterises the entire book is what makes reading ‘Elements’ rather hard work: the intermeshing of the critique of the present – capitalist modernity – with the much grander theme of the critique of human civilization.
Most of what Horkheimer and Adorno have to say on antisemitism in the perspective of the capitalist present is contained in the first few pages of the chapter and must have felt like a slap in the face by unsuspecting liberal readers: the argument emphasizes the continuity between liberal and fascist governance and the responsibility of the bourgeoisie. First of all, liberals and the representatives of the ‘democratic-popular movements’ had always been lukewarm at best about the equality |
nuclear DNA, which resides in the root. Lastly, Poe had no children, so there are no direct descendants who might give comparative hair samples. (Realistically, it’s probably not in the interest of the owners to scientifically authenticate the hair; the procedure is expensive and, given the acceptable, relatively loose standard of provenance, there’s no real upside.) Occasionally, however, celebrated old hair gets put under the microscope. Back in the 1990s, Beethoven’s locks were analyzed to determine his cause of death.
On a brighter note: not all of Poe’s hair was removed posthumously. A lock in the collection of the Indiana University’s Lilly Library is one of the few we know for certain was not taken at the wake. It was acquired by the pharmaceutical industrialist Josiah Kirby Lilly, Jr., for whom, says librarian Rebecca Baumann, Poe was an “early collecting obsession.”
Poe’s dramatic letter to his one-time fiancee, Sarah Helen Whitman. (Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University)
One chestnut-colored curl in Indiana, purchased from Max Harzof, a famed New York bookseller, was found in a black tin box of letters that Poe wrote to his one-time fiancee Sarah Helen Whitman. Upon the envelope was written: Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman / Providence / RI / Sent to me on the evening / of Nov 8th 1848.
“Sarah Helen Whitman, a sort of 19th-century version of the modern ‘Goth’ girl, was known for wearing black clothes and a coffin-shaped charm, holding séances at her house, and writing transcendentalist poetry,” Baumann emailed. “She was briefly engaged to Poe until she received an anonymous note at the library claiming that he had returned to drink (which he had sworn off of as a condition of their engagement).”
Their courtship, wrote author David Randall, was “brief and violent … during which both parties were often alternately or jointly hysterical.” In a letter dated November 7, Poe wrote to his beloved: “If you cannot see me—write me one word to say that you do love me and that, under all circumstances, you will be mine. Remember that these coveted words you have never yet spoken—and, nevertheless, I have not reproached you.”
There’s a second lock in the Lilly collection, this one sent in 1849 to Annie Richmond, a friend of Poe’s, by Maria Clemm (mother of Virginia). The hair is encased in a pearl-ringed brooch, which maybe from the writer’s deathbed. “That is certainly the library lore of the item, but I was unable to find anything to conclusively establish this,” says Baumann. “The date is right, and it certainly fits in with the custom of funeral jewelry, but I haven’t been able to confirm.”
The sheer quantity of Poe hair dispersed across the country is remarkable. No less than four libraries along the Eastern seaboard have their own caches: In addition to the collection in Baltimore, the New York Public Library has a lock of his hair, acquired in 1938, while the Philadelphia Free Library is home to a strange miniature of Poe, painted on ivory, that also contains some of his prized hair. Given this fact, one wonders how much hair still remained when Edgar Allan Poe was buried.
Poe was initially entombed in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore cemetery. It was neglected terribly. A decade after Poe’s death, Maria Clemm wrote to Neilson Poe, “A lady called on me a short time ago from Baltimore. She said she had visited my darling Eddie’s grave. She said it was in the basement of the church, covered with rubbish and coal. Is this true?”
By 1875, however, the author’s reputation had been resuscitated and burnished, and Poe’s body was exhumed and reburied in a more tourist-friendly part of the cemetery. A reporter for the Baltimore American was there when the coffin was first re-opened, where it was inspected by a small gaggle of curious onlookers. According to him, the skeleton was “almost in perfect condition, and lying with the long bony hands reposing one upon the other,” while the skull had “some little hair…still clinging near the forehead.”
There’s something poignant about it. Even as the rest of Poe’s body had fallen away—neither carefully cut up like the old man in The Tell-Tale Heart nor encased in a catacomb like the nobleman in The Cask of Amontillado—his remaining locks had hung on.
A pearl-ringed brooch with Poe’s hair inside, perhaps from the author’s deathbed. (Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University)
Update, 5/12: An earlier version of the story misstated the century of Poe’s life—it was the 19th century, not the 18th. We regret the error.The King Street East shop is fielding five to six calls a week for maladies ranging from busted rims to bent suspensions to wonky steering, with bills running as high as $4,000, says mechanic Ali Ghaddar.
"Last year and this year are the worst years in memory."
Several customers have said they're hoping the city picks up their tab, says shop manager Brian Beynon.
"There's not a day goes by that I don't have a customer that's told me, 'Everything was fine until I hit that pothole I didn't see until the last minute.'"
As of Sunday, the city had received 62 pothole claims, but that number is expected to rise "significantly."
"Spring is generally a busy time of year for pothole claims, particularly after a bad winter," said John McLennan, the city's manager of risk management services.
In 2014, there were 411 claims, 98 in 2013 and 60 in 2012.
The city denies "the majority" of pothole claims, McLennan said, noting damage is often "avoidable through defensive driving and driving the speed limit."
Common complaints are ruined tires, dented rims, broken exhausts and damaged suspensions, with the average damage claim between $200 and $800. The worst mine field for claims is Burlington Street.
Public works has launched a pothole-filling "blitz," with a priority on higher-speed and greater-volume roads, Smith said.
After those, such as the particularly riddled and frost-heaved Burlington and Barton streets, crews will shift to less transited and lower-speed roads.
"It does take time. It's not something we can accomplish overnight," Smith said, noting the "blitz" will take four to six weeks to complete before secondary filling occurs.
The city spends about $2.6 million on potholes every year.
But keeping roads smooth isn't a simple patch-up job for the cash-crunched Hamilton, says Coun. Sam Merulla.
The city is saddled with a nearly $3-billion infrastructure backlog and hamstrung by downloaded provincial and federal responsibilities, says Merulla, who chairs the public works committee.
"The funding formula for municipalities right now is broken. It should be fixed. We need a new deal."
With files from Matthew Van Dongen
tmoro@thespec.com
905-526-3264 | @TeviahMoroThe head of the Employers and Manufacturers Association has slammed New Zealand First's idea of a major reduction in immigration.
Photo: RNZ
The party wants to cut the number of people coming into the country, with the policy likely to be on the table in coalition negotiations this week.
The association's chief executive, Kim Campbell, said reducing immigration would bring the economy to a "shuddering halt fairly quickly".
He said New Zealand First's policy of reducing the number of migrants to 10,000 a year was extreme.
"The fact that immigration could use some recalibration, I don't think anybody disagrees with that, but just these arbitrary numbers are hard."
Photo: RNZ / Philippa Tolley
Mr Campbell said the developed world's population was aging and it would not be long before countries would be competing for people and New Zealand could not be left behind.
"Many of the people coming in are young and energetic and hopefully they will raise our birth rate so the country actually has a possibility to continue to prosper."
And Mr Campbell laughed off Mr Peters' suggestion that the Ports of Auckland be moved to Northland.
He said in the fullness of time the port could be moved but it would take a lot of money.
"Let's pick a number, say $5-6 billion."
Mr Campbell cited transport and roading issues as two of the big problems facing Auckland.Soon after I turned 11, the best thing in my life happened: I won a caption competition run by Target Books, and my prize was a trip to BBC Television Centre in London to meet Doctor Who. I wore Jesus sandals. (Even Jesus couldn't really rock a Jesus sandal.) Also: brown shorts and, for some insane reason, on this, the best day of my life, a T-shirt of my dad's, also brown, advertising guitar strings. Because it was 1983, I had a very bad, Scottish version of Princess Diana's layered hair, only with a long piece hanging down the back, like a rat's tail.
It was pitch dark in the bowels of Television Centre, and busy-looking people were putting tin foil over mattresses to turn them into "space mattresses". A rotund man with a beard was making expansive gestures in a tiny, lit-up control room high above the sound stage. Best of all, I was standing next to the Doctor – the real, live Doctor, with celery in his lapel and everything – who was standing next to the actual Tardis.
I peered feverishly into the Tardis through the gloom. "Ah," said Peter Davison, who was charming, particularly to my mother, who had gone a bit giggly. He followed my gaze into the balsa wood box. "I wouldn't go in there, son. You'll find it very disappointing."
What did I think was going to happen? That I was going to get whisked away to be the new companion? (Yes. That's exactly what I thought would happen. I was a very young 11.) Or that maybe, at the very least, the Doctor – who knew everything – would be able to guess my gender? I did.
It was hard being a young female Doctor Who fan. For a long time, I thought I was the only girl in the world who dreamed about the extraordinary thrill of vanishing into space. Now, any girl who won that competition would get kudos; in 1983, I got a nasty teasing. I loved the Doctor's bolshy companion Tegan (Janet Fielding), and demure Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), too – even if she did get out of the more frightening adventures by fainting. But Bonnie Langford and I simply could not get along. And then there followed the great hiatus when the show went off air.
I waited along with everybody else, watching UK Gold repeats at odd times of day, admiring the extraordinary fortitude of Doctor Who Magazine, which somehow stayed in business for the 16 years the show was suspended. Then, in 2005, a flicker of excitement began to build. Seriously? Christopher Eccleston? He was hot off a drama called The Second Coming, written by Russell T Davies, which displayed his extraordinary skill≈at parachuting the oddest of things into the most believable of settings. There was a point, 15 minutes into that first episode, when New Who's success became inevitable. Even now, you can say these lines to a Who fan anywhere in the world and they will respond immediately, like Friends fans doing the four claps from the theme tune:
Rose: If you're an alien, why do you sound like you come from the north?
The Doctor: Lots of planets have a north.
The slightly childish skew of the first couple of episodes (aliens doing farts!) was cool, but then came a triple whammy of such sophistication that any sense this was just an overexcited kiddie show with good CGI was sent packing: Steven Moffat's The Empty Child episode, featuring Billie Piper flying in a union flag T-shirt, an invisible spaceship parked at Big Ben, and a horrifying, gas-masked child zombie asking if you were his mummy; Paul Cornell's Father's Day, a heartbreaking meditation on love and loss; and the chilling Dalek episode, with Billie shouting, "Hahaha, it can't get up stairs!" – whereupon the Dalek simply levitates and massacres an entire platoon. In Billie Piper's Rose, we had a normal girl who was brave, conflicted and instantly recognisable.
We all know what happened next: David "Bar-sa-LEUN-ah" Tennant turned up. Now, up until then it had been fairly clear that the Doctor couldn't possibly be attracted to humans. (And Time Lords aren't born anyway, they're woven - yes, yes, off to the comments section with you to dispute this.) Tom Baker summed it up perfectly in Douglas Adams's wonderful episode City Of Death, with the line "You're a beautiful woman... probably."
When David Tennant came along, there was a new problem: he and Rose had chemistry: ridiculous, undeniable chemistry. You could tell the makers didn't particularly want it to happen any more than the protagonists did: but there they were, falling in love, as was the mother of pretty much every child in the country watching the show, adding to the ever-rising ratings. (I won't name names, but in 2007 at least four of my romantic novelist friends published books featuring slender, dark-eyed heroes with minds like quicksilver.) And then there was the marvellous Donna (Catherine Tate), huffing down corridors in her Per Una and reminding you what fun a girl can have in the Doctor's universe.
Last year I wrote a Doctor Who book, and the publishers were a bit wary when I approached them, worried I would up the snogs. We decided to publish the book as JT Colgan (I don't have a middle name; the T stands for Tardis), but the fans don't care a bit (they're a pretty smart bunch), so we're reclaiming the Jenny: next time round, I'm Jenny T Colgan.
Can girls write the Doctor? Of course we can: Naomi Alderman's Doctor Who book is terrific, and AL Kennedy's forthcoming Tom Baker novella is sensational. Should we write more of the show? Well, I think the producers should do what they've always done: pick the best writers they can think of. Am I outnumbered at panel events? Yes. Does it bother me? Nope. The chances of there being a female Doctor in my lifetime are, I feel, approaching 100%.
Watching the show as a woman may be a different experience. This may or may not have anything to do with gender, but it took me a lot longer to get over Amy Pond losing her baby than it took Amy Pond. In fact, had I been Amy Pond (and yes, I wish that, too), I would have marched up to the first weeping angel I came across, closed my eyes, and begged it to hurl me back in time: to where I could grab my little girl back into my arms, and make my own getaway.
This may also be a female thing, but I am still sending several begging letters a month to my delightful and long-suffering editor at BBC books, pitching a book set against the background of Martha and Mickey's inevitable and messy divorce. Likewise, excited as I am to see DT and Rose back for the 50th, I've already mentally decorated their house and named their numerous redheaded children.*
Being a fan these days is a very different thing: you can watch every episode as often as you like, and freeze frame your favourite bits, which may or may not include David Tennant leaning his head sideways on a wall. But the loveliest part is getting to meet other female fans at conventions and online; I've met other people who remember what it was like to feel little, and powerless, and who dreamed of exploring infinite worlds in the blink of an eye – and still get home in time for egg and chips.
Oh, and a few years ago I read an interview with Tennant, and he was asked if he'd always been a Doctor Who fan. Yes, of course, he said. In fact, when he was 11, he had entered a Target Books caption competition to meet the Doctor. He didn't win.
*Adric, Katarina and Sarah-Jane
• Jenny Colgan's Doctor Who: Dark Horizon is published in paperback by BBC Books at £7.99. To order a copy for £6.39, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. She is currently working on a follow-up, Doctor Who: Into The Nowhere.Michael Shannon Thedford is pictured in Collin County, Texas, U.S. in this undated handout photo. Collin County Sheriff's Office/Handout via REUTERS
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A Texas man charged with causing the death of his six-month-old daughter by leaving her in a hot car put the baby in a refrigerator after finding her in desperate condition in the back of his vehicle, a document released on Wednesday said.
Michael Thedford, a 33-year-old, unemployed high school teacher, was arrested in Collin County, outside of Dallas, on Tuesday.
He was charged with manslaughter and released on bond. No lawyer was listed for him in online jail records.
According to a probable cause affidavit released on Wednesday, he dropped off his two other children, ages 3 and 5, at daycare but forgot about his baby daughter in the back of the car. He went into his home and fell asleep.
His wife was at work at the time of the incident, according to police.
Some four hours later he discovered his daughter strapped into her car safety seat. He took her out, placed her in a refrigerator “for an undetermined amount of time,” and called 911, the affidavit said.
He later placed the infant on the kitchen floor and attempted CPR on the baby before emergency responders arrived, it said.
He said his daughter was stiff and “hot as a brick” when he found her in the vehicle, the affidavit said. The outdoor temperature at the time was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32°C).WordPress was kind enough to inform me today that it’s been eight months since my last post here on Due By Friday. So I’m just going to call that a brief hiatus and leave it at that. But with 2016 coming to an end, I wanted to get at least one success story up here before the holidays went into full swing.
And there is one big project that I just recently completed. A little over a year ago, I set out on the rather overly ambitious task of doing a daily journal for a year. Knowing myself and that I have a difficult time committing to new habits (ahem like posting regularly to Due By Friday cough), I decided that I would need some kind of tool to make this happen.
The tool that made this happen turned out to be a handy little app called Day One. Available on both iOS and MacOS, this app made daily journaling a breeze. With daily reminders set to alert me that it was time to make a journal entry, it was practically impossible for me to miss a day. Every evening, shortly before bed, my phone would light up with a notification reminding me to make an entry in Day One.
My goal with daily journaling was not to list out the day’s activities per se, but more to write a few simple sentences that highlighted the big takeaways from the day. The lessons learned and things I wanted to remember when looking back over the year. By using an app on my phone, I had no excuse not to take two minutes to jot down the thoughts that had been rattling around in my noggin throughout the day.
It was a little tricky for the first couple weeks, as is any new habit. But in no time I found myself slipping right into the routine of making a quick entry before bed. Some days I even made notes to myself of things to write in later. In this way, I discovered a new level of mindfulness in my day-to-day activities. And I think that was part of what I set out to do in the first place with this project. So success!
Now, one year later, I am able to look back over the year and see at a glance what was going on during any particular day. And best of all, I can look at the calendar snapshot in the app and see that there are 12 whole months with no blank spaces or missed days. To see that I’ve been able to do something consistently for an entire year is a huge confidence booster whenever I find myself needing one.
If you’ve been thinking about taking up a daily journal, or perhaps if you used to maintain a journal and have fallen off the wagon, or maybe if you just like to look to the past to guide you in the future, I highly recommend the practice. Now that I’ve completed the year of journaling, I find I can’t stop. The habit has taken hold. Every day I get to see what was going on in my life a year ago. It’s basically my own little mental time machine, which is pretty much what everyone wants for Christmas, right? So I’ll keep at it myself, and continue to recommend it to anyone.
While Day One worked great for me, there are plenty of apps out there you can use. I also tried using Evernote and MacJournal, but they just didn’t quite do it for me as well as Day One did. You can even go old school and put pen to paper, which would give you the added satisfaction of flipping through stacks of notebooks as the years pass and your collection builds. The method and means ultimately don’t matter so much as the ends. And in the end, you gain insight into a day that was otherwise lost to time and fading memory. So take a minute and write something down every day. You’ll be glad you did.
Now with that said, what can we expect in 2017? Well more projects, of course! After the new year, I’ll be gearing up for some (hopefully) fun new undertakings. And if you have any suggestions, feel free to submit. Until then, see you next Friday!About
Hi Folks.
Today I went to the US Population Clock and made note of the number on the clock. At the time, it said that the US Population was 312,555,919. Now I don't know about you, but that sounds like a lot of people to me. 1 percent of those people have a big fat wallet. And WHY SHOULDN'T THEY? Most of them have worked hard for that kind of money and some of them just got lucky. I don't think it is fair for the rest of the 99 percent to expect them to divide it up and hand it over to us just because we don't have as much.
So I say COUNT ME OUT OF THE 99%. These OWS occupants are out of control. They leave trash piles scattered in their wake and they are filthy. They are getting arrested for various different reasons. They have invested very little thought in what they are doing, and most of them really don't even know why they are there in the first place. Don't believe me? Just google "OWS trash" and see what pops up. A friend of mine once said "THE PROBLEM in this country does not lie on Wall Street. THE PROBLEM IS ROOTED IN THE EPIDEMIC OF IGNORANCE AND COMPLACENCY THAT ACCOMPANIES VOTERS on election day." If you want to cure our problems here in this country, DON'T OCCUPY WALL STREET. Just, please, get informed before you vote.
I am just one person. 1/312,555,919 = 0.0000000031994274918850600938387604171399, or roughly 0.000000320%
If you count me out of the 99%, that leaves only 98.999999680%
And that, my friends, is where the number on the T-Shirt comes from.
DO YOU WANT TO BE COUNTED OUT? Just buy one of my T-Shirts and let them know. Wear it proudly, friends. I do.
Now this is a short-run project. You have to get your t-shirt while you can. I am only doing it for 14 days for a couple reasons.
1. I want to make sure you get your shirt before Christmas.
2. I'm not sure how long these jokers will be around. At some point, I figure they will just pack up and go home... or back to the alley or the Y or the dorms or wherever it was that they stayed before. If it has a good response, I'll run it again on another short-run, but this is the only one I can say with 98.999999680% certainty will go out before Christmas. (=
What do you get for your investment? A cool T-Shirt. What do I get? That all depends on how many shirts I sell. At the very least, I could use a comb and a shave. At least I'll fit in when I go to the occupy event, as grubby and unkept as I look.
PLEASE TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO BUY ONE OF MY SHIRTS! I NEED A HAIRCUT!UPDATE Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 3:12 P.M.- West Monroe police have arrested the second suspect involved in the attempted robbery of a pizza delivery driver.
Joshua Donson was booked into OCC early Saturday morning, charged with armed robbery, second degree kidnapping, second degree murder and criminal conspiracy.
West Monroe Police say Donson was currently servicing weekend time at OCC for the armed robbery of another pizza delivery driver on Tanglewood Drive.
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Original Story:
A West Monroe pizza delivery driver shot and killed one of two suspects who tried to rob him Thursday evening. Police say he acted in self-defense.
It happened around 9:00 PM, when the suspects ordered a Dominoes pizza to be delivered to Haynes and North 8th Streets.
When the driver arrived, he says the suspects tried to rob him, in the process he shot one of the suspects. That suspect died. Police say they are seeking a second suspect.
Anyone with information on this case is asked to contact West Monroe Police.Wallenda successfully completes both legs of the walk. The first leg, between Marina City west tower and the Leo Burnett tower across the river, takes 6:51 minutes at a 19-degree angle, taking the world record for steepest tightrope walk between two buildings. His average height over the Chicago River is about 630 feet, roughly the same height as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The cable to the Leo Burnett building is at a 19-degree angle to solve some tension issues, making it more grueling than the 15-degree walk he had trained for. His father, Terry Troffer:
Aside from the cold weather and the wind, I am concerned on how it will fatigue Nick on his incline walk
From the Leo Burnett tower, he takes an elevator to the street and returns to the Marina City west. At 500 feet, the walk to the Marina City east tower is the highest blindfolded tightrope crossing. His first few steps into the blindfold walk:
You guys watching think I’m crazy, but this is what I’m made for
He had planned to grab onto the wire and stay there if he lost his balance or slips. He practiced slipping and then clutching the cable at his training grounds in Sarasota.Thursday on “Morning Joe,” former Mexican President Vicente Fox called Donald Trump a “false prophet,” adding that Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is “meaningless.”
"I'm surprised that this nation is now going back to the old days of the gringo feo, the ugly American, but going back to populism. This nation is great already. This nation is great because of the work of these millions and millions of workers," he said.
About the wall, Fox said: "This ignorant doesn't even know that the Chinese wall failed, thoroughly failed. The Mongols, the Manchus, came in and conquered China. The same thing happened with the Berlin Wall. This is a stupid idea so please wake up, America. Look at the proposals of a false prophet. I don't know what he has against Mexico, but we Mexicans love and like the United States."
He added: "We are frightened outside. I work with 95 former heads of states, our Club de Madrid, and we are all now in one solid front against this man. This is not the voice of United States."ST. LOUIS (January 8, 2016) – A player from each of the 2015 NCAA championship title teams has been named the 2015 MAC Hermann Trophy winners: junior forward Jordan Morris of Stanford and senior midfielder Raquel Rodriguez of Penn State.
The Missouri Athletic Club’s (MAC) Hermann Trophy is presented to the best female and male players in NCAA Division I soccer. The winners were decided by a vote of NCAA Division I soccer coaches that are current College Services members of the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA).
Morris is the first-ever Stanford men’s player to earn the MAC Hermann Trophy. He was named the Most Outstanding Player at the College Cup after leading the Cardinal to the program’s first NCAA title with a two-goal performance in the championship in December. Stanford routed Clemson, 4-0, extending the school’s streak of at least one NCAA team championship to 40 year (an ongoing record) while earning its 108th NCAA team title and 129th overall. Morris’ two goals were the first multi-goal effort for a player in a title game since Seth George in 1997 (UCLA).
The Pac-12 Player of the Year, Morris had a career-high 13 goals in 18 appearances for Stanford in 2015. In his final 14 games with the Cardinal, the junior had 12 goals, three assists and 27 points. He finished fifth in the country in game-winning goals (6), fifth in goals per game (0.72), seventh in total goals (13) and 12th in points per game (1.61).
The junior missed five collegiate matches this season due to responsibilities with U.S. Soccer. He split time between the senior team, making six appearances with the U.S. Men’s National Team and earning 11 caps with the U-23s, scoring six goals and tallying four assists. With the USMNT, Morris scored against Mexico on April 15 and assisted on the game-winning goal against the Netherlands on June 5. A Type 1 diabetic, he also lent his support to Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s (JDRF) “T1D Looks Like Me Campaign” for National Diabetes Awareness Month (NDAM) in November.
Runners-up for the men’s award were Georgetown senior forward Brandon Allen (Old Bridge, N.J.) and Creighton junior forward Fabian Herbers (Ahaus, Germany).
Rodriguez is the second Penn State women’s player to earn the MAC Hermann trophy, with the first being Christine Welsh in 2001. Rodriguez started all 27 matches in the Nittany Lion midfield, tallying 18 points on six goals and six assists. She capped off her collegiate career by scoring the game-winning goal in a 1-0 victory over the Duke Blue Devils in the 2015 Women’s College Cup final. Her goal in the College Cup Final was the 23rd of her career and her ninth career game-winning goal. Out of 27 matches in 2015, Rodriguez played the full-time nine times, including a 0-0 draw against then-No. 21 Duke in late August.
Rodriguez brought home NSCAA All-America First Team and All-Great Lakes First Team honors, All-Big Ten First Team plaudits, and for her performance in the Women’s College Cup she was named to the All-Tournament Team and the Most Outstanding Player on Offense. The 2015 year has been a banner year for Rodriguez as she scored the first World Cup goal for the Costa Rican national team in the country’s World Cup debut on June 9 against Spain. She also made Penn State history by becoming the first Nittany Lion to score in a World Cup, and earned LYG Player of the Match honors.
Not only did Rodriguez excel on the pitch, she also succeeded in the classroom. For her hard work in the classroom, Rodriguez was named to the NSCAA Women’s NCAA Divisions I and II Scholar All-America First Team and the NCAA Divisions I & II Women’s Scholar Player of the Year.
Runners-up for the women’s award were West Virginia junior defender Kadeisha Buchanan (Brampton, Ontario) and Virginia senior defender Emily Sonnet (Marietta, Ga.).
For more information about the history of the MAC Hermann Trophy and a list of past winners, visit the MAC Hermann Trophy page at NSCAA.com. For news and highlight reels from previous MAC Hermann presentations, visit www.machermanntrophy.org.Its construction was a $550 million nightmare and its design has been likened to crushed beer can.
But the innovative Perth Arena has been named as one of the world's top entertainment venues, ahead of iconic venues including New York's Madison Square Garden and London's Wembley Arena.
Almost half a million tickets for events at the arena were sold in 2013 - a long way from the at-times farcical construction of the building which slipped $323 million after a series of blunders.
That meant that respected live music industry magazine Pollstar ranked the venue as number 22 in the world's top 200 popular venues.
The best-attended arena in the world was the O2 in London, which last year topped 2.12 million attendants.
"This venue has placed Perth on the international touring map, and is now a must-play destination," sport and recreation minister Terry Waldron said.
Artists coming to the Arena in 2014 include Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Michael Buble, Bruno Mars and Dolly Parton.
AAPThe Office of the Nevada Attorney General announced Monday that it filed complaints against three more notaries in the state’s continuing massive robo-signing investigation. Meghan Shaw, Jennifer Bloecker and Joseph Noel were charged with notarization of the signature of a person not in their presence, a gross misdemeanor. Theannounced Monday that it filed complaints against three more notaries in the state’s continuing massive robo-signing investigation. Meghan Shaw, Jennifer Bloecker and Joseph Noel were charged with notarization of the signature of a person not in their presence, a gross misdemeanor. "These complaints are the result of notary practices which did not conform with legal requirements of our state," said Chief Deputy Attorney General John Kelleher in a statement. "These requirements were enacted to ensure the integrity of public documents and our action today is another step in our attempt to determine those responsible." According to the Nevada Attorney General criminal complaint, Shaw's and Bloecker's alleged crimes took place in 2005 and were discovered in 2010. Noel's alleged crimes took place in 2008 and were discovered in 2010. "These actions were performed in a secretive manner in order that the false documents be given full legal effect and that this criminal activity not be discovered," the complaint states. The charges stem from the notaries’ involvement in the scheme to file fraudulent documents with the Clark County Recorder’s office. The documents, referred to as Notices of Default, were used to initiate foreclosure on local homeowners. Through an investigation led by the Attorney General’s office, the notaries charged in the case confirmed that their job duties included signing another person’s name on a document and then notarizing that signature as valid. Last week, Las Vegas notary public Tracy Lawrence was scheduled to be sentenced for her part in a foreclosure robo-signing scheme, but was found dead in her home after failing to show up for sentencing. The local TV station referred to Lawrence as a whistleblower in a larger robo-signing investigation that resulted in the first criminal charges for the filing of faulty foreclosure documents. Earlier in November, two employees of (LPS) were indicted in Nevada on alleged robo-signing charges connected to foreclosure filings. Gary Trafford and Gerri Sheppard, both California residents described as title officers, were indicted on a total of 606 counts by a Clark County grand jury. Shaw, Noel and Bloecker are set to make an initial appearance in court on Wednesday, December 28. Write to Justin T. Hilley. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHilleyGoogle has just released a video and story about plans for a new "futuristic" headquarters at their Mountain View, California location. As described in an article in the Guardian, Googlers can look forward to "woodland glades and wildflower meadows, next to trickling streams and verdant allotments, among bike paths and yoga classes and gushing fountains, with fresh produce on tap. It will be a pastoral utopia-with-WiFi, all safely swept beneath a series of gigantic glass tents."
A key to the architectural concept is "flexibility." David Radcliffe, Google's vice-president for real estate says:
The idea here is simple. Instead of constructing immoveable concrete buildings, we'll create lightweight block-like structures which can be moved around easily as we invest in new product areas.
This may be a good idea for more reasons than he thinks. The map below, taken from Pacific Institute research, shows the current and future vulnerability of Google's Mountain View headquarters to sea-level rise from human-induced climate change. Their property at the south end of San Francisco Bay is extremely vulnerable to projected sea-level rise. Indeed, forecasts over the next several decades show Google's property to be smack in the area vulnerable to flooding with a 1.4 meter sea-level rise. Even smaller increases will boost the risk of flooding during storm events and high tides. New York recently learned a hard lesson when Hurricane Sandy struck at high tide, made worse by an increase in sea-level of 20 centimeters (nearly 8 inches) over the past several decades. Lloyd's of London (pdf) estimated that this rise in sea level contributed to an increase in billions of dollars of damages from storm surges.
(Google's Mountain View headquarters on the Pacific Institute's map of vulnerability to sea-level rise. Source: Pacific Institute)
The Pacific Institute study on the risks of sea-level rise for California identified $100 billion in existing infrastructure and nearly 500,000 people living in areas at risk from projected sea-level rise. Without planning, these numbers will grow.
(Google's headquarters and nearby San Francisco Bay.)
Google is a forward-looking company. But are they looking forward to, and planning for, the now-unavoidable impacts of climate change as they design new multi-billion dollar infrastructure investments? Are the rest of us?As |
, it's fair to say that Chandler is in roughly the same free agent tier as Stevens, though his numbers are an obvious advantage in terms of establishing an asking price.
If roughly $4 million per year is the new market price for a blocking tight end, it's easy to imagine Chandler's asking price eclipsing $5 million annually. (That is obviously just speculation on our part.) At minimum, that could explain Nix's comment last Monday; at maximum, it could make the 26-year-old Chandler difficult to retain.Noble Energy Inc. has begun drilling for shale oil in Elko County usimg the hyraulic fracturing process. Seen here is the drilling rig in the DJ Basin of Colorado. (Photo: Photo provided by Noble Energy Inc.)
More than 2 miles beneath the surface of Nevada's high desert, they're cracking open rocks in search of oily wealth.
Fracking, it's called. And in Nevada, it's new.
In a state world-famous as a gold producer, Houston-based Noble Energy Inc. is looking deep underground to make big bucks from previously untappable oil deposits, spending up to $130 million to identify the possible rewards. The venture is still in its early stages, with company representatives saying they have yet to assess the true potential, but word is out it could be significant.
So is concern by critics. After Noble Energy for the first time in Nevada's history employed the practice of hydraulic fracturing at an exploration well east of Elko in March, environmentalists, tribal members and other critics cite concern over threats to precious water supplies, impacts to a sensitive landscape and the potential that earthquakes could be triggered in one of the country's most seismically active states.
Some insist state officials currently crafting new regulations to guide activities are overly influenced by the very industry they're tasked with regulating.
Even the oil company's representatives acknowledge they're breaking new ground.
"What's unique about Nevada is it really is a frontier area," said Kevin Vorhaben, Rockies business unit manager for Noble Energy. "It's a chance to get in and really do the right thing for oil and gas development. We're excited to be in Nevada."
Fracking, commonly used to tap oil and natural gas deposits elsewhere in the country, allows access to hydrocarbon resources otherwise unreachable by conventional drilling operations. The process involves injecting a pressurized solution of water, sand and chemicals into deep shale formations, fracturing the rock and allowing oil or gas to seep into the well and rise to the surface for extraction.
It allows for horizontal drilling deep underground, accessing more deposits than possible with a vertical well. Noble's exploratory fracking will be limited to vertical wells but horizontal drilling could occur later.
'Checkerboard' of land targeted
Noble's activities target a checkerboard of private and public land in northeastern Nevada generally located between Elko and Wells north and south of Interstate 80. Sixty-seven percent of the 580-plus square-mile area is privately owned, with the remaining public land managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
The BLM is currently processing environmental assessments for Noble to drill up to 20 wells at Mary's River 4 miles northwest of Wells and up to another 20 just west of Jiggs. Fracking would be used to complete all wells drilled.
The two exploratory wells already drilled, with fracking already conducted at one, are located on private land about 17 miles east of Elko.
"It went great. The job went exactly as planned," Vorhaben said of Nevada's first fracking operation, conducted in Elko County last month.
The operation was observed by officials from the Nevada Division of Minerals and the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, both charged by the 2013 Legislature to draft regulations guiding hydraulic fracturing activities in Nevada.
About 300,000 gallons of water from an adjoining well drilled for that purpose was used in the first fracking operation, Vorhaben said.
Early research indicates oil, not natural gas, is the hydrocarbon resource available in the project area, Vorhaben said.
"We're really excited about the initial results," Vorhaben said of early indications of potential oil resources. "We need more time to be able to assess the real potential."
Critics: Activity 'not OK'
While that potential is being assessed, critics insist too much is happening too fast.
Fracking is associated with significant problems in places such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Dakota, Texas and Wyoming, and there's no reason to expect some of those same problems won't occur in the Silver State, said Dawn Harris, a Reno woman who founded the group Frack Free Nevada over concern about Noble Energy's plans.
Harris said she's particularly troubled that fracking has begun even before Nevada has finalized regulations concerning the activity.
"What I find very problematic is fracking is already occurring and that program isn't in place," Harris said. "It's wrong. What's happening is not OK."
Similar concern was expressed by Bob Fulkerson, executive director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. During a March workshop on proposed fracking regulations hosted by the Nevada Division of Minerals in Carson City, Fulkerson spoke of dangers posed for an arid state by excessive use of water during hydraulic fracturing and of the potential that underground aquifers could be contaminated by chemicals.
"The primary goal in a desert is to protect our water. That's how we protect our life," Fulkerson said at the time.
That danger, Fulkerson said later, might last for some time.
"Our groundwater might not be polluted instantly, but what's to say it won't happen long after Noble Energy is gone," Fulkerson said. "Water is precious. It doesn't make a lot of sense to us."
Both Harris and Fulkerson also spoke of concern that fracking-related activities could trigger earthquakes, a phenomenon documented in Oklahoma by the U.S. Geological Survey.
"There's overwhelming research that suggests a connection between fracking and earthquake generation, and I think we ignore that at our peril," Fulkerson said.
Fulkerson also expressed skepticism Nevada's Commission on Mineral Resources will ultimately approve effective regulations guiding fracking due to members' ties with industry.
"We're trusting the minerals commission to develop these regulations, and the commission members each have a stake in either mining, oil or gas development," Fulkerson said. "It's hard to trust regulations coming from an inherently biased process."
That process is also being rushed, he said.
"The political pressure in Nevada is so overwhelming, there's the impetus to do this as quickly as possible, and that's what the minerals commission is responding to," Fulkerson said.
Another issue surrounds potential effects from drilling and road construction on terrain used by the greater sage grouse. The chicken-sized bird is a candidate for listing as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
Elko County, the cross-hairs of Noble Energy's plans, provides the most valuable sage grouse habitat in Nevada. Regulators need to pay attention to how planned development might affect that habitat and the bird's potential listing, said Kyle Davis, representing the Nevada Conservation League. Many say the bird's listing would come at crippling economic cost to Nevada.
Regulators say concerns are noted
Rich Perry, administrator for the Nevada Division of Minerals, said his office and the Division of Environmental Protection are committed to approving comprehensive and effective regulations on fracking. Officials are reviewing all written and verbal comments submitted by the public, and additional public hearings are likely in August or September before final action is taken by the Commission on Mineral Resources, Perry said.
"I know there are concerns about the use of this," Perry said. "In other states, there have been some issues."
Nevada can likely learn from some of those, he said.
"Nevada's coming late in the game here with regards to regulating hydraulic fracturing," Perry said. "Other states have learned about what works and what doesn't. We can take advantage of that."
Noble Energy's Vorhaben said his company is committed to pursuing its plans in an environmentally responsible manner.
"Noble Energy is committed to protection of human health and the environment," he said in statement read during that March hearing in Carson City. "We firmly believe that with good regulation, we can have the energy we need, the economy we want and the environment we deserve."
Fracking occurs at depths far below groundwater aquifers, with several layers of rock formations between aquifers and fracking zones, Vorhaben said. The wells themselves have several layers of cement and steel to guard against leaks where they pass through aquifers, he said, adding that his company has contracted with the Desert Research Institute to conduct a groundwater study to help guide future operations.
"Noble is absolutely committed to protecting the groundwater," Vorhaben said.
As for earthquake danger, fracking itself poses no risk, Vorhaben said. While there is evidence that disposal of wastewater used in fracking operations by injecting it into the ground make be linked to seismic events, "scientists agree these are rare," he said.
One person watching events unfold is Graham Kent, director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at University of Nevada, Reno. The majority at Kent's students at UNR end up with jobs in the oil industry, he said.
Kent has no way of knowing if it's true, but he's been hearing that Noble may be on track to extract 600 million to more than 1 billion barrels of oil from its Nevada project area.
"That's the scuttlebutt," Kent said. "From what I understand, the potential for oil out there is pretty significant."
Using fracking, can that oil be withdrawn safely or are concerns voiced by critics valid ones?
Really, either case could be true, Kent said. It's clear there have been problems elsewhere.
"To the degree certain companies probably haven't done a good job and there wasn't a lot of oversight, they messed up. There is that potential," Kent said. "My own opinion is if it's well regulated, there is the potential of getting this out with minimal damage."
What is fracking?
Hydraulic fracturing is a procedure that can increase the flow of oil or natural gas from a well. It is done by pumping water, sand and chemicals down a well and into deep shale formations under sufficient pressure to fracture the rock. The idea is to create a network of interconnected fractures to allow movement of oil or gas to the well bore for extraction. For and illustrated look at Fracking, See Page 6
Source: RGJ research
Oil from shale
The fracking operations planned by Noble Oil Inc. in northeastern Nevada are not the first to extract oil from shale in the area. In 1916 at Elko, Robert Catlin drilled a main shaft for use in a short-lived plant used to pull oil from shale. Nevada's only successful oil-from-shale operation peaked in operation in the early 1920s, with the plant closing in the fall of 1924. The oil was said to be too expensive to compete with other fossil oils of the time.
Source: Elko Rose Garden Association
372,000
Acres of private and public land targeted for potential oil development.
40
Potential oil wells using fracking on BLM land near Wells and Jiggs.
2
Exploration wells already drilled on private land near Elko.
1
Wells with fracking already conducted.
300,000
Gallons of water used in first fracking operation.
Read or Share this story: http://on.rgj.com/1njtAuLShadow Moses, the unofficial, fan-built Unreal Engine 4 recreation of the original Metal Gear Solid, has been cancelled. In a statement posted to the project's Facebook page, the developer(s) announced that "we have to cancel the Shadow Moses Project for reasons beyond our control".
It's tempting to speculate that Konami caught wind of the project and shut it down, but there's no solid evidence to confirm that. While the Metal Gear Solid remake is on ice, the developers have also promised "some other news" coming at some unspecified point.
It's a shame, but not entirely unexpected. Konami owns the Metal Gear Solid IP after all, and it's unlikely they'd want someone to remake one of their own games – whether profit is involved or not. Secondly, the project appeared to be the work of just one person – which seems too few for an undertaking of this scale.
Still, it did look kinda cool, while it lasted:All-Star
Reach 100% completion in Campaign mode by obtaining all the stars. 0.2%
Ultra Rare 1.46%
Ultra Rare
Peace... Forever?
Finish the Campaign mode. 4.4%
Ultra Rare 7.02%
Very Rare
Troll Hunter
Kill a troll in with any hero in any game mode. 35.8%
Rare 41.52%
Uncommon
Crowd Control
Score a x5 or higher multikill. 31.2%
Rare 36.55%
Uncommon
Dropping Like Flies
Score a x10 or higher killing streak. 59.8%
Common 64.62%
Common
Angry Demolition
Destroy 3 enemy rooms with one shot. 63.1%
Common 71.05%
Common
Ten Heads
Make 10 headshot kills in a row in any game mode. 45.6%
Rare 52.92%
Common
Chip Off the Old Block
Win the King's Tournament with the mystery knight. 3.5%
Ultra Rare 5.56%
Very Rare
Monster Killer
Kill the monster protecting Bladgard. 2.1%
Ultra Rare 3.51%
Ultra Rare
Royal Revenge
Defeat the final boss of the Royal Guard campaign. 2.0%
Ultra Rare 3.51%
Ultra Rare
Superstar
Earn all the stars of the Royal Guard campaign. 0.2%
Ultra Rare 1.46%
Ultra Rare
Prison Breaker
Escape from the prison of Vikingland. 2.6%
Ultra Rare 4.97%
Ultra Rare
Fate of Traitors
Defeat the traitor's army at Stonecrest. 1.8%
Ultra Rare 3.22%
Ultra Rare
For My Father
Defeat the final boss of the Viking Elites campaign. 1.6%
Ultra Rare 2.92%
Ultra RareHouse Republicans, in their final days at work before taking a five-week vacation, have come out with a new agenda: “Stop Government Abuse.”
A more candid slogan might be: “Stop Government.”
This is traditionally one of the busiest weeks of the year, when the House rushes to complete the dozen annual spending bills so that the Senate can pass them before the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. But there is no hurry this time. Instead of taking the lead on spending bills as the House traditionally does, lawmakers are instead proceeding with bills such as one “guaranteeing a citizen’s right to record conversations with federal regulators.”
That legal protection for recording devices might be a fine idea. But the real “government abuse” is what the House itself is doing: Only four of the 12 appropriations bills have cleared the chamber so far. And because the House plans to be in session just nine days in September, that guarantees that government finances won’t be in order in time for the new fiscal year.
House Republicans aren’t even trying to get the job done — which would seem to confirm the suspicion that they are precipitating a crisis.
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The budget and appropriations processes have been a mess in recent years under both parties’ control, and there was no expectation this year would be different. But this time the slow walk serves conservatives’ singular purpose of undermining Obamacare. Because the appropriations won’t be completed by Oct. 1, Congress will have to pass a temporary extension, or “continuing resolution.” This kitchen-sink measure gives House Republicans the power to shut down the federal government if President Obama doesn’t agree to their demands — particularly the repeal of health-care reform.
On Monday, leaders of influential conservative groups such as the Club for Growth, Heritage Action, Family Research Council, FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform sent a letter to House leaders begging for a donnybrook. “The best and last chance for House Republicans to stand up and thwart this law before its new entitlements kick in is during the upcoming funding debate,” they wrote, “and the House should live up to the moment and pass a bill funding the government but denying any funding for Obamacare.”
Newcomer Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is pushing for a shutdown showdown, spelled it out on Andrea Tantaros’s radio show: “We need 41 Republicans in the Senate or 218 Republicans in the House, to stand together, to join me” in saying that “we will not vote for a single continuing resolution that funds even a penny of Obamacare.” Cruz has since taunted “scared” Republicans who oppose his idea and dismissed as “cocktail chatter” the notion that a government shutdown would be a bad move for Republicans.
Happily, a number of Senate Republicans have called that idea daft. But it’s a different matter in the House, where the obsession with rolling back Obamacare takes on yet another form Friday with a vote on a bill blocking the Internal Revenue Service from implementing the health-care law. In that sense, the lack of urgency with which the House is handling the spending bills makes perfect sense: It gives Republicans another swing at Obamacare. So what if economic chaos is a side effect?
“ ‘Irresponsible’ is a term that doesn’t go nearly far enough,” says Norm Ornstein, the American Enterprise Institute scholar who has become a scold of congressional Republicans. “You could say it’s a do-nothing Congress but that doesn’t do justice to it. These guys are doing something, which is to destroy the economic fabric of the country by holding the functions of government hostage to a non-negotiable demand to eliminate Obamacare.”
In a sense, the inaction on spending is just another sign of the dysfunction in the chamber that has prevented negotiations on an overall budget framework, put bipartisan immigration legislation on ice and created a standoff on the farm bill that will, if not overcome, cause milk prices to jump to as much as $8 per gallon next year. But provoking a government shutdown would take things to a whole new depth.
A shutdown is unlikely to achieve the goal of repealing health-care reform; Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), one of the top political minds in the House, cautions his colleagues that shutting down the government would be a “suicidal political tactic.” Polls suggest the same.
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But such calculations assume the shutdown crowd cares about the politics or the chance of success. For them, “stop government” is more than a slogan; it’s a way of life.
Twitter: @Milbank
Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.The editor at the Daily Mail has allegedly defended his decision to only put two of the gold medalists from the four woman, world record breaking Team Pursuit team on the cover of the Daily Mail.
“Well it’s obvious really isn’t it, most of our readers read the paper with their breakfast. We can’t put a bald woman, regardless of what a magnificent example of female athleticism and achievement she is, on the cover of The Daily Mail, people are eating.”
Joanna Rowsell Shand who has aloepecia, several world records, a gold medal and an MBE to her name was relegated by the Daily Mail to the back cover along with her pink haired compadré Katie Archibald.
“Well erm, you know, it was, well, like err, you know, it was, well. Well Laura and Elinor are err…”, he is alleged to have mumbled.
Are what Daily Mail? More newsworthy? Have hair you approve of?
Fuck you Daily Mail. Fuck you.
Well done Joanna, Katie, Elinor and Laura you’ve made us all proud.The crazed New Orleans swirl pulls them in as soon as they pull out. Their sedan bounces along Elysian Fields Avenue to where a resident on Spain Street says a man pointing a gun keeps driving by his house. The resident tells a tale unnerving to him, mundane to them: “When he pulled out the gun, that’s when, that’s when — you know what I’m saying?”
The soldiers promise to keep an eye out and continue on toward a street called Humanity, this first routine call of the night reflecting a stunning reality: Three years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans still needs the military to help keep some semblance of order in certain neighborhoods.
Violent crime has often overshadowed the city’s baby steps toward recovery. This year alone, New Orleans has had at least 127 murders, a stunning statistic given that roughly a third of the city’s population — 454,000 before the hurricane — has so far not returned.
Crime was so rampant by June 2006 that Mayor C. Ray Nagin asked Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to send in the troops. She obliged: soon more than 300 National Guard members in Humvees were patrolling the city’s more damaged, less populated streets as backup for a depleted police force.
More than two years later, 300 soldiers remain, with the Louisiana National Guard still operating its command post from the Dixieland conference room in a downtown Holiday Inn. The plan, officers say, is to end the mission by the new year, giving the police department more time to replenish its ranks.
Until then, soldiers from Natchitoches, Alexandria and beyond — soldiers like Sergeant Barthelemy and Specialist Sylvia — continue to roll through streets no longer foreign to them, their ears attuned to the static song of the dispatcher, their eyes searching the post-trauma landscape.
The sergeant, for example, constantly looks left and right. “I’ve been doing that ever since Iraq,” he says.
Photo
The Crown Vic barrels down St. Claude Avenue, a main road so familiar to Specialist Sylvia that he knows to veer to the right as he crosses the railroad tracks; less bumpy. He drives a crisscross pattern through their assigned area, including the Ninth Ward and the Lower Ninth Ward, repeatedly passing a billboard for a local church that says, “Worshiping God in a Worrisome World.”
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The images seen through that cracked windshield provide flashcard contradictions: a man drinking a beer on his deteriorated shotgun porch and a man painting his restored shotgun porch; a deserted dollar store, its door agape, and a new frozen-dessert shop, its window open.
A United Parcel Service truck making a delivery. Unsmiling children returning the sergeant’s wave. And everywhere, that X symbol used by rescue units in the first days after the flood to signal that a building had been searched for the living and the dead.
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Specialist Sylvia slows down in front of a marked, abandoned house, then speeds up. “I thought I saw a shadow,” he explains.
The two soldiers break for rice and beans at Stewart’s Diner, a window-service restaurant in the Ninth Ward surrounded by several closed storefronts. Its décor includes photographs of President Bush’s visit to the diner more than two years ago, and a three-foot-high water line on the wall.
Back outside, the soldiers notice a man spinning down the center of the darkened street in a wheelchair, his spokes catching the streetlights. They know him.
“Likes to rob people,” the sergeant says.
“He’s tough,” the specialist says.
“He thinks he is,” the sergeant says.
This August night of underwater mugginess plods on. Soldiers everywhere are handling minor incidents, though itching for that big moment always just a block away, a moment away, in New Orleans. These soldiers do not make arrests, but they can cuff and detain suspects until the police arrive; on this night, in fact, two soldiers capture those armed robbers.
Though the city does not provide Sergeant Barthelemy and Specialist Sylvia with much excitement on this 12-hour shift, it does offer them at times a few memorable New Orleans moments.
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At Franklin and St. Claude, they help other soldiers to briefly detain a driver suspected of being high; in the ensuing search and questioning, they learn that she is on her way to work as an exotic dancer. No drugs in her purse, Specialist Sylvia says. “Only stripping supplies and condoms.”
At Pauline and North Derbigny, they interrupt a violent argument between a huge man with biceps the size of hams and his brother-in-law, whose head is bleeding. Two pistols are in plain view in the larger man’s truck. As Specialist Sylvia places cuffs on this man twice his size, the exercised suspect requests gentleness: “I got bursitis in my left shoulder.”
At Port and St. Claude, in the parking lot of Hank’s Super Market, they help to detain a man and two street-weary women he was seen picking up in his black Bonneville. He says they’re his relatives by marriage, but they don’t know his name, and they have many condoms. The man is soon sweet-talking into his cellphone: “Honey, I’m at the market. I’ll be home shortly.”
It is almost funny.
Long past midnight the Crown Vic prowls the palpable absence in the Lower Ninth Ward. The beam of the sergeant’s flashlight skitters across a collapsed storefront, a restored home bearing a No Trespassing sign, an abandoned house bearing an old spray-painted X. It settles there upon a man, sitting alone in the consuming pitch, waiting for something.Last week, news broke that Architecture for Humanity, the design nonprofit founded in 1999 by Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr to bring better architecture to those in need, had shuttered its San Francisco headquarters, and would be filing for bankruptcy.
The announcement came from a story in the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday, surprising even those running the biggest of Architecture for Humanity’s almost 60 chapters across the world. While the volunteers who ran Architecture for Humanity chapters knew that not all was right in the organization (as one volunteer described it, “people were disappearing” from headquarters), many didn’t find out about the fact that the global nonprofit they were volunteering for had shut its doors, potentially sidelining the projects they had been working on and jeopardizing funds they had raised, until it had been reported in the media–weeks after the full-time staff had been let go. In a way, Architecture for Humanity’s public unraveling mirrors the deeper problems that ultimately contributed to its demise: disorganization, an inability to adapt, and simmering tension between the parent organization and its army of volunteers.
Manhattan Bridge Skatepark, NYC
Architecture for Humanity operated several field offices abroad in addition to its 59 volunteer-run chapters, which could be started by anyone as long as they had a few dues-paying members and at least one architect on board. Its field offices, in places such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti, oversaw the nonprofit’s disaster rebuilding efforts and were financially supported and staffed by Architecture for Humanity. The subsidiary chapters, scattered throughout the U.S. and internationally, pursued local projects in their community, and were dependent on Architecture for Humanity’s institutional support and brand recognition, but didn’t receive monetary support.
“The chapters had known for some time that there were financial issues with headquarters,” says Tom Veed, a member of the board of directors for Architecture for Humanity Chicago. But the Architecture for Humanity board, which as of Tuesday afternoon still had not released any kind of statement, did not notify chapter members of the plan to file for bankruptcy. (The board’s chairman confirmed the news to the New York Times on Saturday.) Veed–whose chapter is made up of more than 800 volunteers–found out via an emailed statement from Sinclair, who stepped down as the organization’s executive director in October 2013.* (Stohr, his co-founder and wife, left earlier that year.)
Maeami-hama Community House, Japan
The group’s challenges were apparent long before this. As Architect magazine noted in a profile of Architecture for Humanity in 2011:
It’s doubtful that even [Cameron] Sinclair knows exactly what all Architecture for Humanity does. At a glance, the organization coordinates architects in regions where their services are scarce or distressed. Architecture for Humanity promotes a broad network of young professionals through its design fellowship program and chapter organizations. Through this outreach network—and the requests for proposals it fields for clients as well as collaborations with other for-profit and nonprofit firms—Architecture for Humanity marshals architectural services for communities struck by conflict, natural disasters, and deficits in resources. And that’s just for starters. In the 12 years since the organization took root, in 1999, in a 300-square-foot New York apartment shared by Sinclair and Kate Stohr, Architecture for Humanity has grown. Its San Francisco office employs 36 full-time staffers and manages a small army of volunteers—teams that work to alleviate poverty, build community, and address climate change among at-risk populations. The organization has 17 staffers in Haiti alone. Yet it also declines 70 percent of the projects it is pitched—it just can’t get to them.
Architecture for Humanity grew rapidly in the past few years. From 2009 to 2013, it went from $2 million in annual revenue to $12 million, according to a strategic plan for the organization posted online by Cameron Sinclair in the fall of 2013. That plan reveals that even then, Architecture for Humanity had several weaknesses, including that “autonomous chapters are under-supported, under-leveraged,” and a “lack of consistent funding streams.” The plan warned that “lack of focus could spread resources too thin.” Last week, Matt Charney, the chairman of Architecture for Humanity’s board, admitted to the New York Times that there were several cost overruns on projects. Some remain unfinished, like a school in the Philippines and rebuilding projects in parts of New Jersey damaged by Hurricane Sandy and in tornado-ravaged regions of Oklahoma. A community center in Roškovce, Slovakia opened in early December just before the nonprofit folded.
Mitazono Wakaba Kindergarten, Japan
Structurally, it appears that Architecture for Humanity could not keep up with its expanding global footprint. The group had a more than $2 million budget deficit and had gone through several rounds of layoffs before it closed. According to the New York Times, that the group tried to cut costs by reducing its payroll and moving to smaller offices. However, by the end of the year, that was not enough to keep the company afloat, and it laid off its staff of almost 30 people.A spell of bowling in the nets in Adelaide in 2014 fixed a long-standing problem with his alignment
It's all in the body position: Ashwin bowling in Hyderabad 2012 (left) and Kanpur 2016 © AFP
Like all good stories, it took a spell of rejection to achieve redemption. At Adelaide Oval in December 2014, R Ashwin had been left out of India's XI for the seventh time in nine Test matches.
During the match, Ashwin worked with B Arun, India's bowling coach at the time, in the nets.
The source of Ashwin's troubles, Arun says in the cover story on R AshwinDecember cover story in the Cricket Monthly, was Ashwin's alignment at the crease, in his delivery stride.
"It is about the positioning of your body, from your back-foot impact to your front-foot impact. You're more likely to succeed if the alignment is towards the batter. Then you're perfectly balanced.
"If your alignments are right, I can bowl where I want: outside the off stump and turn, or I can turn it from the stumps.
"If your alignment is either towards leg slip, or it's falling away, then the body position changes. You tend to compensate when you deliver the ball towards the batsman, and you are most likely to deliver only one kind of delivery.
"You may bowl a few good balls but your consistency will come down, and also, you may tend to get a lot more tired."
While Ashwin had previously worked on fixing his alignment issues, he only found a lasting solution during those net sessions in Adelaide after Arun had identified the cause of the problem: the load-up, the way he sets up with his bowling and non-bowling arms prior to his delivery stride.
"A bowler has control only over two things - his run-up, and the way he loads," Arun says. "The rest, everything is reaction. Reaction gives you feedback as to what needs to be done, but most people tend to correct the reaction rather than the action. So you need to work backwards and see what exactly you need to address. Subtle things like how you load can determine where your foot lands."
With this insight, watching videos of Ashwin's action before and after Adelaide is illuminating.
© ESPNcricinfo Ltd
Focus on his right hand during his pre-delivery jump. In the 2012 home series against England, it is above his right shoulder when he takes off, off his left foot. By the time he is at the top of his jump, it has wandered outwards - dipping behind his shoulder and then sweeping to the right until his arm forms an L by his side.
The sideways movement of his right hand and arm seems to influence a change in his body's momentum. He jumps at an angle to his run-up, to his right, and by the time he's in his delivery stride, the line between his back and front foot doesn't go down the pitch towards the batsman, but across to fine leg.
It forces him to pivot around a front leg that leans uncomfortably, and by the time he releases the ball, his right arm has gone beyond the vertical too. From the batsman's viewpoint, it is at 1 o'clock rather than 12. From that position, it seems near impossible for Ashwin to achieve any drift away from the right-hander.
When he finishes his action, his follow-through pulls him away towards cover rather than down the pitch.
In his new action, at the start of his pre-delivery jump, not much has changed: the right hand is still over his right shoulder. But now, instead of moving to his right, the hand stays close to his shoulder all the way through his jump, pulling backwards like a catapult before moving forward just as he lands on his back foot to begin his delivery stride.
Where the movement of his right arm used to disrupt his forward momentum, they are now in sync. His jump continues along the straight line of his run-up, ensuring an efficient transfer of momentum that carries on through his delivery stride, all of it driving towards the batsman. At release, the right arm is at 12 o'clock, as high as it can possibly be.
"If you are better balanced, you are in a better position to impart more spin, and also, the transfer of weight that takes place is very effective," Arun says. "It is towards the target, which is again the batsman. It's about being nippy, getting that extra bounce, and also spinning the ball."
With this new action, Ashwin is a transformed bowler. The numbers tell the story well enough: before Adelaide, he averaged 28.65 and had a strike rate of 59.10. Since Adelaide, up until the start of the series against England this year, he averaged 21.49 and takes a wicket every 43.7 balls.
This is an edited extract from the Cricket Monthly December cover story on R Ashwin
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.Source: American Trends Panel (wave 1). Survey conducted March 19-April 29, 2014. Based on all Web respondents (representative of the 89% of Americans with internet access). Each graphic shows the ideological distribution of all respondents who got news about government and politics from the source over the course of a week. Sizes of each graphic reflect the relative sizes of their audiences, which can also be seen in the reference graphic on the top right of the page. (Overall N=2,901; sample sizes for consumers of each source available upon request.) Ideological consistency based on a scale of 10 political values questions.
Source: American Trends Panel (wave 1). Survey conducted March 19-April 29, 2014. Based on all Web respondents (representative of the 89% of Americans with internet access). (Overall N=2,901; see About the Study for sample sizes of each ideological group.) Respondents were asked which (of 36 sources for news about government and politics) they have heard of, trust, distrust and got news from in the past week. Ideological consistency based on a scale of 10 political values questions. To see audience profiles, click each source. *Note that ThinkProgress, Daily Kos, Mother Jones and The Ed Schultz Show do not have audience profiles because the sample sizes for these audiences are too small to analyze.Excavations start in ‘sunken city’ in İzmir
İZMİR – Anadolu Agency
A Roman ancient city, discovered during one of the world’s most important archaeology projects, the Liman Tepe excavations, is set to serve as an archeopark after excavations end.Some spots on the sea in Urla were detected on aerial photos, which later turned out to be the ruins of the ancient city of Klazomenai. Later on, underwater works were initiated under the coordination of Ankara University Research Center for Maritime Archaeology (ANKÜSAM), finding the ruins of settlements from 7th century B.C. to the Roman era.Works that have been ongoing since 2000 in the archaic port of Liman Tepe have revealed that settlement existed there for nearly 6,500 years. Last year, a Roman-era city was found on the coasts of Karantina Island.The works have recently started to unearth the Roman city, which is estimated to have collapsed in an earthquake in 1,000s B.C.Hayat Erkanal, the head of the Liman Tepe excavations, said they focused on the Roman city as the second excavation spot and completed the preparations for the excavations and the process of approval.He said the city’s big structures, roads and columns are visible, adding that they will work to unearth them completely.“We will go into a different work this year. We want to arrange this place as Turkey’s first underwater archeopark. We have completed all legal process transactions. This is a well-preserved Roman city with its roads and columns. We need to |
not “minimally hold up” and that there was “not even circumstantial evidence” pointing to Mrs. Kirchner.
The criminal case, which had been revived by another prosecutor after Mr. Nisman’s death, sought to charge the president, the foreign minister and other political supporters of Mrs. Kirchner.
The original complaint by Mr. Nisman, the lead investigator into the attack on the Jewish center, which left 85 people dead, had described a complex web of back-channel negotiations, accusing Mrs. Kirchner of directing an effort to reduce pressure on Iranians wanted in connection with the bombing in exchange for trade benefits.This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the race for the White House. Hillary Clinton has dominated this week’s news after claiming victory in the Democratic contest, setting her on a path to become the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination. With only one primary to go in the District of Columbia, Clinton has an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates over her challenger, Bernie Sanders. But Clinton’s pledged delegate count falls short of the 2,383 needed, meaning she will need to rely on the support of unelected superdelegates to officially secure the nomination at next month’s convention in Philadelphia.
But Hillary Clinton isn’t the only woman aiming to be on the ballot in November. Jill Stein is moving closer to securing the Green Party nomination. On Tuesday, Stein won the Green Party’s primary in California. She has so far won 20 of the 21 contests ahead of the party’s national convention in August in Houston.
AMY GOODMAN: Jill Stein first announced her candidacy on Democracy Now! last June. She also ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2012. In April, she wrote an open letter to Bernie Sanders urging him to consider joining forces to, quote, “ensure the revolution for people, planet and peace will prevail,” unquote. Jill Stein joins us now from Albany, New York, ahead of Saturday’s nominating convention of the New York Green Party.
Jill Stein, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you respond to what happened this week, Hillary Clinton clearly saying in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, before thousands of people, that she has secured the Democratic Party’s nomination, she is the presumptive nominee?
DR. JILL STEIN: Yes, and good morning, Amy and Juan. It’s great to be with you. You know, this is kind of what many people have foreseen all along. It was kind of in the cards. The Democratic machine has very steeply tilted the playing field, from the beginning, by limiting the debates, limiting the exposure of Bernie Sanders, some very questionable election practices, 100,000 voters disappearing from the rolls in Brooklyn, some very questionable things that happened in the Democratic primary in California where independent voters thought they could just show up at the polls and cast a vote for Bernie Sanders but were unable to, by large numbers, and huge discrepancies between the polls in advance and the actual outcome of the elections. So, you know, and needless to say, the superdelegates have massively tipped the playing field. And the announcement the night before by major news organizations that Hillary Clinton had already clinched it, you know, hard to call that just a coincidence, seems tailor-made for discouraging people from actually turning out and exercising their right to vote.
So, this is what the Democratic Party has done for decades—many decades, in fact. And after the election of George McGovern in 1972 as a peace candidate—I should say his election to the nomination of the Democratic Party, the party changed the rules to steeply tilt that playing field, creating superdelegates and Super Tuesdays that make it very hard for a grassroots campaign to prevail. And over the years, the party has allowed principled candidates to be seen and heard, but has, at the end of the day, sabotaged them in one way or the other, often through fear campaigns and smear campaigns, in the same way that Bernie is being called a spoiler now and has been for some weeks. Dennis Kucinich was redistricted and basically, you know, taken off the political map. We saw Jesse Jackson the victim of a smear campaign. People remember the Dean scream that was used against Howard Dean as a peace candidate who was doing well. So, in many ways, the Democratic Party creates campaigns that fake left while it moves right and becomes more corporatist, more militarist, more imperialist. This is why we say it’s hard to have a revolutionary campaign inside of a counterrevolutionary party. That’s why we’re here as the Green Party to build a place where a revolutionary movement can truly grow with a political voice.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Jill Stein, you’ve been trying for months to reach out to Bernie Sanders, because you acknowledge that there are many similarities in your program and his, to join forces. What’s been the response from the Sanders campaign, and what are you hopeful for now?
DR. JILL STEIN: Well, the response over the last several weeks has been the same as the response over the last several years. And in fact, the Green Party reached out to Bernie Sanders before the last election to see if he might be interested in running on the Green Party ballot line. And that was in 2011. And basically, we haven’t heard back yet, so I’m not holding my breath that we are going to. And in fact, I think it was just yesterday that Senator Sanders announced that he would be meeting with President Obama to basically stay the course and to essentially move his campaign inside of the Democratic Party, which I think is a mistake and would be essentially an abandonment of the movement that has been built. We’ve seen many very principled and powerful efforts to reform the Democratic Party from within over the course of many years, and Democratic Party keeps marching to the right. So, you know, my hope, as Senator Sanders himself said, is that this is a movement, it’s not a man. And my hope is that the movement will continue. And we’ve offered—I’ve offered, basically, to put everything on the table and to see how we can work together and explore the—what it would take in order for that to happen—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go to Bernie Sanders—
DR. JILL STEIN: —to run a joint ticket, for example.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about that for a minute. Let’s go to Bernie Sanders last July speaking at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, when he was asked if he would run on a third-party ticket if he failed to win the Democratic nomination.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: If it happens that I do not win that process, would I run outside of the system? No, I made the promise that I would not, and I’ll keep that promise. And let me add to that: And the reason for that is I do not want to be responsible for electing some right-wing Republican to be president of the United States of America.
AMY GOODMAN: So that is Bernie Sanders last July. You talked about the possibility of a joint ticket. Are you saying that you would—I mean, you are not the presidential nominee of the Green Party yet. You’re running in different state primaries and conventions. But are you suggesting that the Green Party would consider him being the presidential candidate, whether or not he would consider this?
DR. JILL STEIN: It would obviously take a major change of rules for that to happen. But what I’m saying is that if Senator Sanders made the case that now he understood, after the very, you know, disturbing experiences of the last many months and the way that he’s been mistreated and beaten up by the party, perhaps he has a different view of the potential to create revolution inside of a counterrevolutionary party. Maybe he has come to see the necessity for independent third parties to actually move this movement forward. That would be—you know, that would be a game changer if he made the case that he has come to understand the critical need to build the Green Party as the political voice of that revolution. If that were the case, I think many things would become possible at that point for making the rules changes. I can’t change those rules, but I can have those discussions with him and lay the groundwork for it. It would probably have to be taken to the Green Party convention. But in terms of my own view, you know, I’m a physician, not a politician. I don’t have a vested interest in a particular political career or a particular political office. My job is to do everything that I can to create an America and a world that we can live in and that we can survive in. And I would be very interested in having this discussion. I am not holding my breath that it’s going to happen. And I think it’s important that our campaign be plan B, if not for Senator Sanders, then for his supporters.By: Amanda Froelich,
True Activist.
It seems a tragic paradox that there are more empty houses in the United States than there are homeless people, yet 1,75,000 individuals still remain on the street, and almost 1/3 of them go hungry every day. Overlooked by those with modern conveniences, it seems a common occurrence for struggling souls on the street to be ignored in the midst of crisis.
There is mixed reception on the issue. Some cities detest homeless people lingering about in parks or around busy, metropolitan areas during the day:
City council members in Colombia, South Carolina, were concerned that the city was becoming a “magnet” for homeless people, therefore they passed an ordinance giving the homeless an option to either relocate or get arrested. After backlash from police offers, city workers, and advocates, however, the council later rescinded the ordinance.
Philadelphia passed a law that banned the feeding of homeless people on city parkland. Religious groups objected to the ban, and announced they would not obey it.
. Religious groups objected to the ban, and announced they would not obey it. In 2013, the city of Tampa, Florida – which had the most homeless people for a mid-sized city – passed an ordinance allowing police officers to arrest anyone they saw sleeping in public, or “storing personal property in public.” The city later followed up with a ban on panhandling downtown, and other locations around the city.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, the city asked religious groups to stop their longstanding practice of feeding the homeless on city parkland. Not surprisingly, religious leaders announced that they would risk arrest rather than stop.
And then there are those who are fed up with the situation, adopting extreme tactics to cope with the mess of frustration.
Earlier this month, Hawaii State Representative, Tom Bower, began walking the streets of Waikiki district with a sledgehammer, smashing shopping carts owned by homeless people. “Disgusted” by the city’s chronic homelessness problem, he literally took matters into his own hands. But the reception to his over-the-top actions gained him no popularity, therefore he shortly thereafter declared, “mission accomplished”, and retired his sledgehammer.
Refusing to acknowledge the homelessness crisis will not resolve the issue, however. That’s why Utah’s actions are so commendable.
In the past eight years, Utah has quietly reduced homelessness by 78 percent, and is on track to completely end homelessness by 2015.
How did this state accomplish such a noteworthy feat? Quite simply: Utah solved homelessness by giving people homes. In 2013, the state recognized that that the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail stays for homeless people was about $16,670 per person, compared to $11,000 to provide each homeless person with an apartment and a social worker.
With this intelligence, the state began giving away apartments – with no strings attached. Each participant in Utah’s Housing First program also receives a case worker to help them become self-sufficient, but they can keep the apartment even if they fail. The program has been so successful, other states are hoping to achieve similar results with programs modeled on Utah’s.
Perhaps Utah relied on a page from the 2009 report, Homes Not Handcuffs to implement change. The National Law Coalition for the Homeless used a 2004 survey and anecdotal evidence from activists to conclude that permanent housing for the homeless is cheaper than criminalization. Housing is not only more human, it’s economical.
Utah’s results show that all locations have the ability to implement decidedly progressive solutions to solve problems like homelessness. No longer can the non-glamorous issues be ignored; with the technological resources and capability to care for global citizens worldwide, the time to progress as a race and care for all inhabitants of the planet is now.
Sources:
Homes Not HandcuffsReport: Post-Gazette Considering Trump Endorsement
Written by Jason Addy, Contributing Writer
With the Republican Party’s biggest donors coalescing against Donald Trump, the real estate mogul could be set to pick up a huge endorsement from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Rumors are floating around the Post-Gazette’s newsroom that the Pittsburgh paper and its sister publication, The Toledo Blade, are looking to back Trump, Chris Krewson of BillyPenn.com reports.
Tom Waseleski – the Post-Gazette’s editorial page editor and a member of the editorial board – said they are “nowhere near any endorsement with regards to any candidate, with regards to any primaries,” though some reporters at the paper are starting to worry.
“I did hear a rumor to that effect, which is very distressing. But we’re not privy to that [information],” reporter and President of the Pittsburgh Newspaper Guild Michael Fuoco said.
A Trump endorsement from The Toledo Blade could be upon us shortly, with Ohio’s primary less than two weeks away. An endorsement from The Blade is likely to signal an endorsement from the Post-Gazette, though Pennsylvanians will not cast their ballots for another eight weeks.
The endorsements would be Trump’s first from major newspapers and could go a long way toward legitimizing his huge primary lead to the establishment wing of the Republican Party, though that probably doesn’t matter to the former reality TV star.
Trump won seven states on Super Tuesday – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia – and opened up a sizable delegate lead over his main challengers, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich remains in the race, but Ben Carson has pulled out of Thursday night’s Republican debate in his hometown of Detroit, signalling his intent to withdraw from the race after seeing no “political path forward” after Super Tuesday.
March 2nd, 2016 | Posted in Front Page Stories, Presidential, Top Stories | 28 CommentsA consortium of energy groups look to create “mini electricity” system relying on local renewable energy production and storage.
The search has begun for a suitable town to become Australia’s first “zero net energy town” – where electricity is generated locally from renewable sources, and stored and distributed on a localised mini grid.
The concept of zero net energy towns (ZNET) – where local communities generator enough of their electricity needs – and sometimes much more – is becoming common in Europe and elsewhere.
The Bavarian town of Wildpoldsried is often cited as a model of what can be achieved. It produces 460% of its own energy needs from a mixture of bio-gas, wood, solar, wind and hydro generation. A village in India achieved something similar this week.
Now, a consortium of green energy, community, and academic groups, with the support of local politicians and the NSW government – is seeking to replicate this model in Australia.
Project director Adam Blakester, from Starfish Initiatives, says the consortium of groups will create a blueprint and a business case for the concept. And find the right town to put the idea into practice.
“The ZNET idea is to create a distributed ‘mini’ electricity and energy system for a rural town in the New England region of NSW, utilising the cutting edge of energy network technologies and solutions,” Blakester.
”The model utilises local renewable energy resources, energy management and storage technologies. Local involvement is key and is woven throughout all aspects of energy supply and usage as well for investment, governance, employment and financial returns.
“The potential value of this model for Australia is quite significant, particularly given how abundant its renewable energy resources are and how distributed our energy needs are.”
The concept is now as outlandish as it may seem. Apart from the fact that hundreds of rural and regional communities have done the same, network operators in Australia already admit it makes increasing sense on economic reasons.
Ron Stobbe, the head of SA Power Networks, said in April that rural communities – including major towns – could soon look after their own generation needs. He said it could be inevitable that all forms of centralised generation and transmission will be made redundant over time.
Stobbe’s prediction that rural communities could gcreate their own micro-grids – and perhaps have just a small connection to the main networks – follows similar remarks by Ian McLeod, the CEO of Queensland distributor Ergon Energy. Regional operators in Queensland and Western Australia are looking to “downsize” their network assets in favour of localized generation and micro-grids. In effect, they are looking to ditch their poles and wires.
The ZNET project comprisesthe Institute for Rural Futures at the University of New England; the Office of Adam Marshall, Member for Northern Tablelands; the Regional Clean Energy Program of NSW Office of Environment & Heritage; NSW Trade & Investment. Most of the member organisations have been working on the initiative for well over one year now.
“Zero Net Energy Town has the potential to create a new model of electricity and energy infrastructure for rural and regional Australia,” added Dr Judith McNeill, Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Rural Futures.
“This model may create much needed financial and economic benefits by transforming what is currently a significant economic leakage and cost area into being a new industry and area of employment and income.”
The ZNET project comprises the Institute for Rural Futures at the University of New England; the Office of Adam Marshall, Member for Northern Tablelands; the Regional Clean Energy Program of NSW Office of Environment & Heritage; NSW Trade & Investment. Most of the member organisations have been working on the initiative for well over one year now.
The immediate priorities for the ZNET initiative are to seek tenders for the blueprint and business case plus the selection of the town for the pilot. Announcements regarding each of these matters will be made over the coming few months. The project will be completed by June 2015.Join us at Cafe Mox for a collaborative drawing game streamed live over Sicaga's twitch channel! Or, if you can't attend, you can watch the stream on Twitch and chat with us!
https://www.twitch.tv/sicaga
Sicaga's newest organizers, Craig Hauser and Kyle Newbridge, have secured The Green Room at Cafe Mox. They will be setting up a camera, a mic and a huge sheet of paper for a collaborative group-drawing session to be broadcast live on our Twitch channel.
The game we will be playing is called "Theme Blossom." An artist will draw a picture in the center of the paper. This image will set the theme for the evening. Everyone participating will add their drawings, connecting to the center image as the group fills the page.
We've done live streams twice now at the Friday sip-and-draw. They were a huge hit and everyone had a lot of fun, but the events tended to overshadow Friday's calm and chill vibe. We're hoping to set up live-streaming as a regular event, so let's kick this off right!
See you all Thursday to draw live on Twitch!An Ottawa judge has set a dangerous precedent by convicting a recreational hockey player of assault for an incidental hit, according to the defendant’s lawyer.
Gordon MacIsaac, 31, was sentenced Wednesday to probation of 18 months after a rare criminal conviction for an on-ice collision in March 2012 with Drew Casterton, now 31.
Lawyer Patrick McCann says the on-ice collision in the non-contact hockey league in Ottawa was accidental. (Lorian Belanger/Radio-Canada) The two men played in the Ottawa Senior Men's Hockey League, a recreational non-contact league. Non-contact leagues ban bodychecking, but incidental contact is common.
As a result of the hit, Casterton was knocked unconscious. The trial heard he suffered serious physical effects and a loss of income.
Ontario Court Justice Diane Lahaie convicted MacIsaac of aggravated assault, and on Wednesday, she ordered him to pay Casterton $5,000.
MacIsaac’s lawyer, Patrick McCann, said the decision could have a major effect on the way hockey is played.
"If I were advising my son to play hockey, I would say, 'Stay away.' All kinds of stuff can happen. Even playing shinny on an outdoor rink, stuff like this can happen," said McCann.
Collision was accidental, lawyer argues
"The problem is when you start getting the law involved in these kinds of things, it really does create a very chilling effect for people that play the game."
McCann argues the contact was not intentional, but accidental, so his client should never have been found guilty.
"You have people playing in a recreational league and sometimes it gets a little intense and two players collide," the lawyer said.
McCann said the case pitted Casterton’s teammates against his client’s teammates, which created a clear divide in how the hit was viewed.
"The players on the side of the complainant saw it as a nasty, vicious hit. Players on the side of Mr. MacIsaac saw it as incidental contact between two players skating fast," McCann said.
As a result, Lahaie relied on the testimony from the one referee who took the stand, according to McCann, whose testimony ultimately led to the conviction.
Casterton is also suing MacIsaac and the non-contact league for $600,000.
Take our pollThe Texas Longhorns got back on track Saturday after a 3-game skid despite starting off 2-0. After being outscored 144-114 in the past 3 games, the Texas defense stepped up, only allowing 2 field goals to Iowa State.
Texas ranks 19th nationally on offense. Rushing, they are 20th, averaging 238.8 yards per game, thanks to D’Onta Foreman. Passing, the Longhorns are 42nd in the nation at 261 yards per game. Shane Buechele seems to have regained his confidence after below-average games at Cal, OSU, and OU. The true-freshman tossed 2 touchdowns with 68% completions for 296 yards, his highest total of the season so far.
This game was a tale of two halves for Texas, highlighted by yards gained. In the first half, the Horns totaled 138 yards. To put this abysmal number in perspective, it must be noted that D’Onta Foreman racked up 136 for the entire game. Texas also only scored 3 points in the first two quarters, settled for after driving down to the 2 yard-line before halftime.
The second half went much better for the Longhorns when their offense realized that they were not playing against a pee-wee team. Texas gained 367 yards after halftime, 229 more than before intermission. Buechele connected on a couple of long balls to former QB Jerrod Heard and freshman receiver Devin Duvernay, jump-starting the offense and leading the Longhorns to 21 points in the third before putting in the backups. Over the course of the game, Buechele completed passes to 10 different receivers, the most in a game this season.
The bright spot for Texas on Saturday was defense. Charlie Strong took over defensive play-calling duties after allowing over 300 yards of passing per game to opponents heading into the Red River Rivalry. It only took one week for the defense to fall into place after letting up over 600 yards to OU. With cheat-sheets on their forearms, the Texas defense let up only 280 yards of offense to Iowa State, a massive improvement for the 103rd ranked defense in the FBS. The Horns tallied 8 sacks last game, their most since 2013.
There are still plenty of signs that this football team needs to mature. Texas racked up 9 penalties for 100 yards on Saturday. These penalties destroyed drives on offense and also ruined two 3rd down stops for the defense. This week held the most penalties for Texas, thankfully against a shoddy Iowa State team. The Longhorns must stay disciplined on both sides of the ball to have a chance against other Big 12 powerhouse opponents.
One thing that continues to carry over for Texas is the performance of tailback D’Onta Foreman. He stretched his streak of games with 100 yards or more to 7 last week, leading the entire FBS. Foreman will look to continue his streak against a tougher Kansas State defense in week 8.
For quality up-to-date sports reporting, visit our website, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.Calls for end to 'inhumane' separation of elderly couples being moved into care
Britain’s leading family judge has called for an immediate end to splitting up elderly couples when one or both are moved to a care home.
Although such instances were rare, Sir James Munby said no one should ever be uprooted from their home and other family members against their will.
The president of the high court’s family division told the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services conference of his “personal outrage” at the “inhumanity” of putting older couples who had been together for decades into separate care homes.
Most people would prefer to stay with their partner than live somewhere safer, Munby argued.
Studies have found that a disproportionate number of people die shortly after being moved to a care home.
The 68-year-old judge, who is due to retire next year, said: “We do know that people die of a broken heart. I have read of cases where one person died and then the other dies a couple of days later. How long do people last if they are uprooted? A very short time.”
About 300,000 elderly people in England and Wales live in care homes.
Munby said social workers should resist the desire to “rescue” the elderly from “squalid” dwellings that they nevertheless regarded as their home.
“Merely demonstrating that if you let that person go on living in that house there is a foreseeable and appreciable risk that one day a neighbour or carer will come in and find them with a broken neck at the bottom of the stairs – is that sufficient justification for making them leave, if it is going to make them thoroughly miserable?” he told the conference.
“It is no good just saying most people would prefer to live longer in nice new accommodation without breaking their neck – some people would not.”
Munby is behind a push to hold some family court hearings in public in England and Wales for the first time in a bid to make the system more transparent.Rick Diamond / Getty Images
Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren (Uzo Aduba) just wants to be seen. And in the second season of Netflix's hit series Orange Is the New Black someone's eyes are finally opened to the committed, loving person she's capable of being. The only problem is that person also knows how to manipulate that devotion and adoration like no other: newcomer Vee (Lorraine Toussaint), who ends up hurting Suzanne like no one ever has either. "This is a woman who loves deeply and will love at all costs and she will do everything in her power to defend and protect the one she loves," said Aduba, sitting in an Austin, Texas, hotel bar in a large black leather chair that envelops her. "You saw that in the cafeteria scene with the pie. You saw it with her peeing on the floor. So I already knew that that's what this person will do, how far she will go for love. Then in the second season, I was able to see the true scope of how far she would go. It's not just throwing pie, it's not just writing poems, it's not just peeing on the floor. There's another side of it: She will fight for love; she may kill for it. And she's willing to sacrifice even those people whom she has loved before." The Massachusetts-raised actress, who had done mostly theater before she was cast on Jenji Kohan's Orange Is the New Black, has helped shape who Suzanne has become over the course of the show's 26 episodes, from her bulging eyes and childlike mannerisms to the Bantu knots that have become so closely associated with the character. Aduba wore the tightly wound hairstyle to her audition in 2012 and it inspired not only Suzanne's most recognizable feature in Season 1 (besides the territorial urination, of course), but important metaphors for her character as well. Mere minutes after Aduba recalled the audition, Orange Is the New Black casting director Jennifer Euston, who was also attending the ATX Television Festival like Aduba, came over and hugged the actress delicately so as not to ruin her carefully coiffed curls and pressed-to-perfection dress. "She's the best. You know that, right?" Euston said. "This is my everything," Aduba added wistfully with a smile that channeled her character's lighter moments. "She changed my life by bringing me into that room." "You did it all, baby," Euston added.
It's clear Aduba and the cast and crew of Orange Is the New Black have a bond that's unique in Hollywood, depicted not only in their constant Instagram photos, but in the way that closeness and trust translate on screen. "Jenji is just one of the most generous people I've ever worked with," Aduba said, getting settled into her chair yet again. "She saw [the Bantu knots] and liked it and wanted to keep it and then used it in such a beautiful way. It just became this symbol." Viewers first saw Suzanne's surprisingly white parents in Season 1, but in the sophomore season, more of the character's backstory is revealed in the episode titled "Hugs Can Be Deceiving." The episode includes a scene where a young Suzanne, clad in butterfly wings, goes to see her newborn sister in the hospital and a nurse offers to do her hair, something her white mother isn't capable of doing. At the end of the same episode, Vee, who becomes her prison mother, offers to give Suzanne another new look, allowing the character to feel, perhaps for only the second time in her life, like she's seen as something more than "Crazy Eyes." "She's already said in the first season, 'Mommy, I like to wear my hair like this. I like my hair like this.' And then to see in the second season, we see why she likes it," Aduba said. "To have this figure transform her hair and that touch and soothing moment that she has in the hospital room and then again, another soothing moment in the prison and that connection… She's really always just wanting that connection and wanting to be seen and understood." Beyond Suzanne's signature hairstyle, "Hugs Can Be Deceiving" offers deeper insight into just how badly Suzanne is seeking that bond. In a flashback, 10-year-old Suzanne accompanies her blonde 5-year-old sister to a sleepover and when they take turns telling a fairy tale, the character is reminded once again that she is inherently different from everyone else.
Aduba had the pleasure of watching Taliyah Whitaker play 5-year-old Suzanne in the hospital room and Eden Wiggins take on 10-year-old Suzanne at the sleepover. "Eden, who played Middle Crazy Eyes, that young lady, separate from her performance, is a phenomenal, phenomenal spirit. So wise beyond her years," Aduba recalled, the volume of her voice decreasing to a near whisper. "I think Eden was 12 years old maybe and she had really thought about who this girl was. So relaxed, and still a kid, but just such a centered little girl. I was just so fascinated by her. She was so centered and calm." "There was an ease about her," she continued. "In terms of the acting, she had thought about it, she had watched some episodes, and just wanted to borrow some of the idiosyncrasies that were Suzanne. And she gave just a beautiful, open performance… She was, take after take, just unbelievable." For Aduba, the scene expanded on the sadness that viewers witnessed in the "How come everyone calls me Crazy Eyes?" scene in Season 1. "She's been asking questions and not being understood her whole life and what was beautiful about what Eden did with that line — 'But dragons are cool' — is, even at that age, Suzanne has been metaphorically asking the question of, 'Why do people call me Crazy Eyes?' which really, for me, the subtext is, 'How come you don't see me? How come you don't understand me? I feel like what I'm saying is so clear.'" "Also, the actor in me wants to link it in some way with her fascination with words, in addition to her parents being academics. 'If I could just figure out how to communicate with you, you would understand me better,'" added Aduba, who studied at Boston University. "And she just keeps hitting the same wall, running into it over and over again. It's something she's been living with her whole life." And that's where Vee comes in. Seeing Suzanne left out of a game of Celebrity, she makes her feel special by offering her cake, giving her a new hairstyle, and tasking her with "important" jobs to do in her cigarette and eventual drug-smuggling ring. It's not long before she has Suzanne right where she wants her: completely malleable and easily controlled to do whatever she says or needs. "When I first started the show, I asked the question, How far would somebody go for love?" Aduba said. "And now I tag on to it, What are you willing to do to fit in?" The answer, we learn as Orange Is the New Black's second season continues, is anything and everything. With a mere glance from Vee in Episode 10, Suzanne pounces on her former ally Poussey (Samira Wiley) in the bathroom, leaving the latter crying on the floor in both physical and emotional pain and the former proud of defending her fearless leader's honor. "Oh my gosh. That broke my heart," Aduba recalled of the scene, clutching her chest. "That really broke my heart. One, because I love Samira Wiley and I think Samira's absolutely brilliant... She's a phenomenal actor and a beautiful person and I love her. And what I thought they did that was so brilliant was the first-position person in Suzanne's life is obviously Vee. This is the person she's determined to keep and protect. But they also had these small nuances and moments where Poussey and Crazy Eyes would have little agreements, like Poussey's invention of the'stand-and-deliver' and Crazy Eyes believing in it. This is somebody that she cares for… She really loves her. And then, for that to be the one that she now has to stomp on, that was just heartbreaking. Shooting that was very difficult. My whole being felt that and it took a lot… And we had that look exchanged between Crazy Eyes and Vee with her chin up, saying, No, it's OK." Aduba's voice trailed off, getting emotional reliving the moment.
But that was only the start of Vee exhibiting the hold she had on Suzanne. In the penultimate episode of Season 2, Vee's feud with Red (Kate Mulgrew) reaches a new extreme as she mercilessly beats her with a sock full of locks and then, convinces her blind follower Suzanne that she committed the crime. "I didn't know we were leading to that level of destruction," Aduba admitted of the season finale's turn. "They had written Vee so well — and you could see on the page, they write these lines in there that say, 'And she lifts Suzanne's head up,' and then like, just the word, 'Hope' — and you think to yourself, Oh my gosh. I know where we're going, but I hope this doesn't cost her everything." When production began on Season 2, Aduba didn't know it nearly would. "What the writers do hold in suspense is what the cost will be, but I could see the alliance was forging. We knew this was going to be a season about alliances and allegiance and loyalties and ties and tribes. So when I started to see that the ringleader was going to be Vee, who was going to lead the ghetto dorm tribe and carry them through, and saw that she was using Suzanne and truly using her to help her own strategy, I knew that this would not end well for Suzanne, because I knew Suzanne well enough to know that love does not end well for her. "The thing is, Suzanne is not a dumb girl. So she knows that that doesn't make perfect sense, but she also knows she needs Vee so badly… Her need for love is so strong that she is prepared even to sacrifice herself. So, the attacking of Poussey is a piece, but this is throwing herself down on the altar," said Aduba about Suzanne taking the fall for Vee. "She knows what happened is wrong, but she needs her so badly in her life that she's willing to believe she may have done this. And then, through manipulation and trickery, she really does get a little turned around about what she did or didn't know. But she has a realization when she's sitting with Mr. Healy [Michael Harney] and she knows this won't end well for her." Even Taystee (Danielle Brooks) tries to help her see the truth, but Suzanne can only see her devotion to Vee. "She was so blind. She has that one line about Vee: 'She is not a liar. She told me so!' Because she said she's not a liar, that makes it so," Aduba said with an ironic laugh. "She just wanted to believe it so badly. And it's funny that even after everything is undone, she's still sobbing for this loss. I don't know if there was any winning for her in that moment."
Netflix“Until that very moment, we were unaware of this website even existing.”
Twente is hardly alone. Football Leaks did not exist until September, but it has made an undeniable impact in its nascent stage, publishing numerous documents intended to be kept secret, all with the intent of exposing the often murky world of soccer finances.
One European club official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not want to provoke the group, said, “No one knows exactly what is happening, but everyone knows that they don’t want to be next.”
Football Leaks is shrouded in mystery, and no one involved with it has |
expose an API with four endpoints. The user facing app will have access to the movies, reviewers and publications endpoints, while the admin app will additionally have access to the pending endpoint which will return movie reviews that are not ready to be publically accessible. We’ll start by building our API.
We’ll build our backend API with NodeJS and the Express framework. To get started let’s create a directory called movie-analyst-api, navigate into it and run npm init to setup our package.json file. You can leave all the default settings, or change them as you see fit. Once you’ve gone through the setup, the package.json file will be created in your directory.
Before we get to writing code, let’s take care of our dependencies. Run npm install express express-jwt auth0-api-jwt-rsa-validation --save to install the dependencies we are going to need. The express dependency will pull down the express framework, express-jwt library will give us functions to work with JSON Web Tokens, and finally auth0-api-jwt-rsa-validation will provide a helper function for getting our secret key.
Now that we have our dependencies in place, let’s create a new file called server.js. Since our backend API is only going to expose a few routes, we’ll write all of our code in this single file. Check out our implementation below.
var express = require ( 'express' ) ; var app = express ( ) ; var jwt = require ( 'express-jwt' ) ; var rsaValidation = require ( 'auth0-api-jwt-rsa-validation' ) ; app. get ( '/movies', function ( req, res ) { var movies = [ { title : 'Suicide Squad', release : '2016', score : 8, reviewer : 'Robert Smith', publication : 'The Daily Reviewer' }, { title : 'Batman vs. Superman', release : '2016', score : 6, reviewer : 'Chris Harris', publication : 'International Movie Critic' }, { title : 'Captain America: Civil War', release : '2016', score : 9, reviewer : 'Janet Garcia', publication : 'MoviesNow' }, { title : 'Deadpool', release : '2016', score : 9, reviewer : 'Andrew West', publication : 'MyNextReview' }, { title : 'Avengers: Age of Ultron', release : '2015', score : 7, reviewer : 'Mindy Lee', publication : 'Movies n\' Games' }, { title : 'Ant-Man', release : '2015', score : 8, reviewer : 'Martin Thomas', publication : 'TheOne' }, { title : 'Guardians of the Galaxy', release : '2014', score : 10, reviewer : 'Anthony Miller', publication : 'ComicBookHero.com' }, ] res. json ( movies ) ; } ) app. get ( '/reviewers', function ( req, res ) { var authors = [ { name : 'Robert Smith', publication : 'The Daily Reviewer', avatar : 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/uifaces/faces/twitter/angelcolberg/128.jpg' }, { name : 'Chris Harris', publication : 'International Movie Critic', avatar : 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/uifaces/faces/twitter/bungiwan/128.jpg' }, { name : 'Janet Garcia', publication : 'MoviesNow', avatar : 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/uifaces/faces/twitter/grrr_nl/128.jpg' }, { name : 'Andrew West', publication : 'MyNextReview', avatar : 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/uifaces/faces/twitter/d00maz/128.jpg' }, { name : 'Mindy Lee', publication : 'Movies n\' Games', avatar : 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/uifaces/faces/twitter/laurengray/128.jpg' }, { name : 'Martin Thomas', publication : 'TheOne', avatar : 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/uifaces/faces/twitter/karsh/128.jpg' }, { name : 'Anthony Miller', publication : 'ComicBookHero.com', avatar : 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/uifaces/faces/twitter/9lessons/128.jpg' } ] ; res. json ( authors ) ; } ) app. get ( '/publications', function ( req, res ) { var publications = [ { name : 'The Daily Reviewer', avatar : 'glyphicon-eye-open' }, { name : 'International Movie Critic', avatar : 'glyphicon-fire' }, { name : 'MoviesNow', avatar : 'glyphicon-time' }, { name : 'MyNextReview', avatar : 'glyphicon-record' }, { name : 'Movies n\' Games', avatar : 'glyphicon-heart-empty' }, { name : 'TheOne', avatar : 'glyphicon-globe' }, { name : 'ComicBookHero.com', avatar : 'glyphicon-flash' } ] ; res. json ( publications ) ; } ) app. get ( '/pending', function ( req, res ) { var pending = [ { title : 'Superman: Homecoming', release : '2017', score : 10, reviewer : 'Chris Harris', publication : 'International Movie Critic' }, { title : 'Wonder Woman', release : '2017', score : 8, reviewer : 'Martin Thomas', publication : 'TheOne' }, { title : 'Doctor Strange', release : '2016', score : 7, reviewer : 'Anthony Miller', publication : 'ComicBookHero.com' } ] res. send ( pending ) ; } ) app. listen ( 8080 ) ;
If we launch our API server and navigate to any of the four routes we’ve created, we should get the expected response. Let’s test this by running node server and navigating to localhost:8080/movies. You should see a JSON response with the list of movie reviews and their associated data.
We have our API but now anyone can call it. Let’s fix this by securing our endpoints with Auth0. Auth0 makes user identity simple and recently they released a new feature to make securing API endpoints a breeze as well. If you don’t already have an Auth0 account, signup for a free account here. Once you’ve signed up, navigate to your Auth0 dashboard and click on the New Client button to create a new Auth0 application.
For the client type, select Non-Interactive Client and name it MovieAnalyst Website. Click on the Create button to create the client.
As this is a new feature that is still in beta, you will be prompted to enable the API functionality. You can do so by simply flipping the switch and a new menu option titled “API’ will be available. Click on this new menu option to continue.
The API tab will already have one API created automatically, this is the Auth0 Management API. Utilizing this API, you can create your own Auth0 dashboard or manage any of the Auth0 features programmatically. To learn more about the features of the Management API, click here. We won’t be using this API, so let’s instead click on the Create API button to create our own API.
You can name your API whatever you want, we’ve chosen MovieAnalystAPI. The identifier field will be a unique identifier for your API. This field does not have to be a URL, so feel free to put an identifier that makes the most sense to you - just know that this field cannot be changed. We’ll leave the signing algorithm as RS256 and click the Create API button.
We are also going to create one more client for our Admin front end. This will follow the same process as when we created the first client. Navigate to the Clients section and click on Create New Client. This time name the client MovieAnalyst Admin and make it a non-interactive client as well. Click on the Create button to create this client.
With our two clients and API created in the Auth0 dashboard, we can now go ahead and secure our API endpoints. Open up the server.js file again and make the following updates.
var jwtCheck = jwt ( { secret : rsaValidation ( ), algorithms : [ 'RS256' ], issuer : "https://YOUR-AUTH0-DOMAIN.auth0.com/", audience : 'https://movieanalyst.com' } ) ; app. use ( jwtCheck ) ; app. use ( function ( err, req, res, next ) { if ( err. name === 'UnauthorizedError' ) { res. status ( 401 ). json ( { message : 'Missing or invalid token' } ) ; } } ) ;
If we launch our server now and navigate to any of the routes, we’ll get an error message as we are not providing the correct information on our requests to the server.
This is intended as we don’t want just anyone to have access to our API endpoints. In addition to protecting our API routes, we are also going to fine-tune access to specific endpoints. Luckily, we can do this with ease in the Auth0 management dashboard.
Head over the management dashboard, navigate to the API section and click into the MovieAnalyst API we created earlier. From here, click on the Scopes tab.
Scopes allow us to grant specific permissions to clients that are authorized to use our API. For our demo, we are going to create two scopes, general and admin. In an actual application, you could further narrow down the scopes by giving read or write permissions and even go as far to protect each individual route with a separate scope. We’ll keep it fairly general here though. Go ahead and create the two scopes now.
Now that we have our scopes in place, the last thing we’ll need to do is authorize our two clients to work with the API we created. Within the MovieAnalystAPI section, navigate to the Non-Interactive Clients tab. Here you will see a list of all the clients that can interface with our API. By default, when we created our MovieAnalystAPI a test client was created for us. We’ll also see the two clients we created but they will be displayed as Unauthorized.
To authorize our clients, flip the switch to Authorized and you will see additional information displayed. In addition to enabling access to the client, we can easily manage which scopes the client will have. For the admin client, let’s enable both the general and admin scopes, and for the website client, we’ll just enable general access. Be sure to hit the Update button once you’ve made the scope changes.
Now that we have our scopes in place, let’s go back to the server.js file for our API to make some final edits. What we are adding now is the ability to check if the client has permissions to view the endpoint requested. To do this, we’ll create another middleware that will look at the decoded JWT and see if it the token has the correct scope. If it doesn’t we’ll send an appropriate forbidden message, otherwise we’ll send the data. Take a look at our implementation of this functionality below.
var guard = function ( req, res, next ) { switch ( req. path ) { case '/movies' : { var permissions = [ 'general' ] ; for ( var i = 0 ; i < permissions. length ; i ++ ) { if ( req. user. scope. includes ( permissions [ i ] ) ) { next ( ) ; } else { res. send ( 403, { message : 'Forbidden' } ) ; } } break ; } case '/reviewers' : { var permissions = [ 'general' ] ; for ( var i = 0 ; i < permissions. length ; i ++ ) { if ( req. user. scope. includes ( permissions [ i ] ) ) { next ( ) ; } else { res. send ( 403, { message : 'Forbidden' } ) ; } } break ; } case '/publications' : { var permissions = [ 'general' ] ; for ( var i = 0 ; i < permissions. length ; i ++ ) { if ( req. user. scope. includes ( permissions [ i ] ) ) { next ( ) ; } else { res. send ( 403, { message : 'Forbidden' } ) ; } } break ; } case '/pending' : { var permissions = [ 'admin' ] ; console. log ( req. user. scope ) ; for ( var i = 0 ; i < permissions. length ; i ++ ) { if ( req. user. scope. includes ( permissions [ i ] ) ) { next ( ) ; } else { res. send ( 403, { message : 'Forbidden' } ) ; } } break ; } } app. use ( guard ) ;
Our guard middleware will be called on each request and will ensure that the token has the correct scope. If it does, we’ll send the data, otherwise we’ll return a 403 Forbidden status and appropriate message.
This wraps up our API implementation. If we launch our server now and try to navigate to any of the routes, we’ll still see the 401 Unauthenticated response. That’s still ok, as our API is meant to interface with other clients and not end-user browsers. Next, we’ll implement our first client, the MovieAnalyst Website.
We have our API ready, now let’s build a UI to consume it. Create a new directory titled movieanalyst-website and navigate into it. Run npm init for this directory to create a package.json file just like for the API. For our website dependencies run npm install express ejs superagent --save. The express dependency is self-explanatory, we will use ejs as our templating engine and finally the superagent library will handle making HTTP requests to our API.
In addition to creating a server.js file, you’ll also want to create a public directory and in this directory, create a subdirectory titled views. We are going to have four views for our user facing website so let’s create them now. The four views we are going to create are:
index.ejs - this will be our homepage
- this will be our homepage movies.ejs - this will be the view that display movie reviews
- this will be the view that display movie reviews authors.ejs - this will display the list of critics
- this will display the list of critics publications.ejs - this will will display our publication partners
With the scaffolding done, open up the server.js file to get started with the implementation. Let’s take a look at the implementation and we’ll explain what’s going on line by line.
var express = require ( 'express' ) ; var request = require ('superagent' ) ; var app = express ( ) ; app. set ( 'view engine', 'ejs' ) ; app. set ( 'views', __dirname + '/public/views/' ) ; app. use ( express. static ( __dirname + '/public' ) ) ; var NON_INTERACTIVE_CLIENT_ID = 'YOUR-AUTH0-CLIENT-ID' ; var NON_INTERACTIVE_CLIENT_SECRET = 'YOUR-AUTH0-CLIENT-SECRET' ; var authData = { client_id : NON_INTERACTIVE_CLIENT_ID, client_secret : NON_INTERACTIVE_CLIENT_SECRET, grant_type : 'client_credentials', audience : 'https://movieanalyst.com' } function getAccessToken ( req, res, next ) { request. post ( 'https://YOUR-AUTH0-DOMAIN.auth0.com/oauth/token' ). send ( authData ). end ( function ( err, res ) { if ( req. body. access_token ) { req. access_token = res. body. access_token ; next ( ) ; } else { res. send ( 401, ‘Unauthorized’ ) ; } } ) } app. get ( '/', function ( req, res ) { res. render ( 'index' ) ; } ) app. get ( '/movies', getAccessToken, function ( req, res ) { request. get ( 'http://localhost:8080/movies' ). set ( 'Authorization', 'Bearer'+ req. access_token ). end ( function ( err, data ) { if ( data. status == 403 ) { res. send ( 403, '403 Forbidden' ) ; } else { var movies = data. body ; res. render ('movies', { movies : movies } ) ; } } ) } ) app. get ( '/authors', getAccessToken, function ( req, res ) { request. get ( 'http://localhost:8080/reviewers' ). set ( 'Authorization', 'Bearer'+ req. access_token ). end ( function ( err, data ) { if ( data. status == 403 ) { res. send ( 403, '403 Forbidden' ) ; } else { var authors = data. body ; res. render ( 'authors', { authors : authors } ) ; } } ) } ) app. get ( '/publications', getAccessToken, function ( req, res ) { request. get ( 'http://localhost:8080/publications' ). set ( 'Authorization', 'Bearer'+ req. access_token ). end ( function ( err, data ) { if ( data. status == 403 ) { res. send ( 403, '403 Forbidden' ) ; } else { var publications = data. body ; res. render ( 'publications', { publications : publications } ) ; } } ) } ) app. get ( '/pending', getAccessToken, function ( req, res ) { request. get ( 'http://localhost:8080/pending' ). set ( 'Authorization', 'Bearer'+ req. access_token ). end ( function ( err, data ) { if ( data. status == 403 ) { res. send ( 403, '403 Forbidden' ) ; } } ) } ) app. listen ( 3000 ) ;
We have our server.js implementation complete. Let’s build out our UI pages. We’ll start with the index.ejs page. We will make use of the Bootstrap and Font Awesome libraries to create a good looking UI fast. The homepage will just display links to the other sections of the website. Take a look at the implementation and screenshot of what the completed product will look like.
<!doctype html> < html > < head > < link rel = " stylesheet " href = " //maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.2.0/css/bootstrap.min.css " > < link rel = " stylesheet " href = " //maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.6.3/css/font-awesome.min.css " > < script src = " http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.2.4.min.js " > </ script > < style > body { background-color: #ecedec; } </ style > </ head > < body > < div class = " container " > < div class = " jumbotron text-center " > < h1 > < span class = " glyphicon glyphicon-bullhorn " > </ span > </ h1 > < h2 > Movie Analyst </ h2 > </ div > < div class = " row " > < div class = " col-sm-4 " > < div class = " panel " > < div class = " panel-heading " > < h3 class = " panel-title " > Latest Reviews </ h3 > </ div > < div class = " panel-body text-center " > < h1 > < span class = " glyphicon glyphicon-bullhorn " > </ span > </ h1 > </ div > < div class = " panel-footer small " > < a href = " /movies " class = " btn btn-block btn-primary " > View Latest Reviews </ a > </ div > </ div > </ div > < div class = " col-sm-4 " > < div class = " panel " > < div class = " panel-heading " > < h3 class = " panel-title " > View Latest Reviews </ h3 > </ div > < div class = " panel-body text-center " > < h1 > < span class = " glyphicon glyphicon-user " > </ span > </ h1 > </ div > < div class = " panel-footer small " > < a href = " /authors " class = " btn btn-block btn-primary " > View Authors </ a > </ div > </ div > </ div > < div class = " col-sm-4 " > < div class = " panel " > < div class = " panel-heading " > < h3 class = " panel-title " > Our Partners </ h3 > </ div > < div class = " panel-body text-center " > < h1 > < span class = " glyphicon glyphicon-tower " > </ span > </ h1 > </ div > < div class = " panel-footer small " > < a href = " /publications " class = " btn btn-block btn-primary " > View Publications </ a > </ div > </ div > </ div > </ div > </ div > </ body > </ html >
Next, we’ll build out the movies.ejs view. In the interest of time, we’ll omit some the head section. Feel free to copy and paste the contents from the index.ejs file to save some time.
< div class = " row " > <% movies.forEach(function(movie, index) { %> < div class = " col-sm-4 " > < div class = " panel " > < div class = " panel-heading " > < h3 class = " panel-title " > <%= movie.title %> (<%= movie.release %>) </ h3 > </ div > < div class = " panel-body text-center " > < h1 > <%= movie.score %> < small > / 10 </ small > </ h1 > </ div > < div class = " panel-footer small " > < p > By <%= movie.reviewer %> for <%= movie.publication %> </ div > </ div > </ div > <% }) %> </ div >
The authors page will look similar as well. The implementation for authors.ejs is below.
< div class = " container " > < div class = " jumbotron text-center " > < h1 > < span class = " glyphicon glyphicon-user " > </ span > </ h1 > < h2 > Our Movie Critics </ h2 > </ div > < div class = " row " > <% authors.forEach(function(author, index) { %> < div class = " col-sm-4 " > < div class = " panel " > < div class = " panel-heading " > < h3 class = " panel-title " > <%= author.name %> </ h3 > </ div > < div class = " panel-body text-center " > < img class = " img-circle " src = " <%= author.avatar %> " /> </ div > < div class = " panel-footer small " > < p > Writes for <%= author.publication %> </ div > </ div > </ div > <% }) %> </ div > </ div >
Finally, the publications.ejs implementation is below.
< div class = " container " > < div class = " jumbotron text-center " > < h1 > < span class = " glyphicon glyphicon-tower " > </ span > </ h1 > < h2 > Our Publication Partners </ h2 > </ div > < div class = " row " > <% publications.forEach(function(publication, index) { %> < div class = " col-sm-4 " > < div class = " panel " > < div class = " panel-heading " > < h3 class = " panel-title " > <%= publication.name %> </ h3 > </ div > < div class = " panel-body text-center " > < h1 > < span class = " glyphicon <%= publication.avatar %> " > </ span > </ h1 > </ div > </ div > </ div > <% }) %> </ div > </ div >
Let’s test our app and make sure that it works. Launch the API server by running the node server command from the movieanalyst-api directory. Launch the Website server by running the node server command from the movieanalyst-website directory. Now you will have two node applications running, the API at localhost:8080 and the client facing website at localhost:3000.
Navigate to localhost:3000 and you should see the homepage we’ve designed. Click on any of the links, and you should see the appropriate page displayed with the data we’ve defined in our API backend project. Try navigating to localhost:3000/pending. Remember, we created this route, but the response will be forbidden as our client does not have the admin scope applied to it. Let’s build our Admin frontend that will have this scope.
Our admin frontend will be very similar to the user centric frontend. In fact, to get started quickly, let’s just copy and paste the entire directory and rename it movieanalyst-admin.
Let’s open up the server.js file next as we’ll need to make some updates. We are going to need to update the NON_INTERACTIVE_CLIENT_ID and NON_INTERACTIVE_CLIENT_SECRET variables with the values from our MovieAnalyst Admin client. Head over to the management dashboard and get those values and replace them here. The other change we will need to make is to change the port the app will listen on. Since our user website listens on 3000 and our API is on 8080, we’ll set the app.listen() port for our admin interface to 4000.
For our UI, we are going to change it up a bit. Since this is an admin based website, rather than just displaying the content, we’ll make it all editable. We won’t actually save changes. Another new feature with the admin website is that we are going to write a partial view for the main navigational menu. Let’s create this partial view first. Create a new subdirectory in your public/views directory and name it includes. We’ll call our partial view navbar.ejs. Create the file and open it. Our navbar implementation will be as follows:
< nav class = " navbar navbar-inverse " > < div class = " container-fluid " > < div class = " navbar-header " > < a class = " navbar-brand " href = " # " > Movie Analyst Admin </ a > </ div > < div class = " collapse navbar-collapse " > < ul class = " nav navbar-nav " > < li > < a href = " /movies " > Reviews </ a > </ li > < li > < a href = " /authors " > Authors </ a > </ li > < li > < a href = " /publications " > Publications </ a > </ li > < li > < a href = " /pending " > Pending Reviews </ a > </ li > </ ul > </ div > </ div > </ nav >
Next, we’ll update each of the views to display a form rather than just the content. We’ll also add a save button, so if an admin makes any updates they can save them. Finally, we’ll be sure to include our navbar partial in each of the views. We’ll only show the movies.ejs file change here. You can follow the process shown here, or get all the code from our demo GitHub repo.
<!doctype html> < html > < head > < link rel = " stylesheet " href = " //maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.2.0/css/bootstrap.min.css " > < link rel = " stylesheet " href = " //maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.6.3/css/font-awesome.min.css " > < script src = " http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.2.4.min.js " > </ script > < style > body { background-color: #ecedec; } </ style > </ head > < body > <% include./includes/navbar %> < div class = " container " > < h2 > Editing: < strong > Movies </ strong > </ h2 > < div class = " row clearfix " > <% movies.forEach(function(movie, index) { %> < div class = " col-sm-4 " > < div class = " panel " > < div class = " panel-heading " > < h3 class = " panel-title " > Edit: <%= movie.title %> </ h3 > </ div > < div class = " panel-body text-center " > < label > Name </ label > < input type = " text " class = " form-control " value = " <%= movie.title %> " /> < label > Release </ label > < input type = " text " class = " form-control " value = " <%= movie.release %> " /> < label > Score </ label > < input type = " text " class = " form-control " value = " <%= movie.score %> " /> < label > Reviewer </ label > < input type = " text " class = " form-control " value = " <%= movie.reviewer %> " /> < label > Publication </ label > < input type = " text " class = " form-control " value = " <%= movie.publication %> " /> </ div > </ div > </ div > <% }) %> </ div > < a class = " btn btn-primary btn-block " > Save </ a > </ div > </ body > </ html >
With the server.js and our views updated, let’s launch the application and navigate to localhost:4000. If all went well, you should see the homepage showing the new navbar as well as the links to separate pages. Let’s click on the movies link to see how the design is different. We can now also visit the /pending link by either typing it in the browser bar or clicking on Pending Reviews in the navbar. This time, instead of seeing an error, we’ll get the data successfully returned and will be able to to make edits to it.
Our API works! We have successfully built an API with two disparate clients that have different levels of access to our API. We can add as many additional clients as we want now, and they don’t have to be Node based either. We can create a mobile application or even another web application with say Laravel to consume our API. We’ll just need to create a client and get the Client ID and Secret pair and write some code to exchange this pair of credentials for an access token.
The services API and clients we built today were fairly simple. Real applications will have many more routes, features, and likely need for granularity. Auth0 luckily supports many of these features out-of-the-box.
Other considerations that will be up to you are handling how your backend API interacts with clients. It is recommended that each endpoint be rate-limited so clients don’t overload your API. This is especially important if you have many different clients interacting with your backend. You can use the Auth0 Management API to handle the generation of clients if you don’t like using the Auth0 dashboard. The Management API can handle everything the dashboard can and more which may be useful in the event that you need to revoke access from a particular client, or need to adjust scopes. For more best practices, check out the Auth0 docs concerning API Authentication and Authorization.
Today, we built a backend API that exposed RESTful data to be consumed by independent UI clients. We created two clients, each with a different set of scopes and permissions, to show how we can granularly control access to our API. The Auth0 API Authorization and Authentication feature allowed us to easily protect our API, as well as create clients to interact with our newly secured API. Sign up for a free Auth0 account today and start securing your APIs with ease.EVE Online Might Get DirectX 11 Support and Features. Will Let You Buy a GTX 560 With PLEX.
Giuseppe Nelva March 24, 2012 1:26:58 PM EST
Today, during EVE Fanfest 2012 CCP Games and Nvidia showcased a demo of EVE Online running in DirectX 11.
The demo was absolutely stunning, showing full tassellation applied to a EVE Sansha spaceship and to asteroids in real time, with full fledged lighting and shadows. The most interesting part was probably seeing the ship and the asteroids interacting, with the rocks shattering thanks to Nvidia PhysX as they hit the ship, creating more real time lighting effects on it.
Implementing DirectX 11 would require a development team about a year, and CCP Games asked the community for feedback on the possibility. Something tells me that there won’t be may “Don’t do it!” answers (even if the EVE community can be a tad unpredictable at times).
If you’re worried about your video card being able to run the game in DirectX 11, not only the tassellation system would be fully scalable, but CCP and Nvidia will allow players to buy a new graphics card paying with in-game currency.
The deal is rather sweet: players can already covert their ISK (the in-game currency of EVE) in PLEX (Pilot License Extension, equivalent to a month of subscription to the game). Soon they will be able to pay 20 PLEX to have a Nvidia GTX 560 delivered to their doorstep.
This is a rather interesting initiative, as it allows MMORPG players to directly convert in-game currency into a real world purchase. If your video card is a tad outdated it might be time to dust your frigate, read my ninja salvaging guide and start earning some ISK.On Tuesday, the Department of Justice acknowledged for the first time that the notion that e-mail more than 180 days old should require a different legal standard is outdated.
This marked shift in legal theory, combined with new House subcommittee hearings and new Senate legislation, might just actually yield real, meaningful reform on the much-maligned Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It's an act, by the way, that dates back to 1986.
As Ars' Tim Lee wrote in November 2012, “ECPA requires a warrant to obtain freshly sent e-mail before it's been opened by the recipient. But once an e-mail has been opened, or once it has been sitting in the recipient's e-mail box for 180 days, a lower standard applies. These rules simply don't line up with the way modern e-mail systems work.”
In written testimony presented to a House subcommittee on Tuesday, Acting Assistant Attorney General Elana Tyrangiel concurred with that idea.
“We agree, for example, that there is no principled basis to treat e-mail less than 180 days old differently than e-mail more than 180 days old. Similarly, it makes sense that the statute not accord lesser protection to opened e-mails than it gives to e-mails that are unopened. Acknowledging that the so-called ‘180-day rule’ and other distinctions in the [Stored Communications Act, a sub-section of ECPA] no longer make sense is an important first step. The harder question is how to update those outdated rules and the statute in light of new and changing technologies while maintaining protections for privacy and adequately providing for public safety and other law enforcement imperatives.”
Civil liberties advocates are watching ECPA reform's progress with a careful and optimistic eye.
“[The ACLU has] said that there should always be a warrant for e-mail,” Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Ars. “To me, this is one of those things that is a core constitutional value. We’ve always said that we protect communications with a warrant, whether it was physical mail 150 years ago, telephone calls 40 years ago, or e-mail today.”
With any luck, there will be a much better, privacy-conscious way for law enforcement to access our e-mail. Don't hold your breath for urgency though. Ars has been reporting on this issue for many months now—similar legislation has been introduced going way back to May 2011.
Pen registers and D-orders also under fire
Besides Tyrangiel’s Tuesday testimony, the House’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations also fielded written testimony. The subcommittee asked questions of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, a law professor from the George Washington University Law School, and Google’s director of law enforcement.
Tyrangiel also articulated “there are a number of other parts of the statute that may merit further examination during any process updating and clarifying the statute.”
Specifically, she cited problems with how law enforcement has used other electronic records, which include pen registers, “D-orders,” and other tools. But the justice department wasn't totally in favor of making all digital communications more private. Tyrangiel suggested that accessing "to" and "from" addressing information should be made easier for law enforcement.
"Congress could consider modernizing the SCA so that the government can use the same legal process to compel disclosure of addressing information associated with modern communications, such as e-mail addresses, as the government already uses to compel disclosure of telephone addressing information. Historically, the government has used a subpoena to compel a phone company to disclose historical dialed number information associated with a telephone call, and ECPA endorsed this practice. However, ECPA treats addressing information associated with e-mail and other electronic communications differently from addressing information associated with phone calls. Therefore, while law enforcement can obtain records of calls made to and from a particular phone using a subpoena, the same officer can only obtain 'to' and 'from' addressing information associated with e-mail using a court order or a warrant, both of which are only available in criminal investigations. This results in a different level of protection for the same kind of information (e.g., addressing information) depending on the particular technology (e.g., telephone or e-mail) associated with it. Congress could consider updating the SCA to set the same standard for addressing information related to newer technologies as that which applies in traditional telephony."
In other words, while the Justice Department appears open to eliminating some parts of the law that are blatantly ridiculous (the 180 days bit), it also seems to want to lower the standard for accessing header information via a simple subpoena.
ECPA reform bill re-introduced in Senate
Also on Tuesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) re-introduced legislation that had previously passed committee in November 2012. The difference this time? Its co-sponsor comes from across the aisle, which hopefully means that it has a better chance of passing. Earlier this month, two lawmakers introduced a related bi-partisan bill in the House of Representatives.
“When ECPA was enacted, e-mail was primarily a means of communicating information, not storing it," said Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). "Today, we use our e-mail accounts as digital filing cabinets, where we store many of the personal documents and sensitive information that the Fourth Amendment was meant to protect. This bill takes an essential step toward ensuring that the private life of Americans remains private.”
Still, privacy advocates have raised eyebrows at the fact that at least some law enforcement agents have been pushing for a text message retention provision in any ECPA revision.
“Billions of texts are sent every day, and some surely contain key evidence about criminal activity,” said Richard Littlehale, assistant special agent at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, in his written testimony (PDF). “Text messaging often plays a big role in investigations related to domestic violence, stalking, menacing, drug trafficking, and weapons trafficking. I am well aware that retention means a cost for service providers. I would urge |
new weight. You saw this on moon walks because the Astronauts tried to walk normal but ended up falling down discovering it was easier to hop.
Our plan is to add Virtual Reality goggles to the program so everywhere you look you see Mars or the Moon, however this feature may not be available until late 2015.
2.Modular EVA (spacewalk) Training System (METS)
For the $349 backers you run this simulation in a full pressurized space suit for full effect.
3.Normobaric Chamber – Hypoxia Training
As part of the training for flights into space (and for airline pilots) pilots are required to go through Hypoxia Training which is the deprivation of oxygen simulating a low or no oxygen atmosphere at high altitudes or in space.
People train for this typically by going into an altitude chamber. However, this method has risks because you’re dealing with pressurization which could result in physiological issues. We use a Normobaric Chamber which is NOT pressurized and simply replaces the oxygen with nitrogen to give the same effects of hypoxia without the high risks.
4.Pressurized Space Suits – Astronaut Training
Full pressurized space suits give the participant a true feeling for what it is like to operate in space because they have to wear cooling garments, communication systems and physiological monitoring systems. They basically become their own personal autonomous spacecraft. The participants will find it is very hard to do everyday tasks like holding a pencil, turning a screw, walking, bending climbing, etc. Being in a space suit adds complexity and challenges for any and all activities.
What are the size and medical requirements to do the spacesuit training?
§Must have current open water scuba certification
§Height and size requirements
§Min. Height: 5’1″ or 61 inches (155 cm)
§Max Height: 6’5” or 77 inches (196 cm)
§Max. Waist Size: 40 inches in circumference (102 cm)
§Max. Chest Size: 40 inches in circumference (102 cm)
§Must be 18 years or older
4. Medical Requirements
Obtain Valid FAA Medical Certificate (class 3 or higher) or equivalent. You must have a current electrocardiogram (EKG/ECG) test if over 40 years of age to participate or a waiver signed by your physician. Visit the FAA Locator Site to find an Aeromedical Examiner in your area. You may fax or email a preliminary copy to Waypoint 2 Space and will need to bring the original FAA Medical Certificate when you arrive for training.
5.Completion of Forms
§Waypoint 2 Space Booking Forms
§Terms and Conditions
§You will be required to sign additional waiver of liability forms upon arrival.
Is all of the above training guaranteed?
Although we don’t anticipate training offered to change, we are aware that anything can happen from equipment malfunctions, software glitches, etc. Therefore, Waypoint 2 Space reserves the right to modify program content provided modifications do not materially affect the program being offered.
What’s the deal with International Shipping?
If you live outside the continental US, simply provide us with your mailing address and we'll work together to determine the lowest amount needed in addition to your pledge to ship you your rewards.
What if I am not from the United States, can I still come and train?
As long as you have a valid United States Visa and the United States State Department allows you to visit the United States you will be able to participate in the training. Please let us know in advance if you have any special requirements (food, allergies, interpreter required, etc.) prior to arriving for your training.
Spaceflight Training Programs
http://kickingitforward.orghttp://kickingitforward.orgfulfillment, every project hasWe'd like to remind you that when using our data directly, via the API, or in any other way, youabide to the terms of our license & credit us appropriately by placing a link back to our site, mentioning it on air, or making the source of information clear in other ways. Refer to the full text of the license for the details: CC BY-NC-SA
HGC Prediction challenge. Season 3.
Hi everybody!
The third season of our HGC matches results prediction challenge is starting already today, on June, 21rd!
Unfortunately, we still weren't able to find a sponsor to fund the prize pool (hint, hint!), but again we have decided to break our piggy bank to bring you some action figures coolness. The top 10 participants according to our leaderboard will get:
The challenge will run up until the ending of the season, including Western and Eastern Clash. There are more than 100 matches in front of us, so have fun watching and fight to the very end!
Previous changelog: Reworked team page and better filteringThe Wall Street Journal broke what would seem to be a big story on Wednesday night: According to anonymous sources, President-elect Donald Trump is looking at overhauling our country's intelligence apparatus by paring back the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and possibly even restructuring the CIA.
The Trump team is now saying it's baseless. “These reports are false,” incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on a conference call Thursday. “There is no truth to this idea of restructuring the intelligence community infrastructure. It is 100 percent false.”
The timing of this story couldn't be more conspicuous.
Trump is right in the middle of ramping up his criticism and questioning of the intelligence community's conclusions about Russia's alleged hacking of Democrats in an effort to influence the 2016 election. He's still not granting that Russia did the hacking. And just this week he put the word “intelligence” in quotation marks in a tweet and suggested the intelligence community was out to get him — was scrambling to find proof to back up their preferred theory.
The "Intelligence" briefing on so-called "Russian hacking" was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and Adm. Mike Rogers, the National Security Agency director, are both testifying before Congress this morning, and Trump is set to be briefed (again) on Russian hacking on Friday. All of which comes at a time when Trump's questioning of the intelligence community has driven a wedge between him and some Republicans.
It's not clear what's going on here, but the fact that this would come out at this particular juncture in time is too difficult to ignore.
Let's step back and acknowledge some well-established D.C. dynamics. The first is the tradition of floating plans that may or may not be likely to come to fruition — either to send a message or because they're trial balloons. One of the Journal's sources essentially admitted this was a response to what the Trump transition team viewed as politics seeping into the intelligence-gathering process — the same argument some Trump defenders have used to question the intelligence pointing to Russian involvement in the hack. And as they prepared to testify Thursday and brief Trump on Friday on a story line he really doesn't like — sharing information he may not want to see — intelligence officials got a reminder that, whether he chooses to use it or not, he has the power to make their lives very different/difficult.
The other dynamic is the continuing communication issues and conflicting signals inside Team Trump, where it often seems no one is more surprised by what the president-elect or some of his aides do or say than other senior staffers or surrogates.
Still, Spicer's denial is pretty full-throated here, which begs the question: Where did this come from? Did someone close to the Trump transition team totally concoct these plans whole-cloth? If so, why? Is this merely a possibility rather than an actual plan?
The report is based on anonymous sources and has been echoed by other outlets, we would note. Somebody is saying this stuff. It's also not presented as an ironclad proposal or something that's definitely going to happen — more as something the Trump transition team is looking into and planning on. So if it doesn't happen, there's really no accountability.
It all reinforces just how much Trump's incoming administration presents a tough choice for journalists. Usually these kinds of plans do leak out through anonymous sources like this — either because they aren't ready for an official public announcement or because someone gets ahead of the official operation and an entrepreneurial journalist scoops his or her colleagues.
But when you can't even expect the president to follow through on his many publicly stated proposals — see: prosecuting Hillary Clinton, mass deportation, Muslim immigration ban, etc. — how can you rely on anonymous sources to provide accurate information about what will happen in the future? There are just no guarantees. Even if a plan were embraced by Trump, there's no guarantee he might not alter or discard it before it's announced — or even after.
The fact remains that everything for Trump is negotiable, including within his own mind. Will he one day actually overhaul our intelligence community? Possibly. But if he doesn't, these leaks came at a very convenient time.Updated 10:43 PM ET
(CBS News) WASHINGTON - CBS News has learned that congressional investigators have issued a subpoena to a former top security official at the US mission in Libya. The official is Lt. Col. Andy Wood, a Utah National Guard Army Green Beret who headed up a Special Forces "Site Security Team" in Libya.
Lt. Col. Andy Wood led a 16-member Special Forces site security team responsible for protecting U.S. personnel in Libya. CBS News/Andy Woods
The subpoena compels Lt. Col. Wood to appear at a House Oversight Committee hearing next week that will examine security decisions leading up to the Sept. 11 Muslim extremist terror assault on the U.S. compound at Benghazi. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues were killed in the attack.
Libya consulate: Was security added or taken away?
FBI team examines site of deadly Libya attack
Lt. Col. Wood has told CBS News and congressional investigators that his 16-member team and a six-member State Department elite force called a Mobile Security Deployment team left Libya in August, just one month before the Benghazi assault. Wood says that's despite the fact that US officials in Libya wanted security increased, not decreased.
Wood says he met daily with Stevens and that security was a constant challenge. There were 13 threats or attacks on western diplomats and officials in Libya in the six months leading up to the September 11 attack.
A senior State Department official told CBS News that half of the 13 incidents before September 11 were fairly minor or routine in nature, and that the Benghazi attack was so lethal and overwhelming, that a diplomatic post would not be able to repel it.
Wood, whose team arrived in February, says he and fellow security officials were very worried about the chaos on the ground. He says they tried to communicate the danger to State Department officials in Washington, D.C., but that the officials denied requests to enhance security.
"We tried to illustrate...to show them how dangerous and how volatile and just unpredictable that whole environment was over there. So to decrease security in the face of that really is... it's just unbelievable," Wood said.
The State Department official says there was a "constant conversation" between security details in Libya and officials in Washington D.C.
Sources critical of what they view as a security drawdown say three Mobile Security Deployment teams left Libya between February and August in addition to the 16-member Site Security Team on loan from the military. That's 34 highly-trained security personnel moved out over a six month period.
One State Department source told CBS News the security teams weren't "pulled," that their mission was simply over.
Also scheduled to appear at next week's hearing are Libya's former U.S. Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom and State Department official Charlene Lamb.Donald Trump's insult-laced dismissal of reports that the CIA believes Russia hacked the 2016 election to help him is rattling a spy community already puzzled over how to gain the ear and trust of the incoming president.
Some fear that Trump's highly public rebukes of the U.S. intelligence apparatus will undermine morale in the spy agencies, politicize their work, and damage their standing in a world filled with adversaries. After all, if the U.S. president doesn't believe his own intelligence officials, why should anyone else?
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"There is nothing more sacred to intelligence officers than their professionalism, honesty and non-partisanship. Trump's charges strike at the core of their integrity," said John Sipher, a former CIA officer with broad expertise on Russia.
Trump, a career businessman with no national security experience, has long taken positions that have alarmed intelligence officials, such as supporting torture and suggesting that it's OK to kill the family members of terrorists.
His choice of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a man who promotes conspiracy theories on Twitter, as his national security adviser has unnerved observers. And his apparent reluctance to accept daily intelligence briefings since winning on Nov. 8 has fueled concerns that Trump will assume the presidency blind to the dangers facing the United States.
But Trump, who often speaks fondly of Russian President Vladimir Putin, really struck a nerve during the latter stages of the presidential campaign by refusing to accept the U.S. intelligence consensus that Moscow was behind cyber-attacks on U.S. election organizations. On Friday, after The Washington Post reported that the CIA believes Russia was trying specifically to help Trump, the president-elect's team compared the allegations to the flawed claims that prompted the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Trump's transition team said in a statement that made jaws drop across the intelligence world, where many blame the George W. Bush administration, not spy agencies, for selective use of the data that led to the war.
Incoming Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer on Saturday called for a bipartisan congressional probe into the reports of Russian electoral interference. "That any country could be meddling in our elections should shake both political parties to their core," the New York Democrat said.
But Republicans have remained largely quiet on the subject, possibly out of an awareness of where the president-elect stands. Even Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain, who acknowledged that the notion of Russian interference was not a surprise and signaled plans to probe the matter in the next Congress, noted, "The CIA has not always been exactly right, to say the least."
Trump would not be the first U.S. president to harbor a distrust of the intelligence community, which has worked hard to restore its standing in the public eye since the invasion of Iraq and revelations of intelligence agencies use of waterboarding and other torture techniques.
Richard Nixon, for instance, was deeply hostile to the CIA, which he suspected had caused him to lose his 1960 run for the White House. But Nixon was a former vice president and lawmaker who eventually reached the White House with far more knowledge of foreign affairs and governing experience than Trump, who has spent most of his career in the real estate business.
In interviews with several former intelligence officials and others connected to that community in recent days, POLITICO found a deep wariness of what a Trump presidency will mean.
The vast majority of people who work for intelligence agencies are career professionals deeply averse to the politicization of intelligence; there's also a deep and long-running suspicion of Russia in the intelligence community that Trump is unlikely to root out.
Amy Jeffress, a former Department of Justice official, told POLITICO that she's been in touch with intelligence community officials to discuss the challenge ahead.
"They don’t like the president-elect’s criticism and are even more concerned that he is skipping his intelligence briefings," Jeffress said. “The new administration will need to reassure the career professionals, who of course include Democrats and Republicans, that they will not misuse or politicize their work.”
The question of the intelligence briefings is one that some analysts are more worried about than others.
Most recent presidents-elect have welcomed the in-person daily briefings by intelligence officials as an opportunity to verse themselves in the threats facing the United States before they take office. Trump is reportedly receiving at most one such verbal briefing a week.
Meanwhile, it's not clear if Trump is reading the President's Daily Brief, the written, top secret document produced every day by the intelligence community for the serving president and designated aides and which also is available to presidents-elect. Trump transition officials did not respond to questions about whether Trump is reading the written document and how many in-person briefings he has received.
In the case of Nixon, the CIA could not convince him to take a single face-to-face briefing during his transition to the presidency, according to David Priess, a former intelligence official and author of "The President's Book of Secrets." The CIA delivered Nixon's team the written daily brief every day, but at the end of the transition period, those envelopes were all returned unopened, Priess said.
Once Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, he might feel compelled to pay more heed to intelligence issues. But already people connected to the spy world are wondering if they'll need to radically alter the way they present the information to a man known to have a very short attention span and a dislike of reading.
Trump's favored mode of communication appears to be Twitter, and he's known to watch cable news regularly. He's said in the past that he's learned a lot about military affairs by watching cable shows. People familiar with his reading habits have told POLITICO he likes information delivered in "short and staccato" bursts.
Different presidents have had their preferred modes of getting the daily briefing. President Barack Obama does not take oral briefings — he prefers to read the written version, which usually runs five to 10 pages, on a special secure iPad. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, always had a daily in-person briefing, even when he was on the road, Priess said.
Some presidents want very specific information, sometimes requesting detailed paragraphs on particular countries. Others prefer pithier nuggets of information. Bill Clinton was known to like extremely short statements of analysis referred to as "snowflakes" in addition to more substantive pieces. At times, including during the Ronald Reagan era, the written brief has been supplemented with video footage.
The expectation is that Trump will prefer bullet points to paragraphs, and headlines to details. Said Priess: "I would ask the president-elect directly: In what format would you like it? We can brief it to you. We can write it for you. We can do interpretive dance if you want. Just tell us."
Some sources told POLITICO that it's not a terrible thing if Trump isn't devoting half an hour each day to reading the intelligence brief or listening to a briefer. "It's a misleading metric," said Philip Mudd, a former CIA officer who verbally briefed Bush. "Some people sleep eight hours a night, some people sleep six. Different presidents absorb information in different ways."
Mudd and others added that what may prove more important is ensuring that Trump's closest aides are aware of what the intelligence community needs him to know. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, for example, is reported to be deeply interested in the intelligence briefings and may be a useful conduit to his boss.
At the same time, some of the people Trump has surrounded himself with also are a cause for concern in corners of the intelligence world. Flynn, the designated national security adviser who previously ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, is reported to have scoffed at intelligence that didn't match his opinions. Days before the Nov. 8 election, he used Twitter to spread false conspiracy theories about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Trump has designated GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas as the next CIA director. By many accounts, Pompeo is a sharp thinker. But he's also considered one of the most partisan members of Congress. He was especially vocal in opposing the nuclear deal that the Obama administration struck with Iran. The question for many in the intelligence realm now is whether Pompeo can objectively present their work to a President Trump.
"The poster child is the Iranian nuclear program," Mudd said. "I can guarantee you CIA people are saying, 'We’re worried he will shift our analysis on whether Iran is complying with the agreement or not or if he will he put his own spin on it'."
But even if Trump surrounds himself with highly competent professionals, even if he feels pushback from Congress, even if he is attacked in the press, he still has tremendous power in intelligence matters.
"He’s a 70-year old billionaire whose entire approach to life was just rewarded. And his approach to life is to not accept facts he disagrees with and attack people who present facts that are inconvenient to him," said Matthew Miller, a former Obama administration Justice Department spokesman who has been highly critical of Trump. "I don’t know why on earth someone thinks he’ll change just because he takes office. There’s zero evidence he’s going to change."
Some sources affiliated with the intelligence community also are quietly voicing concerns about Trump's ability to keep classified information secret, given his habit of going off-script. He uses Twitter to post his unvarnished opinions regularly. And as president, he'll be dealing with enormous amounts of information, some of it top secret, some of it not, a regular basis. It's difficult for anyone to compartmentalize all of that data.
It's entirely possible that, if they haven't already, foreign countries will analyze Trump's tweets and public statements and compare them to his calendar to try to see if there are patterns that could offer hints about U.S. national security.
But would it be proper for an intelligence officer to withhold information from Trump if he's worried about what he'll do with it?
No, some observers said.
"He’s the president. He gets the best we have to offer," Mudd said. "No intelligence officer would say, 'I’m not offering the best we have to the president of the United States.' We weren’t elected. They were."
Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.When he was 14, Xu Guiyuan had to make a grown-up decision — whether to leave his family in southeastern China and move more than 900 miles away to an academy run by Major League Baseball to learn a sport his country is all but indifferent to.
China shows about as much interest in baseball as the United States does in a niche sport like cricket, but for Xu, who was coveted because he was bigger and more athletic than his peers, the offer contained the faintest hope of a career in America's summer sports pasttime.
China has never produced a major leaguer in baseball, which was banned in 1966 as a "bourgeois indulgence for the rich" by Communist leader Mao Zedong and never recovered. But Xu and his family gambled. In 2010, he moved to baseball's fledgling developmental center in Wuxi, on the Yangtze River, beginning a six-year, cross-cultural journey that recently led him to the Orioles' minor league spring training camp after being the first player signed from baseball's Chinese academy program.
Xu believes he is talented enough to be a baseball pioneer and thinks the sport will one day resonate with the Chinese people. Baseball, the left-handed first baseman said, requires "selfless sacrifice" and "teamwork" that are central to Chinese culture.
"I think he understands this is a heroic quest," said Dan Duquette, the Orioles executive vice president, who stopped at the club's minor league training center at Twin Lakes Park on March 13 to welcome Xu.
"Well, we're glad to have you on the Orioles," Duquette said as he shook the player's hand on a sunny practice field at the palm tree-lined complex about 10 miles from Ed Smith Stadium, where the major leaguers play. "You've got a lot of people watching you back in China."
"Oh, yeah," Xu replied shyly.
Xu, 6 feet tall and 188 pounds with an engaging smile, goes by the nickname "Itchy." The scout who discovered him said he was quiet as a boy, and he still shows hints of shyness, particularly when searching for the right English word or expression. He speaks Mandarin and Cantonese, but he learned enough English at the centers to communicate with coaches and teammates.
Xu might start in the rookie-level Gulf Coast League and could end up this season with the Short-A Aberdeen IronBirds of the New York-Penn League. Occasionally, he allows himself to imagine taking the field one day at Camden Yards.
"I saw a picture, but I've never been there," he said. "Beautiful field. I know the office is behind the field, right?"
The Orioles believe baseball has found a partner in China, a nation of 1.3 billion people that embraces such sports as soccer, basketball and gymnastics. All are Olympic competitions whose popularity is enhanced because they tap into China's nationalist pride. Baseball is not in the Olympics, but baseball-hungry Japan, which hosts the 2020 Games, is pushing for the sport's inclusion.
"Twenty years from now... people will look back and say [Xu] was the first," said Brian Graham, the Orioles player development director who oversees Xu and the 150 other minor league players at Twin Lakes Park.
At the Chinese academies where he once trained, and where he essentially grew up, Xu is a symbol of baseball hope.
Before he left China for spring training, 20 of his academy teammates assembled in uniform on a dirt infield to record a video that the player carries with him on his iPhone.
"The new season is coming soon — may you make it into the major leagues and achieve your dream!" one player shouts. Then, all yell in unison and pump their fists: "Go Itchy!"
Xu was signed after a trip to China by Orioles international scout Brett Ward and Mike Snyder, the club's Baltimore-based director of Pacific Rim operations. When Xu arrived in Florida for an instructional league stint in the fall, Duquette said he dispatched his son, Dana, to pick up the player at the airport, telling him: "That's a historic trip, you know."
A middle child, Xu left behind his father — a commercial driver — his mother and four siblings to train at the three academies, moving from one to the next as he got older. When the first academy opened in Wuxi in 2009, MLB promised in a news release to provide "professional baseball training for middle school and high school-aged students within an academic school environment."
"For me, I try to help my family," said Xu, interviewed after his first full training day in the cramped hotel room he is sharing with Oswill Lartiguez, an outfielder from Venezuela who played last season with the IronBirds and Low-A Delmarva Shorebirds. "If I sign a contract and go to the MLB developmental center, I can go to school for free, eat for free, live for free, so I can help my family."
In his black duffel bag, he brought to Florida a bright red card his mother gave him featuring Chinese characters for "happiness" and "prosperity."
But his first week created strain. His flight to Tampa International Airport was delayed and he arrived — wearing a black Orioles hoodie — at his hotel at 3 a.m. He felt jet-lagged all week and said he was uncomfortable being immediately singled out by American and Chinese media members before proving himself.
After several days of workouts, the player said he was "very excited, but my body feels a little bit tired. I feel every time when I hit a ball I just missed a little bit. It's getting better."
The next week, on March 16, he hit a single, driving in two runs, in his first minor league spring game.
Xu's training has left him straddling two cultures. He has grown up at the academies learning about both nations and eating American and Chinese food.
His favorite baseball player is Japan-born Ichiro Suzuki, now 42, who has been one of the best big league hitters in the United States during his career. Seeking a nickname, Xu said he asked coaches years ago if he could be called "Ichiro." They told him that was awkward, so he became "Itchy" instead. Xu said he didn't realize at the time that itchy is actually an English word.Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
March 23, 2015, 4:57 PM GMT / Source: TODAY By Jeff Rossen and Jovanna Billington
Jennifer Plank-Greer of Kokomo, Indiana, was visiting a home in Celina, Ohio, on May 6, 2012, when she started recording cellphone video of a man about to fire a rifle at a target in the backyard. Plank-Greer was 150 feet away as the man fired at his target, a refrigerator containing just 2 pounds of exploding targets, a product openly for sale at some of the country's biggest stores.
The refrigerator exploded, sending shrapnel flying in all directions. A metal fragment struck Plank-Greer's right hand, nearly severing it at the wrist. "In a blink of an eye... it was gone," she said. She says she was unaware the refrigerator contained exploding targets.
Plank-Greer, who has since moved to Bradenton, Florida, because cold weather is painful for her injury, has undergone multiple surgeries to reattach her hand and attempt to restore some of its function.
H2Targets and Tannerite both make exploding targets whose key ingredient is ammonium nitrate, the same substance used in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others in 1995 and in IEDs (improvised explosive devices) used against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. In 2013, the FBI issued an intelligence bulletin warning that exploding targets have "potential use as explosives in IEDs by criminals and extremists."
Yet today Tannerite can be legally purchased at most sporting goods stores. Gun enthusiasts buy it for target practice because it explodes when you shoot it, letting you know you've made the shot.
TODAY national investigative correpsondent Jeff Rossen went shopping at one store and bought 40 pounds of it — enough to blow up a house — with no questions asked. And potential terrorists don't even have to show up at a store to buy Tannerite. A Rossen Reports producer bought the same amount, 40 pounds, online. A week later it was delivered to a doorstep in bulk.
Even some firearms experts call the situation unacceptable. "I'm a huge supporter of the Second Amendment," said Travis Bond. "But it's extremely dangerous, like a bomb for sale on the shelf."
Bond says that Tannerite is getting around the law on a technicality by separating the two ingredients in its explosive — ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder — even though the two are sold together.
"Everything you need comes with the package you purchase right off the shelf," Bond said. Though legal restrictions do not apply to the two ingredients when they are separate, he explained, "once it's mixed, it's classified as an explosive."
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) declined Rossen Reports' request for an interview, but Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told Rossen, "This kind of bomb-making material is a real threat and a growing risk."
"You're a key member of the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the ATF," Rossen said. "The ATF doesn't classify this as an explosive. Why aren't you doing more?"
"There should be regulations that, in effect, either require licenses or better track who is buying these devices that are relatively new," Blumenthal replied.
Contacted for comment, Tannerite Sports LLC, makers of Tannerite, told NBC News: "No additional regulations are needed beyond current laws because the product is safe when used correctly," and "the only injuries that have ever happened were results from the shooter misusing the product." The company added: "Only girly-men want to regulate Tannerite Rifle Targets."
Rossen asked Blumenthal: "Will you talk to the ATF about changing the classification of this product?"
"I am going to press the ATF and other government agencies to do more and do it better," the senator replied.
The only state in the country that bans the purchase of exploding targets without an explosives license is Maryland. Everywhere else it's on the shelves right now.
To suggest a topic for an upcoming investigation, visit the Rossen Reports Facebook page.With the defence review underway – and everything or most everything on the table – part of the discussion will inevitably focus on Canada’s Victoria-class submarine fleet. At least once during the Conservative’s time in office, suggestions emerged that the government was looking at shutting down the fleet to save money. Will that same proposal surface this time around?
Royal Canadian Navy commander Vice Admiral Mark Norman believes there should be a debate about the role of Canada’s submarines but from a maritime security and capability perspective. The navy, he said, sees Canada’s submarine fleet “as the ultimate guarantor of maritime sovereignty.”
Here is more of what Norman told Defence Watch:
“There is no other platform in service anywhere that can do what a submarine can do. And I don’t see that sort of essential capability being replaced by anything in the foreseeable future. Ultimately the submarine is about controlling water space. It is a very capable surveillance platform. It has great endurance. It has incredible stealth. Those are all worthwhile characteristics of a submarine, but ultimately its purpose is to control water space. If Canada ever has the desire or the need to declare exclusive control over a column of water, either in our own territory or elsewhere, there’s only one platform that can do that. You can mine it or you can put submarines in. The discussion unfortunately in this country has focused understandably, but excessively on the trials and tribulations of the class itself, and not on the inherent strategic essence of the capability. We’re surrounded on three sides by water. We have the largest ocean state in the world. And I don’t care how much remote sensing, UAVs, aircraft or any other technology you want to throw at our massive maritime state, if you want to control it or any part of it at any time of your choosing you got to have a submarine in it. Others need to know that you have a submarine in it because that in and of itself has an asymmetric deterrent effect.
This is a discussion that needs to take place. It needs to be an informed debate. It needs to be a debate based on fact and analysis, and not based on rhetoric and innuendo. The capability of the Victoria class is actually very robust. And we’ve had enormous success in both continental missions, and recently in the latter part of 2015, Windsor did some incredible things in support of NATO as we were dealing with some Russian activity in the North Atlantic.
We need to have the conversation. And as I indicated, the conversation needs to be about the capability and not about the merits of the acquisition of the current platform, which is unfortunately where the debate often goes.”Liver Transplantation in Children
What is a liver transplant?
A liver transplant is a surgical procedure performed to replace a diseased liver with a healthy liver from another person. The liver may come from a deceased organ donor or from a living donor. Family members or individuals who are unrelated but make a good match may be able to donate a portion of their liver. This type of transplant is called a living transplant. Individuals who donate a portion of their liver can live healthy lives with the remaining liver.
An entire liver may be transplanted, or just a section because the liver is the only organ in the body able to regenerate. A transplanted portion of a liver can rebuild to normal capacity within weeks.
Why is a liver transplant recommended?
A liver transplant is recommended for children who have serious liver dysfunction and will not be able to live without having the liver replaced. The most common liver disease in children for which transplants are done is biliary atresia. Other conditions may include the following;
Congenital conditions, such as Alagille syndrome or cholestatic disorders
Viral hepatitis
Hemochromatosis
Alpha-1 anti-trypsin
Liver cancer and other liver tumors
Acute liver failure from an autoimmune disease, unknown causes, or an overdose of medication, such as acetaminophen
Other genetic and hereditary liver diseases
How many children in the U.S. need liver transplants?
Visit the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) website for statistics of patients awaiting a liver transplant, and the number of patients who underwent a transplant this year.
Where do transplanted organs come from?
The majority of livers that are transplanted come from organ donors who have died. Organ donors are adults or children who have become critically ill (often due to an accidental injury) and will not live as a result of their illness. Donors can come from any part of the U.S. This type of transplant is called a cadaveric transplant.
A child receiving a transplant may either get a whole liver, or a segment of one. If an adult liver is available and is an appropriate match for two people on the waiting list, the donor liver can be divided into two segments and each part is transplanted.
Living family members may also be able to donate a section of their liver. This type of transplant is called a living-related transplant. Children receiving a partial liver seem to do as well as those who receive a whole liver. Relatives who donate a portion of their liver can live healthy lives with the segment that remains.
How are transplanted organs allocated?
UNOS is responsible for transplant organ distribution in the U.S. UNOS oversees the allocation of many different types of transplants, including liver, kidney, pancreas, heart, lung, and cornea.
UNOS receives data from hospitals and medical centers throughout the country regarding adults and children who need organ transplants. The medical team that currently follows your child is responsible for sending the data to UNOS, and updating it as your child's condition changes.
Criteria have been developed to ensure that all people on the waiting list are judged fairly as to the severity of their illness and the urgency of receiving a transplant. Once UNOS receives the data from local hospitals, people waiting for a transplant are placed on a waiting list and given a "status" code. The people in most urgent need of a transplant are placed highest on the status list and are given first priority when a donor liver becomes available.
When a donor organ becomes available, a computer searches all the people on the waiting list for a liver and sets aside those who are not good matches for the available liver. A new list is made from the remaining candidates. The person at the top of the specialized list is considered for the transplant. If he/she is not a good candidate, for whatever reason, the next person is considered, and so forth. Some reasons that people lower on the list might be considered before a person at the top include the size of the donor organ and the geographic distance between the donor and the recipient.
How is my child placed on the waiting list for a new liver?
An extensive evaluation must be completed before your child can be placed on the transplant list. Overall testing includes:
Psychological and social evaluation. These tests are done on the child, if old enough, and the family.
Blood tests
Diagnostic tests
Blood tests
Blood tests are done to gather information that will help determine how urgent it is that your child is placed on the transplant list, as well as to ensure the child receives a donor organ that is a good match. These |
ollima's View
Last month’s prediction of a big provocative move came true. The Chollima does not expect that Trump’s offer still stands to come to the table and make a deal (Financial Times 07-Nov). The Chollima also does not expect much from even more new sanctions from the US and China (Washington Post 29-Nov). SK and Japan think that listing NK as a terror state will help derail their nuclear program (Reuters 21-Nov). This is even more dubious.
The (credible) rumours are that Singapore is a big centre for NK money. The Chollima wonders how serious Singapore’s suspension of trade relations truly is. Difficulty for NK in Singapore might have an impact.
Fun Fact: Pyongyang University of Science and Technology now has a cryptocurrency course (Vice News 25-Nov)
The Chollima Report 31-Oct-2017
Top 3 Macro and Risk Headlines
Russia TransTeleCom to lay fibre optic network (Frontera News 19-Oct)
Kim Jong Un’s sister promoted to Politburo (BBC 08-Oct)
Nuclear test site mountain likely to collapse (38 North)
The Chollima's View
The public should be more fearful of NK’s cyber abilities. Microsoft is certain that NK is responsible for the infamous WannaCry virus (Washington Examiner 14-Oct). NK capability will get stronger with Russian support.
The Chollima thinks there is a strong possibility that North Korea’s next nuclear tests will occur in the Pacific Ocean. A tunnel at the Mt Mantap test site collapsed (Yonhap News 31-Oct). NK need a new test site and a move to the Pacific would be a suitable next provocation/test of the USA.
Fun Fact: North Korea is experimenting with algae for home grown oil production to beat sanctions (38 North 20-Oct)
The Chollima Report 30-Sep-2017
Top 3 Macro and Risk Headlines
US sanctions resolution watered down (Guardian 11-Sep)
Russia, SK, NK to work on trilateral projects (RT 06-Sep)
SK President says dialogue impossible (Yonhap News 15-Sep)
The Chollima's View
The Chollima outlined two key warning signs in last months’ report. These have not been met but the situation is edging closer. Oil delivery to NK will be capped, not ended. Japan is only planning for, not calling for, evacuation of its citizens from SK (Nikkei Asian Review 06-Sep).
The Chollima believes this is still brinkmanship and expects to see more insults and contradictory actions.
Fun Fact: Basketball star Dennis Rodman offers to “straight things out” between the USA and North Korea (Syracuse.com 07-Sep)
The Chollima Report 31-Aug-2017
Top 3 Macro and Risk Headlines
North Korea fires missile over Japan (BBC 29-Aug)
China recommits to sanctions on NK (AP 29-Aug)
US & Japan agree NK talks not appropriate (Yonhap News 29-Aug)
The Chollima's View
The Chollima is concerned by the UN report that 2 NK shipments to a Syrian chemical weapons factory were caught in the last 6 months (Reuters 21-Aug). The Chollima remembers WMDs and Iraq. The US said it is not seeking regime change (BBC 01-Aug) but Trump has also threatened “fire and fury” (BBC 08-Aug). In return NK threatened the US territory Guam (BBC 09-Aug). The Chollima will begin to worry if the US tells its citizens to leave the region.
China promises to stop importing coal, iron, lead, and seafood (Guardian 05-Aug), affecting $3bn of income for NK, approx 25% of its GDP. China will still supply NK with oil (ABC News 20-Aug). The Chollima will worry if they stop.
Fun Fact: The DPRK is welcoming tourists from Russia – its advertising says that Pyongyang is safer than London (Reuters 24-Aug)
The Chollima Report 31-Jul-2017
Top 3 Macro and Risk Headlines
NK economy is booming (Quartz 21-Jul)
NK on brink of famine (UN 20-Jul)
US “done talking” about NK (Reuters 30-Jul)
The Chollima's View
The prospect of US military action against NK is still unthinkable. State media said that if there was any attempt at regime change that NK would “preemptively annihilate” its enemies with nuclear attacks (KCNA 25-Jul). It’s an increasingly credible threat. Never mind “done talking” – the US seems “done” full stop.
The Chollima wonders if there’s a way forward for NK with Vietnam or China as a model. Consequently, The Chollima is very interested by the mixed reports about NK’s economy. On the one hand, NK faces famine. On the other, NK is in a building boom (NYT 05-Jul) and trade with China is up 10.5% (Reuters 13-Jul).
Fun Fact: Moldova will export wine to North Korea (NK News 03-Jul)
The Chollima Report 30-Jun-2017
Top 3 Macro and Risk Headlines
SK Pres; nuclear solution likelier than ever with Trump (Korea Herald 30-Jun)
Russia boosts trade with NK (USA Today 05-Jun)
NK officials tour Spain for Wonsan beach resort inspiration (Daily Telegraph 25-Jun)
The Chollima's View
China reports that its coal imports have been zero for three months. It seems the US is taking its own precautions. It imposed new sanctions on specific Chinese businesses which it believes launder money for North Korea e.g. Bank of Dandong (Reuters 30-Jun) and Dalian Global Unity Shipping Co (Reuters 29-Jun).
It seems the DPRK is following a model of opening up similar to China or Vietnam in the past (FT 21-Jun). Perhaps there is a way forward for the country if it can harness its great mineral wealth (Quartz 16-Jun). How will the US efforts to stop missile development affect prospects of economic development?
Fun Fact: US basketball star Dennis Rodman gave the DPRK sports minister a copy of Trump’s “Art of the Deal” (AP 15-Jun)
The Chollima Report 31-May-2017
Top 3 Macro and Risk Headlines
New SK President Moon willing to meet Kim Jong Un in NK (Guardian 10-May)
India halts trading with NK (CNN 01-May)
WannaCry ransomware virus possibly from NK (BBC 16-May)
The Chollima's View
Missile testing continues and in response the US is increasing its anti-missile measures. Is it adopting a Reagan-eque “Star Wars” strategy? The Chollima is curious about new S.Korean President Moon’s policy of engagement. Is he letting the US play the bad guy?
Meanwhile, China allowed North Korean delegates to attend its Silk Road summit (Reuters 12-May) and Putin says the world should stop threatening North Korea and talk (Reuters 15-May).
Fun Fact: The DPRK has developed a new tablet computer – it’s called the “iPad” (NK News 31-May)
The Chollima Report 30-Apr-2017
Top 3 Macro and Risk Headlines
Tokyo Metro halted after missile test (Bloomberg 29-Apr)
China readies army on NK border (UPI 12-Apr)
NK agrees to first ever UN rights expert visit (UPI 27-Apr)
The Chollima's View
The Chollima is reconsidering the likelihood of military action against North Korea.
After the US threat to proceed alone (FT 02-Apr), it seems China is cooperating (or at least aligning) with the US. The Chinese army is on the border and it has signalled it will not defend NK from attack (Straits Times 13-Apr).
The Japanese PM warns that a sarin gas attack is possible (Reuters 13-Apr). The halt of the Tokyo Metro is a new level of caution. The threat posed by North Korea is beginning to have an actual impact.
If he doesn’t like you, Trump takes swift, serious, unexpected action e.g. bombings in Syria, Afghanistan. Since the 90s the US has tried to prevent progress of weapons development, keeping NK where it is rather than taking action. Progress was slow but their weapons have improved. The policy clearly hasn’t worked.
Will Trump take a view that he can see where this is going and that it’s better to do something now?
Fun Fact: Han Kwang-Song became the first NK player to score a goal in Italy’s football league (CNN 10-Apr)
The Chollima Report 31-Mar-2017
Top 3 Macro and Risk Headlines
NK banks ejected from SWIFT (CNN 08-Mar)
Protocol for hosting NK workers signed with Russia (KCNP 17-Mar)
Census led by UN to be held (KCNP 24-Mar)
The Chollima's View
N.Korea faces every possible sanction and penalty without any effect. The UN thinks that Africa is a route for N.Korea to avoid weapons restrictions (AP 04-Mar). It seems that limited coal and iron ore trading continues with China (NK News 06-Mar). Workers still go to Russia.
The US warns that all options are open for tackling N.Korea (Reuters 08-Mar). It is even said to be exploring military options (Fox News 01-Mar). This would be extremely risky and The Chollima does not expect the US to take any serious action.
Fun Fact: Kenji Fujimoto, ex-sushi chef to Kim Jong Il, opens restaurant in Pyongyang (AP 04-Mar)
The Chollima Report 28-Feb-2017
Top 3 Macro and Risk Headlines
North Korea conducts ballistic missile test (BBC 12-Feb)
Kim Jong Nam killed at airport (BBC 14-Feb)
China bans North Korea coal imports (Reuters 19-Feb)
The Chollima's View
The coal import ban is very serious. North Korea exports an estimated 22m tons for $1.2bn per year to China. This is about a third of its exports. It is a major (and clean) source of foreign cash.
China actually said it would stop importing from N. Korea (its 4th largest supplier) in Apr-2016, in line with international sanctions. Its decision to act shows a changing relationship. Russia came before China in N. Korea’s New Year wishes (Washington Times 07-Feb). State media also made a release aimed at China titled “Neighbouring country’s mean behaviour” (KCNP 23-Feb).
The EU will increase sanctions (Washington Post 27-Feb). The leading S. Korean presidential candidate, Moon Jae-in, promised to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex (UPI 07-Feb) but this is now very unlikely.
The Chollima expects the situation to worsen. The USA cancelled back-channel talks (NYT 25-Feb) and may place N. Korea back on the list of terror states (Japan Times 28-Feb). If S. Korea installs the US THAAD missile defence system (Yonhap News 28-Feb) this will provoke a response.
Fun Fact: The Chollima (literally “1000 li horse”) is a mythical winged horse which could travel 1000 li (approx. 250 miles or 400km) in 1 dayWe’ve seen it before, and we will certainly see it again. Robotics and 3D printing continue to converge on many different levels. Whether it is the robotic movements of 3D printers themselves, or the creation of better robotics through the use of 3D printing for complete customization, the technologies definitely have a magnificent future together. We have seen numerous robots created through the use of 3D printing, which has allowed for their total customization, while at the same time saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars in machine and injection molding costs.
For one man, named Brian Matthews, 3D printing allowed him to create a robot unlike anything we have ever seen before. We are mostly used to seeing robots that mimic human behavior in order to make our own lives better, or resemble humans in not only their actions, but their body language and movements as well. Matthews, however, took a totally different approach for building his robot from the ground up. He decided to create a robotic parrot, and the end results are rather stunning.
Matthews, who runs a website called Flapping Sprocket, created his robot basically from scratch, as he explains some of what went into its development to 3DPrint.com:
“The controller is an Arduino Mega running animation code I wrote, the servo motors are 7, HS65HB and 2, HS-5685 from ServoCity.com, it is mostly [3D printed in] ABS except for the wings that are PLA. The Battery is from Robot Marketplace, custom 6 volt battery layout maker, and the IR distance sensor from Adafruit. The parrot was printed on an Afinia 5x5x5″ bed. I used the 3D drawing program Sketchup to design all the parts.”
Matthews tells us that he started with the shell, and in order to get a basic version of what a 3D parrot looks like, he downloaded an already drawn version from the Sketchup 3D Warehouse. He also spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos depicting real-life parrots in action, as well as viewing multiple photos of the lovely birds. Once he thought he had a good idea of what a parrot should look and act like, he dumped his original downloaded model and started from scratch by tracing profile and front views of a parrot drawn from internet photos imported to Sketchup.
“Using those, I placed the servos inside the shape where I thought it needed pivots and where the essential actuation need[ed] to be to match those goofy goofy birds,” Matthews tells us. “For the insides, the 3D printed parts just needed to either hold a servo, or mount onto its arm. So designing parts to jump from servo to the next was fairly easy once the servo positions seemed right. For the shell around the bird I hand drew in all the mesh triangles using the traced picture outlines as guides. Artitian plugin is useful here for sculptural tools working with triangular meshes. Three plugins that were essential were the.STL export, Fredo’s Junction push-pull, and TIG’s Smart Offset plugin. After the thin membrane triangulated shape was good and adjusted to fit all the servos even when they move, I would use the multiple offset tool plugin to make internal outlines on all the triangle surfaces. Then I used the Junction Push Pull plugin to turn that thin triangulated framework into a thickened shell so there was something of thickness to actually print.”
Overall, the 3D printing process went pretty smoothly, although it did require a lot of trial and error. Some of the more elaborate parts, like the 8″ long wings which were printed diagonally on the 5x5x5″ print bed, needed some modification in order to print correctly. Matthews tells us that each part took about 2-3 revisions before they all fit together properly.
In the end, Matthews’ hard work paid off, as he created what is probably the world’s first 3D printed robotic parrot, and it is really incredible (as seen in videos). The movements are very reminiscent of a real live parrot.
What do you think about this intricately designed robot? Would you have done anything different? Discuss in the 3D printed robotic parrot forum thread on 3DPB.com. Check out the video and photos below.After grabbing breakfast at the Cheesecake Factory across from the venue. The team went and did a Q&A panel with GameSpot where fans were able to come, ask questions, get autographs, and photos with the team. I was unable to attend due to a business meeting, but I heard from the team that several of you asked about me. The most common question I’ve received about what I’ve been up to since stepping down from the roster full time is: “What is going on with the challenger team?”
Many conjecture that since CLG does not have a challenger team, I simply never pursued it, which is not the case at all. Many of you know that I have been spamming solo queue about ~15 per day, every day, over the past month or so. Aside from attempting to bringing my Leblanc skills up to near Faker levels, the real aim in doing this is an attempt to scout out potential recruits for the challenger team. In my opinion, “known” players are not the best resource to turn to in building a challenger team. Many “known” players, even amateurs, already feel a great deal of entitlement within the scene due to their popularity, and are not as grateful for the opportunities they are given. This is certainly not to be said of everyone, but I am specifically looking for people who are willing to commit everything to the opportunity which they are given. I want the no ego, pure drive, only care about results mentality. I think there is a lot of undiscovered talent still out there in the NA scene, and I intend to find it.
The other thing people fail to realize is that it’s not as easy as randomly selecting 5 good players, putting them on a team, and pressing the “go” button. I am not looking to commit the organization and my resources to anything less than a team I feel supremely confident about. There have been several players I have approached about doing a challenger team with me, but I have yet to find a complete roster of those who I think will work.
As far as my participation on the challenger team is concerned, that is still completely undecided. I would either be coaching the team or playing on it myself, but it really just depends on if I’m able to find enough players where I don’t feel I need to play on the team myself. As a coach who isn’t also a player on the team and an unbiased third party, I am more able to objectively give feedback on the guys performance and help dictate to them the areas in which they need to improve.
I hope that explains that situation to everyone though, now let’s talk about the results from the NA Playoffs and how I think things will pan out at World’s.
PAX RESULTS and NA PERFORMANCE AT WORLD’S
The third place match went pretty much exactly as I expected yesterday. While Dignitas is a good team, based on the team’s scrims this week, everyone on CLG expected Vulcun would have little issue in claiming their spot at World’s. Now, the Finals were arguable more interesting (purely from a results perspective, because the actual finals themselves were quite boring). C9 had been telling us that TSM had been beating them in 80% of their scrims in prepping for PAX. Yet, yesterday, C9 completely dismantled TSM who had looked so strong against CLG and Vulcun earlier in the tournament. So what does this all mean?
In the end, I think the three teams going to World’s are the ones who deserve it most, and that they will do a very good job representing NA at World’s. If you still don’t see it after the finals yesterday against TSM, I am telling you now, Cloud 9 is fucking good at League of Legends. In fact, I think people still underrate them. Cloud 9 is, in my opinion, on the level of top Korean teams. When watching OGN, there are many top level Korean games between the likes of Blaze, Frost, Ozone, SKT T1, KT B, and the like where I don’t feel that they rotate, prioritize objectives, apply pressure, or choose lane matchups as well as Cloud 9. So how will Cloud 9 match up against the Korean team’s that go to World’s?
I think Cloud 9’s greatest fear against the Korean teams at World’s will be in laning phase. Mechanically, and in regards to individual outplays, I think there is a high possibility that Cloud 9 could get bullied in lane so badly by the Koreans, especially with Meteos’ tendency to farm over gank, that they will never get an opportunity to play the kind of game that C9 likes. However, if C9 is able to make it past laning phase in the same position that they are able to against NA teams, I don’t think Koreans will know how to deal with a jungler that is so much more farmed than their own. Cloud 9’s performance at World’s will depend largely on how seriously the Koreans take them and how they are able to fare in lane against the best players in the World. I would not favor ANY team over Cloud 9 except for the Korean team’s at Worlds however. They could easily have a very easy route to the semi finals and potentially even the finals depending on the draws coming out of groups.
TSM and Vulcun are a much greater unknown. TSM is looking very strong right now, but has still never beaten a Korean team. Vulcun has the potential to play better than any team in NA, but are far more inconsistent than Cloud 9 and consistently give opportunities for other teams to come back into the game, which top international teams will punish to a great degree. I expect one of these teams to make it past groups to the quarter finals. Beyond that is unknown. Anyone who draws the SouthEast Asian team which has a bye, in the quarter finals has a potentially very easy route to the semi finals.
The rest of the day
After the matches I toured around PAX some and then went to a wonderful dinner + play session Riot hosted for players/managers/owners at GameWorks across the street from the venue. I am a huge gamer, so in my final blog from PAX (tomorrow), I will write about what games I saw at PAX that excited me most and people should check out. We are also hosting a signing with iBUYPOWER at the NVIDIA booth today at PAX at 1pm. Be sure to come by and get your stuff signed and hang out!It's been 49 years since Giants ace Juan Marichal clocked Dodgers catcher John Roseboro with his bat. The moment was captured in Neil Leifer's iconic photograph, which in turn shaped the collective memory of the incident. Today, Marichal is remembered as the villain, Roseboro as the helpless innocent in the middle of what looks like a mob action. But it turns out that the photo, a compelling image of one of the most disturbing moments in baseball history, is also a bit of a lie.
That's the Dodgers' ace, Sandy Koufax. He and Marichal were facing off at Candlestick Park that afternoon—Aug. 22, 1965—in the finale of their four-game series, in the thick of a pennant race. The series had already been testy, even by the standards of a rivalry that had survived the cross-country exodus of 1957. In the second game, Roseboro objected to a pulled-back bunt attempt by Giants outfielder Matty Alou in which Alou seemed to flick Roseboro's mitt. Marichal came to the defense of his friend and teammate, yelling at Roseboro from the dugout steps. According to John Rosengren's The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro turned Baseball's Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption, Roseboro glared at the pitcher.
"You sonofabitch, if you have something to say, come out here and say it to my face!" Roseboro yelled. Then he said to Alou: "If he doesn't shut his big mouth, he'll get a ball right behind his ear."
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Two days later, with Koufax and Marichal on the mound, things were still tense. In the top of the second, Marichal threw at the Dodgers' leadoff speedster, Maury Wills. Koufax responded in the bottom of the inning by sailing one over Willie Mays's head. Marichal responded in the top of the third by coming in on right fielder Ron Fairly, sending him to the ground. The ump, Shag Crawford, warned both benches.
"Who do you want me to get?" Koufax asked Roseboro, according to Rosengren's book.
"I'll take care of it," Roseboro replied.
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That's John Roseboro. A rock behind the plate, Roseboro, in the words of columnist Jim Murray, was a "no-nonsense, show-up-for-work guy... conscientious—and ballplayers who are, are in shorter supply than.400 hitters." He also knew how to fight, having been trained in boxing and karate.
Roseboro had more than baseball on his mind that day. A week before the game, he'd seen the Watts Riots engulf Los Angeles. One night, according to The Fight of Their Lives, he scooped up the guns around his house in south-central L.A. and kept vigil by the front door. By the time he and the Dodgers left for San Francisco, the riots had caused $40 million in property damage, 34 deaths, and more than 1,000 injuries. "I'd wake up in the morning and say to myself, 'Why are they playing games?'" Roseboro said, according to Rosengren.
But here he was anyway, playing games on Aug. 22. Marichal was leading off the bottom of the third. Everyone expected a brushback. Here's how John Rosengren describes what happened:
Koufax curved a pitch across the plate. Crawford called it a strike. Juan exhaled. He prepared to swing at the next pitch. Roseboro called for a fastball. Low and inside. Sandy delivered. Juan held off. John intentionally dropped the ball, moved behind Marichal to pick it up, and whizzed his throw past Juan's face. Marichal later said the ball clipped his ear. He turned to face Roseboro. "Why you do that, coño?!"he demanded. Roseboro, one of the strongest men in baseball, had decided that if Marichal challenged him, he was going to "annihilate" him. The 5-foot-11, 195-pound Roseboro dropped his mitt and stepped toward Marichal. "Fuck you and your mother!"
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"Game delayed, argument," read the Western Union ticker.
Marichal clubbed Roseboro with his Louisville Slugger, catching him above his left eye and opening up a two-inch gash. They staggered toward the pitcher's mound in a scrum, as players and coaches from both teams raced toward them. Crawford took down Marichal, who lay on his back, kicking. Willie Mays grabbed a bleeding Roseboro and helped restore peace, leading to another classic Leifer photo.
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After the 14-minute brawl, Mays homered off Koufax, and the Giants went on to win, 4-3.
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That's Giants second baseman Tito Fuentes, bat seemingly at the ready. If you watch film of the incident, you'll see that Fuentes plays no role in the fight. He never swings the bat, and in fact it gets plucked out of his hand as other players swarm the field. But he lends the photo a sinister air, as if he and Marichal are ganging up on the stricken Roseboro.
Fuentes, who would enjoy a long career as a bat-flipping showman, was 21 at the time. He'd debuted just a few days earlier, part of an influx of Latino players to which Sports Illustrated dedicated a remarkably ham-fisted story in its Aug. 9 issue. (The Giants had a number of Latino ballplayers: Marichal, Fuentes, Matty and Jesús Alou, and Orlando Cepeda.) "Caribbeans in general have the reputation for being temperamental, and the ballplayers are no exception,"Robert H. Boyle wrote, adding that because of his prideful bearing, "a Latin must be handled more tactfully than his American teammates. The Latin shows a tendency to take criticism, however well intentioned, as a personal affront." He also wrote that "Latins sometimes play with a reckless individuality. Indeed it is the individuality in baseball that they like."
The magazine would be echoed after the incident by columnists like Bob Broeg of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who wrote,"These young Caribbean hot bloods absolutely must be taught restraint."
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Esteemed photographer Neil Leifer was not supposed to be at Candlestick that afternoon because he had already shot the first three games of the series. But he convinced his assignment editor at Sports Illustrated, George Bloodgood, to allow him to stay over so he could concentrate on shooting Koufax and Marichal using color film.
He set up behind home plate, between the backstop and the first row of seats, in a narrow walkway that was primarily used for television cameras. Thus, he was perfectly positioned to shoot Marichal's Game of Thrones moment.
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Leifer, it should be noted, has made a habit of being in the right place at the right time to capture indelible moments in sports history. He snapped Ali standing over Liston in 1965 as well as Alan Ameche's touchdown in the gloaming in 1958.
The Marichal-Roseboro fight happened "so fast," Leifer told me recently, that he had "no idea" if he'd gotten the shot. All he knew was, he was on the 36 th frame of a 36-picture roll of film.
Yes, film: Remember that? "The two things you worried about in those days were focus and exposure—two things nobody worries about today," he said, referring to the advent of digital photography. "I wasn't too worried about the exposure—it was pretty basic because it was a sunny day—but the focus is never a sure thing. I was using a 180-millimeter lens, and I was probably about 80 feet from home plate. The only thing I knew was, mine was the only picture taken at field level. There was no one else down there."
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Leifer hand-carried the film back to New York that night. When the magazine's editors saw what he had, Leifer recalled, they changed the layout to make his photo the lead. His composition turned out to be excellent. The bodies and bats in the foreground and the stands in the background converge to frame Roseboro's falling body. Your eye is drawn to him as, arms extended, he crumbles to the grass as in a sacrifice.
The photograph appeared in the Aug. 30, 1965, edition of SI, accompanied by the text: "'Giants' pitcher Juan Marichal, swinging his bat like a henchman's ax, had opened a two-inch gash and raised a swelling the size of a cantaloupe on the left side of Roseboro's head.'"
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Like Roseboro, Marichal had things on his mind beyond baseball. He'd spent that whole summer worried sick about the safety of his family and his homeland as the Dominican Republic fractured into a violent civil war. A wealthy landowner with connections through his in-laws to the barbarous ruling Trujillo family, Marichal backed the conservative cause that would eventually regain the presidency in the form of Joaquín Balaguer. Earlier that year, President Lyndon Johnson, fearing a "second Cuba" was in the offing, had sent U.S. forces to the D.R. in an attempt to assert order in the country. "I really don't think Juan should have been playing at all," Willie Mays would later tell The New York Times. "He was pretty strung out, full of fear and anger, and holding it inside."
Marichal received the balance of the blame for the fight. He was suspended for eight playing dates—two starts, essentially—and fined $1,750. Roseboro went so far as to sue Marichal, eventually settling out of court for $7,500. The Dodgers wound up winning the '65 National League pennant by two games over the Giants.
It would be years before Roseboro admitted his own role in touching off the brawl. "It was intentional all right," he said in his autobiography, Glory Days with the Dodgers, and Other Days with Others (written with Bill Libby) in 1978, referring to his ear-grazing throw. "I meant for him to feel it." He'd been steeling himself for a fight, too. "I was so mad I'd made up my mind that if he protested, I was going after him. He protested, so I started out of my crouch. … I went to hit him with a punch, and he hit me with his bat."
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Which brings us back to Leifer's photograph, a perfect shot that in a way was too perfect, too articulate, too neatly resonant with the major themes of the day. It showed, or seemed to show, the martyrdom of Johnny Roseboro at a time when Civil Rights advocates were being pummeled by firehoses, German shepherds, and, yes, baseball bats. It showed, or seemed to show, the embodiment of the prevailing stereotype of the "hot-tempered" Latino ballplayer, even though Marichal was anything but hot-tempered.
Great photos tell their own stories, occasionally at the expense of the events being depicted. You think of Leifer's other famous photograph from that year, the one of Muhammad Ali exulting over the stricken Sonny Liston. Through the prism of Ali's greatness, it's seen as a portrait of dominance, such that it blots out the squalid and hinky circumstances of the fight and the knockout itself. Leifer captured Marichal's disproportionate response in such a way that few people remember or even care about the provocation.
Roseboro and Marichal would eventually strike up a friendship. When Marichal's Hall of Fame candidacy ran aground on sportswriters' lingering memories of the fight, Roseboro began to stump for his old nemesis. Upon election in 1983, Marichal phoned up Roseboro to tell him the news.
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"I'm going to Cooperstown," he said, as recounted in The Fight of Their Lives. "Thank you. Thank you."
Then the two men cried together.
Related: Doping, Cheating, And Insta-Celebrity: The Story Behind The First Great Sports Action Photograph, Taken In 1908
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David Davis is the author of Showdown at Shepherd's Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze (St. Martin's).Ever since Vogel's studies in the 1970s it has been known that acute deprivation, particularly deprivation of REM sleep, produces a positive effect on people with. The extremely depressed person feels much better if he goes without REM sleep for a night or two. The suicidally depressed patient may forget the idea of suicide for a few hours or days if he is deprived of REM for a night or two. These basic observations have been confirmed many times since the 1970s (see the reading list below) but the question as to how REM deprivation helps depression has been left unanswered.
Despite the dramatic beneficial effects on serious depression we still have no idea as to why REM deprivation alleviates, at least temporarily, major depression. This is a very surprising fact. You would think that any clue or lead on what kinds of treatment work for major depression would be followed up on with major pushes in the research arena backed up by major funding streams from the National Institutes of. But the voices of depressed people, apparently, are not as loud as the voices of other health-related interest groups so funding for depression studies has never been adequate to the scale fo the problem.
A recent study, however, has managed to throw some fascinating light on the relations between acute sleep deprivation and alleviation of depression.
Gujar N, Yoo SS, Hu P, and Walker MP. of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California have recently reported (Gujar et al., Sleep deprivation amplifies reactivity of brain reward networks, biasing the appraisal of positive emotional experiences. J Neurosci. 2011 Mar 23;31(12):4466-74) that sleep deprivation amplifies reactivity throughout human mesolimbic reward brain networks in response to pleasure-evoking stimuli. In addition, this amplified reactivity was associated with a biased increase in the number of emotional stimuli judged as pleasant in the sleep-deprived group. Interestingly the degree of toward labeling incoming stimuli ‘positive' when in the sleep deprived state was correlated with activity in mesolimbic regions. In short, it appears that acute sleep deprivation increases reactivity in reward networks of the brain. The older neurobiological literature on REM deprivation in animals suggested that motivational and drive related states were heightened during after REM deprivation as animals seemed much more attuned to reinforcing and pleasureable stimuli. These facts led the older researchers to suggest that the normal function of REM was to dampen down pleasureable or motivational states or that REM functioned to re-tune catecholaminergic synapses throughout the brain. In any case both the older literature and the newer data suggest that REM specializes in handling negative motivational and appetitive states and thus it should not be surprising that REM deprivation has a potent if temporary anti-depressant effect. Nor should it be surprizing that REM indices are virtually always elevated in major depression. It seems that major depression is fueled at least in part by a kind of dis-inhibition of REM physiology.
Relevant articles
Agargun, M.Y., & Cartwright, R. (2003). REM sleep, dream variables and in depressed patients. Psychiatry Research, 119(1-2), 33-39.
Agargun, M. Y., Cilli, A. S., Kara, H., Tarhan, N., Kincir, F., & Oz, H. (1998). Repetitive frightening dreams and suicidal behavior in patients with major depression. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 39, 198-202.
Agargun, M. Y., Besiroglu, L., Cilli, A. S., Gulec, M., Aydin, A., Inci, R., et al. (2007). Nightmares, suicide attempts, and melancholic features in patients with unipolar major depression. Journal of Affective Disorders, 98, 267-270.
American Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association Press.
Antrobus, J.S. (1983). REM and NREM sleep reports: Comparison of word frequencies by cognitive classes. Psychophysiology, 20, 562-568.
Armitage, R. (2007). Sleep and circadian rhythms in mood disorders. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 115(s433), 104-115.
Balkin, T. J., Braun, A. R |
. Killer Mike and El-P are a force, they have chemistry that is unparalleled in live music. They create an atmosphere and energy force that the crowd feeds off. Their lyrics, the crowd, the energy and the relentless and heavy beats are all near flawless. This all comes together to create one of the best live shows anywhere in the world. Being part of it at Hulaween is a must see/experience event.
Go see RTJ if:
You Like Rowdy Hip Hop
You Feed Off The Energy from the Crowd
Catchy and Heavy Beats Make You Move Your Feets
You Enjoy Robbing People in the Streets
Moon Taxi
I first heard of Moon Taxi when they played at Hangout Fest in 2014. They covered a ton of Rage Against the Machine and absolutely killed it. After their set I decided get a few of their albums. While their studio stuff is very different than RATM, it was still some awesome stuff. Alt rockers at their core, Moon Taxi put on an amazing live show. I had the pleasure of seeing them again at Okeechobee Fest 2017 and they did not disappoint.
Go see Moon Taxi if:
Long Haired Front Men Get You Going
You Like a Good Alt Rock Band
You Want to See a RATM Song Covered Correctly
Space Jesus
I don’t really know how to explain Space Jesus, so bare with me. Space Jesus is a Brooklyn based Messiah who rains down dirty bass from far off electronic lands upon all of his apostles. He is a welcome new sound to the now over flooded EDM scene. His live sets are absolutely insane. He has a religious following of die hard fans that bring an astonishing amount of energy to his already wild sets.
Go See Space Jesus if:
You Love Bass
You Want Some Different Type of Dub Step
Wubba Lubba Dub Dub
You’re Ready to Sweat
Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats
Do you like lyrically driven folk rock? A leading man who can control a crowd with hypnotist like abilities? Stomping your feet and dancing along with 1,000’s of other people? Taking shots of whiskey in the middle of a hot summer day? If you answered yes to any of those questions then you need to see Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats. I saw Nathaniel Rateliff before he was with the Night Sweats in 2013, he opened for Dr. Dog and The Lumineers, his set was heartfelt, packed with energy and extremely memorable.
Rateliff has been doing this for a long time, his recent jump to fame came when he formed his newest band. Their song “S.O.B” felt like an overnight sensation, helping NR&NS tour across the world.
Go See Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats live if:
See questions 1-4 in paragraph 1 of this section.
Jacob Banks
“Born in Nigeria, Jacob Banks moved to Birmingham in England at the age of 13. Not short of talent, the Brit dabbled in all forms of the creative arts and began singing, playing guitar, and writing songs at the age of 20. A music lover first and foremost, Banks got his start at open mic nights and quickly garnered a following for his commanding vocal presence and daringly intimate songwriting. His music features richly textured beats, with its 808s and synth play, African inspired grooves and a soulful disposition that culminates in an unstoppable new sound. His stage presence leaves you wanting a bit more, but trust me, he has the voice of an angel.
There are dozens of more acts I want to see at Hulaween; Portugal the Man, RL Grime, Disco Biscuits, String Cheese (obviously, they’re Gods), Future Rock, Kamasi Washington and the Jon Stickley Trio just to name a few. Hulaween’s lineup is diverse and stacked as usual, but this festival is about way more than just the music. I always try to catch as many sets as possible, but sometimes there are things going on beyond the music that can captivate you.
If you haven’t purchased your tickets to Hulaween yet, get on that now, they’re selling out fast. I hope to see you there!It comes as no real surprise, but today Milestone have confirmed that MXGP3 will soon be making its way to a console or PC near you.
Arriving in the Spring of 2017, on Xbox One, PS4 and PC, MXGP3 – The Official Motocross Videogame is based on the 2016 season, giving players the most dynamic, enjoyable motocross experience yet. With innovative visuals and new techniques being allowed by Unreal Engine 4, they’ll be taking MXGP3 to the next level.
Dynamic, rather unpredictable weather conditions will be in place, with the change from sun to heavy rain influencing every rider’s visibility. The highly-deformable ground, mud and dust will however be the greatest challenge – mastering that could well be key to your motocross success.
There will also be an in depth career mode, enhanced customisation, all the official MXGP and MX2 2016 riders, official tracks including MXoN and both offline and online modes available.
MXGP3 promises to be more than real! Check out the announcement trailer below.The problem wasn't just one of lacking outreach by Nintendo to third-party developers -- though that was instrumental in the case of the GameCube -- but one of control: the Wii controller is dramatically different from that of the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. The economics of development dictate creating a single game that's able to be published on several co-existing consoles, and the Wii controller means developers either create a game built solely for the Wii, or try to shoehorn in controls made for another console.
Meanwhile, both Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation 2 controllers are, if anything, built for the first-person shooter. Dual analog triggers on the rear offer a meager, albeit meaningful, level of precision; pressure sensitivity helps to circumvent the lacking hyper-precision of a mouse/keyboard, offering one trigger to pull up a gun's sights, while the other is used to fire rounds. The importance of those analog triggers cannot be understated, in everything from the annual Call of Duty game to one-off entries like Bulletstorm -- pressure-sensitive triggers really matter when it comes to this genre. Sony and Microsoft clearly understand that, making the rear analog triggers all the more effective with the DualShock 3 and Xbox 360 gamepad.
Nintendo, however, will remain out of the game with the Wii U (at least for now) -- the Wii U tablet controller and the Wii U Pro Controller both feature digital rear triggers. Rather than pressure-sensitive ones with gradation, they're essentially buttons. In the context of Nintendo's biggest first-party games -- Mario, Zelda, etc. -- this likely won't matter. If anything, my time with the Wii U's controllers has been overwhelmingly positive. But when Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 arrives next week, I'll have a chance to test my theory with a modern console shooter: the Wii U controllers are going to keep first-person shooters from gaining any traction on Nintendo's new system. And that's to say nothing of the racing genre, which is impacted even more greatly by the situation.
Perhaps developers will figure out a creative solution employing the Wii U's tablet gamepad in place of analog triggers? Perhaps! Perhaps Nintendo will amend its triggers to appease FPS players like myself? Perhaps! As it stands, however, I'm worried that America's most popular gaming genre may once more be passed over by America's favorite console manufacturer.Whether you like it or not, One Million Moms, the right-wing group notorious for getting worked up over everything from Toys 'R' Us to Chobani yogurt, is back.
This time, the group has its sights set on ABC's "The Muppets," arguing that the hotly-anticipated ABC reboot is "not what Jim Henson imagined and created" for the series in its original, 1970s incarnation, "The Muppet Show."
In a petition on their official website, One Million Moms members slammed the new show's more mature focus, arguing that its tone is no longer "family-friendly" and calling for ABC to drop its plans to air the program, which premiered Sept. 22.
"The puppet characters loved by kids in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond are now weighing in on abortion and promiscuity," they wrote. Pointing to Miss Piggy self-identifying as "a pro-choice feminist" and how Kermit the Frog "doesn't wear pants," they continued, "Many parents unknowingly will let their children watch an episode only to find out its perverted nature too late, unless they are alerted ahead of time... How many parents want to explain the punchline of sexually charged jokes to young children?"
"The Muppets" has, of course, taken a decidedly mature approach in terms of marketing, with Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog announcing their "split" during an ABC summer press tour and advertisements touting the show's "full-frontal nudity."
While "The Muppets" is very much a 21st century take, One Million Moms seems to forget that Henson always intended his now-iconic characters to appeal to audiences of all ages with a grown-up sense of humor.
"Small children will love the cute and cuddly characters. Young people will love the fresh and innovative comedy," the muppeteer, who died in 1990, wrote in his original 1976 pitch for "The Muppet Show," Tech Times reports. "College kids and intellectual eggheads will love the underlying symbolism of everything. Freaky, long-haired, cynical hippies will love our freaky, long-haired, cynical muppets because that is what show business is all about."
While 'The Muppets" has so far received mixed reviews, don't expect ABC honchos to fret about One Million Moms, which is a division of the American Family Association, anytime soon. After all, the group is perhaps best known for an attempted boycott of JCPenney after the retail chain hired Ellen DeGeneres as its spokeswoman.
That boycott, which even Bill O'Reilly found ridiculous, was a downright spectacular fail.
Also on HuffPost:How Do They Do It: Timers in Go
How Do They Do It: Timers in Go
This article covers the internal implementation of timers in Go. Note that there are a lot of links to Go repo in this article, I recommend to follow them to understand the material better.
Timers
Timers in Go just do something after a period of time. They are located in the standard package time. In particular, timers are time.Timer, time.Ticker, and less obvious timer time.Sleep. It’s not clear from the documentation how timers work exactly. Some people think that each timer spawns its own goroutine which exists until the timer’s deadline is reached because that’s how we’d implement timers in “naive” way in Go. We can check that assumption with the small program:
package main import ( "fmt" "os" "runtime/debug" "time" ) func main() { debug.SetTraceback( "system" ) if len(os.Args) == 1 { panic( "before timers" ) } for i := 0; i < 10000; i++ { time.AfterFunc(time.Duration(5*time.Second), func () { fmt.Println( "Hello!" ) }) } panic( "after timers" ) }
It prints all goroutine traces before timers spawned if run without arguments and after timers spawned if any argument is passed. We need those shady panics because otherwise there is no easy way to see runtime goroutines - they’re excluded from runtime.NumGoroutines and runtime.Stack, so the only way to see them is crash(refer to golang/go#9791 for reasons). Let’s see how many goroutines Go spawns before spawning any timers:
go run afterfunc.go 2>&1 | grep "^goroutine" | wc -l 4
and after spawning 10k timers:
go run afterfunc.go after 2>&1 | grep "^goroutine" | wc -l 5
Whoa! It’s only one goroutine, in my case its trace looks like:
goroutine 5 [syscall]: runtime.notetsleepg(0x5014b8, 0x12a043838, 0x0) /home/moroz/go/src/runtime/lock_futex.go:205 +0x42 fp=0xc42002bf40 sp=0xc42002bf10 runtime.timerproc() /home/moroz/go/src/runtime/time.go:209 +0x2ec fp=0xc42002bfc0 sp=0xc42002bf40 runtime.goexit() /home/moroz/go/src/runtime/asm_amd64.s:2160 +0x1 fp=0xc42002bfc8 sp=0xc42002bfc0 created by runtime.addtimerLocked /home/moroz/go/src/runtime/time.go:116 +0xed
Let’s take a look at why there’s only one additional goroutine.
runtime.timer
All timers are based on the same data structure - runtime.timer. To add new timer, you need to instantiate runtime.timer and pass it to the function runtime.startTimer. Here is example from time package:
func NewTimer(d Duration) *Timer { c := make( chan Time, 1) t := &Timer{ C: c, r: runtimeTimer{ when: when(d), f: sendTime, arg: c, }, } startTimer(&t.r) return t }
So, here we’re converting duration to an exact timestamp when timer should call function f with argument c. There are three types of function f used in package time:
sendTime - sends current time to the channel or discards it if send blocks. Used in time.Timer and time.Ticker.
goFunc - executes some function in a goroutine. Used in time.AfterFunc.
goroutineReady - wakes up a specific goroutine. Used in runtime.timeSleep which is linked to time.Sleep.
So, now we understand what timers look like in the runtime and what they are supposed to do. Now let’s see how the runtime stores timers and calls functions when it’s time to call them.
runtime.timers
runtime.timers is just a Heap data structure. Heap is very useful when you want to repeatedly find extremum (minimum or maximum) among some elements. In our case extremum is a timer with closest when to the current time. Very convenient, isn’t it? So, let’s see what algorithmic complexity the operations with timers for the worst case:
add new timer - O(log(n))
delete timer - O(log(n))
spawning timers functions - O(log(n))
So, if you have 1 million timers, the number of operations with heap will usually be less than 1000(log(1kk) ~= 20, but spawning can require multiple minimum deletions, because multiple timers can reach their deadline at about the same time). It’s very fast and all the work is happening in a separate goroutine, so it doesn’t block. The siftupTimer and siftdownTimer functions are used for maintaining heap properties. But data structures don’t work on their own; something should use them. In our case it’s just one goroutine with the function timerproc. It’s spawned on first timer start.
runtime.timerproc
It’s kinda hard to describe what’s going on without source code, so this section will be in the form of commented Go code. Code is a direct copy from the src/runtime/time.go file with added comments.
// Add a timer to the heap and start or kick the timerproc if the new timer is // earlier than any of the others. func addtimerLocked(t *timer) { // when must never be negative; otherwise timerproc will overflow // during its delta calculation and never expire other runtime·timers. if t.when < 0 { t.when = 1<<63 - 1 } t.i = len(timers.t) timers.t = append(timers.t, t) // maintain heap invariant siftupTimer(t.i) // new time is on top if t.i == 0 { // siftup moved to top: new earliest deadline. if timers.sleeping { // wake up sleeping goroutine, put to sleep with notetsleepg in timerproc() timers.sleeping = false notewakeup(&timers.waitnote) } if timers.rescheduling { // run parked goroutine, put to sleep with goparkunlock in timerproc() timers.rescheduling = false goready(timers.gp, 0) } } if!timers.created { // run timerproc() goroutine only once timers.created = true go timerproc() } } // Timerproc runs the time-driven events. // It sleeps until the next event in the timers heap. // If addtimer inserts a new earlier event, addtimerLocked wakes timerproc early. func timerproc() { // set timer goroutine timers.gp = getg() // forever loop for { lock(&timers.lock) // mark goroutine not sleeping timers.sleeping = false now := nanotime() delta := int64(-1) // iterate over timers in heap starting from [0] for { // there are no more timers, exit iterating loop if len(timers.t) == 0 { delta = -1 break } t := timers.t[0] delta = t.when - now if delta > 0 { break } // t.period means that it's ticker, so change when and move down // in heap to execute it again after t.period. if t.period > 0 { // leave in heap but adjust next time to fire t.when += t.period * (1 + -delta/t.period) siftdownTimer(0) } else { // remove from heap // this is just removing from heap operation: // - swap first(extremum) with last // - set last to nil // - maintain heap: move first to its true place with siftdownTimer. last := len(timers.t) - 1 if last > 0 { timers.t[0] = timers.t[last] timers.t[0].i = 0 } timers.t[last] = nil timers.t = timers.t[:last] if last > 0 { siftdownTimer(0) } // set i to -1, so concurrent deltimer won't do anything to // heap. t.i = -1 // mark as removed } f := t.f arg := t.arg seq := t.seq unlock(&timers.lock) if raceenabled { raceacquire(unsafe.Pointer(t)) } // call timer function without lock f(arg, seq) lock(&timers.lock) } // if delta < 0 - timers is empty, set "rescheduling" and park timers // goroutine. It will sleep here until "goready" call in addtimerLocked. if delta < 0 || faketime > 0 { // No timers left - put goroutine to sleep. timers.rescheduling = true goparkunlock(&timers.lock, "timer goroutine (idle)", traceEvGoBlock, 1) continue } // At least one timer pending. Sleep until then. // If we have some timers in heap, we're sleeping until it's time to // spawn soonest of them. notetsleepg will sleep for `delta` period or // until notewakeup in addtimerLocked. // notetsleepg fills timers.waitnote structure and put goroutine to sleep for some time. // timers.waitnote can be used to wakeup this goroutine with notewakeup. timers.sleeping = true noteclear(&timers.waitnote) unlock(&timers.lock) notetsleepg(&timers.waitnote, delta) } }
There are two variables which I think deserve explanation: rescheduling and sleeping. They both indicate that the goroutine was put to sleep, but different synchronization mechanisms are used, let’s discuss them.
sleeping is set when all “current” timers are processed, but there are more which we need to spawn in future. It uses OS-based synchronization, so it calls some OS syscalls to put to sleep and wake up the goroutine and syscalls means it spawns OS threads for this. It uses note structure and next functions for synchronization:
noteclear - resets note state.
notetsleepg - puts goroutine to sleep until notewakeup is called or after some period of time (in case of timers it’s time until next timer). This func fills timers.waitnote with “pointer to timer goroutine”.
is called or after some period of time (in case of timers it’s time until next timer). This func fills with “pointer to timer goroutine”. notewakeup - wakes up goroutine which called notetsleepg.
notewakeup might be called in addtimerLocked if the new timer is “earlier” than the previous “earliest” timer.
rescheduling is set when there are no timers in our heap, so nothing to do. It uses the go scheduler to put the goroutine to sleep with function goparkunlock. Unlike notetsleepg it does not consume any OS resources, but also does not support “wakeup timeout” so it can’t be used instead of notetsleepg in the sleeping branch. The goready function is used for waking up the goroutine when a new timer is added with addTimerLocked.
Conclusion
We learned how Go timers work “under the hood” - the runtime neither uses one goroutine per timer, nor are timers “free” to use. It’s important to understand how things work to avoid premature optimizations. Also, we learned that it’s quite easy to read runtime code and you shouldn’t be afraid to do so. I hope you enjoyed this reading and will share info to your fellow Gophers.Ben Carson, left, and Donald Trump. Screenshot/CNN
In one of the stranger moments in CNN’s Wednesday-night Republican debate, moderator Jake Tapper pitted Donald Trump—who is most definitely not a doctor—against retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson on the subject of Vaccines: Do They Cause Autism or Not? The answer, as Carson explained, is absolutely not. But Trump had his right of reply:
“Autism has become an epidemic. Twenty-five years ago, 35 years ago, you look at the statistics, not even close. It has gotten totally out of control,” Trump said. “I am totally in favor of vaccines. But I want smaller doses over a longer period of time. Same exact amount, but you take this little beautiful baby, and you pump—I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child, and we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me.”
He added: “Just the other day, 2 years old, 2½ years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.” Trump did not elaborate on whose child he was talking about.
Autism rates are going up, it’s true, but experts have ruled out vaccines as the cause. One of the likely reasons is that diagnosis techniques are catching more cases.
Claiming that you’re not opposed to vaccines, just that you want them to be safer or on a different schedule, is a common deflection technique among anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists. As Trump demonstrated, it’s a way to position yourself as reasonable while still perpetuating the false belief that getting your jabs is going to destroy your brain. Meanwhile, there’s no evidence that vaccines are safer if they’re spaced out more—all that does is open a window to disease exposure and increase the risk that a child could miss a vaccine altogether.
Politically, the moment was a perfect summation of Donald Trump’s candidacy: his ability to pair off-the-charts self-confidence with complete ignorance about whatever subject he’s opining about. His fans swoon over his braggadacio and willingness to speak his mind. But when those talents are paired with an utter disregard for the facts, that kind of confidence is dangerous.
Read more of Slate’s coverage of the GOP primary.Ka’Nard Allen has been shot twice in his 10-year-old life. On May 12 he went with his mother to the annual Mother’s Day second line parade in New Orleans. When two gunmen shot into the line of participants—men, women and children—Ka’Nard’s cheek was struck by a bullet. Eighteen other people were wounded including a 10-year-old girl. Less than a year ago, at Ka’Nard’s 10th birthday party in his front yard, his five-year-old cousin Brianna Allen was fatally shot by an AK-47, and he was shot in the neck.
Now, with his 11th birthday coming up on May 29, Ka’Nard’s mother doesn’t know where to have the party. He wants to go to a hotel, swim in the pool, and stay overnight, he told a reporter for the Times-Picayune, but his mother said she can’t afford it. She doesn’t know where to let him play that will be safe, and he remains at risk because she can’t afford to move.
I have written this before and I write it again now: The psychological and emotional toll of gun violence on children, whether they are bystanders or victims, can be overwhelming and last for years.
A recent screening of 232 New Orleans middle school students who were part of a teen pregnancy prevention program found that 44 percent had someone close to them murdered, 29 percent had witnessed an assault with a weapon, and 14 percent had witnessed a murder. More than half the children classified concerns about “personal safety” as a source of worry, more than twice the number who worried about “being unloved.” “At least a third of our kids are experiencing symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which on a simple level means it is hard to attend school and do well,” said Dr. Denese Shervington, a psychiatrist who heads the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies that ran the program and conducted the screening.
John C. Raphael, the pastor of a church in the neighborhood where Ka’Nard lives, told Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Cass on assignment for the Children’s Defense Fund that children who regularly hear gunfire and see dead bodies on the street become acclimatized to violence and learn that violence is the way to solve conflicts. “They’re afraid but they can’t escape so they harden themselves to survive. They become numb to what should be emotionally disturbing and accept it as a norm, as the community does.”
As a nation we seem to be hardened and numb to what should be emotionally disturbing when we cannot legislate the most modest and reasonable measures for national gun safety even after children in as seemingly safe a place as Newtown, Connecticut, far from an inner city, can be shot down in school. We are numb when the same child can be shot one year at his own birthday party and shot again the next year at a Mother’s Day parade and both shootings are just another day on our cities’ streets. Why are we not all calling our legislators and expressing outrage? How can we let the voices of gun dealers and manufacturers drown out the cries of children?
Pastor Raphael pointed out another consequence of rampant gun violence in places like New Orleans, Chicago, and Newark: Young men become locked into a situation where they feel they have to retaliate to protect themselves and to be respected. When a culture teaches its children that violence is a way to resolve conflicts, “if your brother or friend is shot, you think you have to strike back,” he said. “Sometimes, the family members or friends of the shooter assume you will retaliate and go after you preemptively.”
Retaliation is said to be the motive for the Mother’s Day shooting. Police said that the brothers, aged 19 and 24, who are charged with the crime, were part of a loosely organized neighborhood drug gang and were shooting at a member or members of a rival group. The shooting was related to two previous ones, police said. The childhood experiences of the accused brothers have not been revealed, but it would take numbness to violence to shoot into a crowd with women and children.
In Pastor Raphael’s view, New Orleans “has a spiritual problem. It is beyond criminal. It is a spiritual problem when in a high population area you see children and you shoot into them.”Steinkraus spends the next several hours explaining to inspector Jen Silverman how he grows his plants – with love and painstaking care, but without pesticides. That’s because this hot August day is the first-ever inspection for Colorado’s new pesticide-free cannabis certification, administered by the Organic Cannabis Association (OCA). Denver Bud Company is the first grower to ever pursue it.
“You guys are the pioneers,” Silverman says to Steinkraus. “I’m just the link between producer and certifier. I’m here to make sure the liability is shared, and very transparent.”
Silverman, notebook in hand, listens intently as Steinkraus describes his pest care regimen for the mother plants. To control pests, he says, he mixes reverse osmosis water with rosemary oil and eucalyptus oil. “Every four, five days, I’ll give the plants that nice organic spray of essential oils,” he says.
Silverman counsels Steinkraus to add the rosemary-eucalyptus spray to the pest plan he’ll submit as part of certification. They discuss his other pest prevention measures: an organic soil mixture, proper airflow and ventilation in the room, a neem-oil based miticide used on occasion.
Everything Steinkraus uses is “OMRI Listed” – certified by the Organic Materials Review Institute, the organization that actually decides whether a product is organic under the USDA National Organic Program. Silverman, who’s been doing USDA organic certification on farms of all sorts for more than 12 years, shares best practices with Steinkraus as they walk the floor. To be clear, this is not an organic inspection. Cannabis is still a federally illegal substance and thus can’t be called “organic,” nor can it be certified organic by the USDA or otherwise – but everyone in the room believes it’s only a matter of time before that changes. Pesticide-free, in a sense, is the launch pad.
In the vegetative room – or “veg” room, where baby clones become teen plants – they begin sampling. Steinkraus dons sterile gloves, dips his clippers in alcohol, clips a few leaves from a plant toward the front of the room. He slips the leaves into a sample baggie, which Silverman labels with the room number and plant number – the same number assigned by Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting Compliance, or METRC, to trace every cannabis plant on the Colorado market from seed to shelf. Steinkraus and OCA cofounder Ben Gelt look on as Silverman weighs the baggie.
“Two grams,” Silverman says. “This is sample number one.”
They repeat the process, clipping samples from plants at the middle and back of the room. Silverman seals the baggies inside a larger bag labeled with the room number. They follow the same procedure for both veg rooms. Later, they heat seal the larger bags to prevent tampering. It’s up to Denver Bud Company to safely store these samples and transport them to the lab to be tested for pesticide residues. In a few days, Denver Bud Company will receive an OCA inspection report.
“Based on what we heard today, it sounds like there may be some small adjustments Jen will recommend,” Gelt says. A second site inspection will follow, and Silverman will sample from the flowering room. Down the road, she’ll pay a surprise visit, too. If all goes well, Denver Bud Company will have pesticide-free certification within a few months.
This process is designed to be even more rigorous than USDA organic certification, Gelt says, requiring up to four inspections and as many rounds of samples. The price tag starts at $5,000, and certification and the distinctive pesticide-free label both last one year. Hundreds of growers have inquired about the process, and more than a dozen are already in line for their first inspection. OCA hopes to complete at least five certifications in Colorado by year’s end, and enter other states where recreational cannabis is legal by early 2017. With the ability to charge a premium for their certified product – it’s unclear exactly how much more, but organic foods sell for an average of 47 percent more than conventional food, according to a recent study – growers like Josh Egle, founder of Denver Bud Company, say the process will pay for itself.
And Egle welcomes the rigor. He’s been committed to growing marijuana without pesticides for years; even before he entered the industry, he grew organic weed for his mother to treat her multiple sclerosis – and OCA is finally providing a way to legitimize his approach and provide consumers with a genuine pesticide-free option. “We got into this business to be the good guys,” Egle says. “It’s important to me that the product we put out is helping people instead of hurting people.”
For OCA founder John-Paul Maxfield, who also owns Waste Farmers and Maxfield’s, an organic soil company, creating a pesticide-free certification is all part of the pursuit to make the world a more sustainable place through better agricultural practices. Pesticide-free certification is crucial in helping the cannabis industry catch up with food, he says, and allows consumers to choose their cannabis with the same values they apply to food.
“The goal is to incentivize safe growing practices through market mechanisms,” Maxfield says. “Encouraging clean, sustainable and ultimately organic methods through certification will help create differentiation in the marketplace.”
“Nobody likes fucking chemicals. Nobody likes shitty practices that destroy the planet,” he adds. “The issue is, they don’t know about it.”The North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) has fined Duke Energy a record $25 million for the years of ground water contamination around its Sutton power facility in Wilmington.
Duke previously acknowledged the problem in 2013.
The $25 million fine is four times larger than the previous record of $5.7 million fine in an 1986 air quality case. The money from the fine goes to a state fund for public schools.
Duke has 30 days to appeal.
Groundwater problems have been detected at all 14 of Duke’s North Carolina coal facilities, half of which it shut down the last few years. The company is assessing the extent of the contamination.
Duke is required to close its 32 ash ponds at the coal plant sites by 2029, with the ponds at Sutton facing a 2019 deadline.
The Raleigh News & Observer reports that the Asheville power plant in “next on the list in what’s expected to be a string of fines.”
That’s only part of the bad news for Duke this week. The company, which is the largest electric firm in the U.S., also said it will pay nearly $150 milloion to settle shareholder claims that they lost millions when the company fired its CEO hours after its 2012 buyout of Raleigh-based Progress Energy.While Tony Abbott spent the week leaning on taxpayer dollars in a glory tour of Europe, his supporters were boosting his stocks back home.
An untold disaster of a prime minister, Abbott can best be described as a man of bizarre instincts – knighting Prince Philip, bragging that he is the guy with the hot daughters and eating a raw onion (twice). Politically he is kryptonite, his support for a cause generally setting it up for failure. He was the man who led the original campaign to bring down Pauline Hanson, who attacked a man dying of asbestos poisoning, who vowed to take on Vladimir Putin shortly before he became a global conservative icon, who was a “remainer” until deciding he supported Brexit after the vote.
A Bradburyesque political victor with incredible unpopularity, Abbott only ever really had the support of conservative columnists with an overwhelming loathing of Malcolm Turnbull. Abbott’s week on the road will have them saying that he is looking “prime ministerial” and ready to come back to rule over a shitshow of a parliament. Whatever the result, the WA election this weekend will be seen as a harbinger of the chaos to come for conservative politics.
The fact that Abbott and his supporters dare to show their faces again speaks to the extent of the crisis in the Liberal Party. As Norman Abjorensen recently noted, their raison d’être seems to be keeping Labor out of power. They cannot formulate, let alone agree on, any policy because they’re instinctively conservative but philosophically destitute.
Howard and Costello’s age of cosying up to the middle class is over; the Liberal Party’s free market zeal, once used to undermine Rudd and Gillard, is now under siege from the right amid a global nationalistic economic zeitgeist. The Liberals only live to oppose the inevitable: renewable energy, gay marriage, and any form of fiscal policy outside of spending or tax cuts. And now they’re paying the price for their regressive politics, whether it be over housing prices, climate change, penalty rates, Centrelink and pension payments, or the cascading disasters in the energy market.
To many in the Liberal Party, Abbott is a form of Catholic mystic, a Saint Sebastian wearing the arrows. Forever begging forgiveness before asking permission, he retains his stature in spite of continual failure because he has something that almost everyone in the Liberal Party does not. He has pre-politics: a set of strongly held beliefs that form a coherent world view and that speak to something.
The majority of the party room are middle-aged lawyers drifting in the breeze, wanting to do something but unsure of exactly what. They are unsuccessful Turnbulls. The prime minister’s once stratospheric popularity gave them hope beyond electoral success. He offered them hope that they too could muddle along with tepid statements and policy tweaks, bearing timidity and the narcissism of the small difference. Their political id is Jean-Claude Juncker, former Luxembourg prime minister turned European Commission president, who once noted that “we all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it”.
The Liberal Party will tear like tissue in the lead-up to the next election, and it won’t be over policy. It will cleave between those trying to find hope in the mirror and those looking to the martyr on the cross.
Today’s links“Godot has arrived,” wrote Edward Yardeni, who had been one of Wall Street’s most relentlessly upbeat forecasters. “I’ve been rooting for the muddling through scenario. However, the credit crisis continues to worsen and has become a full-blown credit crunch, which is depressing the real economy.”
The convulsions in the credit markets were spurred in part when Thornburg Mortgage, one of the nation’s biggest independent mortgage lenders, and Carlyle Capital, the offspring of one of the country’s largest private equity firms, failed to meet demands by lenders to post more cash or pledge other assets, also known as margin calls, on debts that had been backed by packages of mortgages.
Fed |
on-demand content like podcasts will completely replace broadcast media pretty quickly.
The big challenge for podcasters going forward will be the increasing professionalization of the medium. Podcasters without corporate backing or a pre-existing fanbase will find it more and more difficult to get noticed, which will make podcasting more like radio and TV and less like the quirky hobbyist space that it’s been.
SCy-Fy: What advice would you give anyone presenting podcasts?
DBK: Create something you’re proud of and that has lasting value. Too many podcasts consist of inane chitchat and unsuccessful attempts at humor. People listen to crass, mindless banter on the radio because they’re stuck in their car and have no choice. Podcasts can’t waste people’s time like that. Try to make every second count.
SCy-Fy: Your most useful resources?
DBK: I like The Wolf Den and Podcasters’ Roundtable for news and tips for podcasters.
SCy-Fy: Points to watch out for in making podcasts?
DBK: Don’t keep cutting and pasting your intro music from the show before, because each time you export to MP3 the audio quality gets worse. I made that mistake in the early days.
Also, people get really upset if your interview is just a list of pre-planned questions. Try to ask at least one follow up question on each point you cover, and try to make each question flow naturally from the guest’s previous response.
SCy-Fy: Things that have kept you going in hard times?
DBK: As a kid I desperately wanted to read interviews with science fiction authors, but there were none available. If I could have listened to a show like Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, I would have been in heaven. I like to tell myself that there are kids out there now who love the show that much, and really that’s what keeps me going, though of course these days there’s a lot more information available on any topic. Sometimes people write me fan letters or send me money, which is always a big boost.
SCy-Fy: Any controversy so far?
DBK: There’s been very little controversy among people who have actually listened to the show, which surprises me a bit because we do cover some pretty controversial topics. One person recently thought we should have had a religious perspective in our discussion of Ridley Scott’s Exodus movie.
That’s about as much controversy as we get with the actual podcast. But hundreds of people post angry comments to our posts on Wired.com, over every stupid thing you could imagine, but as far as I can tell none of those people have ever actually listened to the podcast. Wired.com sometimes gives our posts attention-grabbing headlines that aren’t really a good match for the actual article, and this drives some commenters into apoplectic fits of rage. Not surprisingly, our headline “Lawrence Krauss Believes in Star Trek, Not God” drew several hundred angry comments, though actually I’d say that a humorous headline about Amazon.com being evil actually drew the most livid, scandalized responses. You never know.
SCy-Fy: The most popular show you’ve presented?
DBK: Our recent episode on Queers Destroy Science Fiction, a special crowdfunded issue of Lightspeed magazine celebrating queer authors, recently set a record for first-month downloads with over 20,000 downloads.
SCy-Fy: Your personal favourite?
DBK: It’s hard for me to really pick a favorite episode, but I have said before that the two guests I was most excited to interview were George R. R. Martin and Richard Dawkins.
SCy-Fy: Which forthcoming books and TV shows are you most looking forward to reading or watching?
DBK: Well, as a big George R. R. Martin fan of course I’m looking forward to The Winds of Winter as well as Season 5 of Game of Thrones. The other big thing I’m really looking forward to is The Expanse, the new SyFy show that’s being adapted from the series of novels by James S. A. Corey.
SCy-Fy: Any last words?
DBK: I’d just encourage everyone to check out our website at http://geeksguideshow.com, and if you want to create your own book or podcast, definitely check out our discussion of self-publishing in Episode 83 and our discussion of science fiction podcasting in Episode 86.
SCy-Fy: Thank you, David.The NSA and the GCHQ have compromised much encryption used on the internet through a potent mix of technological theft, spycraft, and collaboration with major technology companies, according to new reports.
In a series of news articles that highlight how the code-breaking crypto-fiddling agencies NSA and GCHQ are doing their job, ProPublica, The New York Times, and The Guardian disclosed on Thursday a wide-ranging campaign by the spies to smash internet crypto methods so to better slurp data from the world+dog.
The NSA "has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show," the NYT reports.
Though thin on specifics, the stories clearly outline that the agencies have developed a variety of methods to attack and gain access to data secured by either SSL, or inside a virtual private network (VPN). They also imply that they have put backdoors into crypto-systems and potentially widely used digital components, as well.
The spies have also worked with technology companies to gain a direct line to data stored in their servers, though the documents do not specify which companies in particular. Analysts can slurp away at the decrypted data through a highly classified program named "Bullrun".
"For the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies.... Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable," one memo from 2010 given to the spies at GCHQ, says.
New "groundbreaking capabilities" have also let the agencies inspect data that is intercepted from submarine cables, the reports state.
The gist of the reports is that the agencies have probably compromised SSL via gaining certificates and encryption keys to the point where they can perform man-in-the-middle attacks on widely used applications. GCHQ is alleged to have broken the security on some 30 VPN systems, and has plans to get into 300 by 2015.
Though mega-leaker Edward Snowden has previously claimed end-to-end encryption can protect users, the thorough ways in which the agencies have worked to compromise endpoints makes it unlikely that users on either end of a communication have access to clean hardware.
So it goes. ®Wests Tigers Captain Aaron Woods will play his first match of the year this Saturday, as the Club plays its final trial match against Cronulla at Campbelltown Sports Stadium.
Head Coach Jason Taylor has named a strong 20-man squad for the Sharks’ clash, which includes livewire fullback James Tedesco and edge backrower Curtis Sironen, who also both take the field for the first time in 2016.
Five of the Club’s off-season recruits — Jack Littlejohn, Tim Grant, Jordan Rankin, Justin Hunt and Josh Aloiai — have been named in the team as they push for selection in Round 1.
Taylor said he was impressed with last weekend’s narrow 18-16 victory over the Melbourne Storm on the Sunshine Coast but felt there are still areas to work on ahead of Round 1.
“The main area that we want to improve on coming out of last week’s trial is our middle of the field defensively,” he said.
“We did a good job of that in patches against the Storm but not so well at other times. We really want to improve that this week against Cronulla and be consistent throughout the year.
“This week we welcome back guys like Aaron Woods and James Tedesco, which will be a huge boost for us. Giving a lot of the younger guys an opportunity over the past two weeks has been great, but we will be certainly getting ready for Round 1 with the side named this week.”
Campbelltown Sports Stadium will host a five-game program this Saturday — with Harold Matthews, SG Ball, Holden Cup and NSW Cup games all preluding the NRL clash.
The football-feast is great value for fans, with tickets $15 or family passes at $40, while all 2016 Wests Tigers Members gain free entry on the day.
The Club will be also live-streaming the match on weststigers.com.au from 6:45pm.
1. James Tedesco
2. David Nofoaluma
3. Tim Simona
4. Kevin Naiqama
5. Justin Hunt
18. Mitchell Moses
7. Jack Littlejohn
8. Aaron Woods (C)
9. Robbie Farah
10. Tim Grant
11. Curtis Sironen
12. Chris Lawrence
13. Sauaso Sue
Interchange:
6. Jordan Rankin
14. Ava Seumanufagai
15. Josh Aloiai
16. Manaia Cherrington
17. Kyle Lovett
19.Luke Brooks
20. Josh Drinkwater
Coach: Jason Taylor
Event Details
11:45am — Gates Open
12:00pm — Harold Matthews: Western Suburbs Magpies vs. Cronulla Sharks
1:30pm — SG Ball: Western Suburbs Magpies vs. Cronulla Sharks
3:00pm — NYC Holden Cup: Wests Tigers vs. Cronulla Sharks
5:00pm — NSW Cup: Wests Tigers vs. Newtown Jets
7:00pm — NRL: Wests Tigers vs. Cronulla SharksThe CBC Pollcast, hosted by CBC poll analyst Éric Grenier, explores the world of electoral politics, political polls and the trends they reveal.
When voting begins on Sept. 18, over 124,000 members of the NDP will be eligible to cast a ballot and choose the next leader of their party.
That number, announced Tuesday, was bigger than many expected — and suggest that Ontario MPP Jagmeet Singh, who claims his campaign has signed up over 47,000, is the favourite to win.
But as the party welcomes thousands of new members into the fold, the four candidates for the leadership are still grappling with an old question. What should be the NDP's position on the niqab?
Quebec's provincial government is considering legislation that would prevent the giving and receiving of government services by people wearing religious symbols.
Every candidate in the NDP race says they want to protect religious freedoms, but both Guy Caron and Niki Ashton have also emphasized the need to respect Quebec's distinctiveness. Are they trying to have it both ways?
And is Singh's uncompromising position against the provincial legislation — and that he is a turban-wearing Sikh — a problem for the NDP in Quebec, the province that sent the largest number of NDP MPs to the House of Commons in 2015?
To discuss the state of the NDP leadership race, Pollcast host Éric Grenier is joined by the CBC's Aaron Wherry.
Listen to the full discussion above — or subscribe to the CBC Pollcast and listen to past episodes.
Follow Éric Grenier on Twitter.Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a slightly bizarre service that outsources simple, repetitive tasks to strangers on the internet, often for laughably tiny sums of money. It’s popular among scientists as a means to carry out research; but recently, Amazon tweaked its pricing in a decidedly science-unfriendly manner.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Mechanical Turk is an Amazon program that’s been around since 2005, matching up Requesters with Workers over the internet. Requesters can create any kind of mundane task — say, spamming comments onto a blog! — and then workers carry it out, often over and over for a pittance per action.
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The price increases, due to go into effect on July 21st, are significant — Amazon’s cut for every transaction is going up, from 10 to 20 percent. On top of that, there’s a new extra 20 percent fee for tasks that require 10 or more workers — so, basically every research task. That all adds up to a price increase of a third, which isn’t really tenable in a world of small scientific budgets.
Researchers are understandably not stoked about their access to cheap studies being cut off. The WSJ spoke to professors from Ryerson and University of Kansas, who felt that the changes “disproportionately” target academic research, and that they’d probably have to pare down their studies as a result.
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Ultimately, the new changes will also be bad news for workers: not only is Amazon taking a larger base commission, but you can expect higher costs to lead to even lower wages somewhere down the line. It’s nice to know that Amazon treats its online human drones just the same as those working in its warehouses.
[WSJ]The Police Association has called for the Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing to be abolished because it has failed to stop the city from descending into an alcohol-fuelled ''bloodbath'' after dark.
A bitter rift has developed between frontline emergency workers and the licensing authority, with Police Association president Scott Weber revealing he has not met with the office for more than two years because he has little faith in its commitment to cleaning up the city.
Vocal: Scott Weber wants licensing courts. Credit:Domino Postiglione
Matthew Blackmore, a 33-year-old finance worker, became the latest victim of unprovoked violence on George Street when he was king hit in the early hours of Sunday morning.
He was punched in the back of the head by a stranger as he was waiting for a taxi after a night out in the city.1 The First Palms The very first Palm handheld devices came out nearly 15 years ago, in 1996. The Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000 wowed the world with their 16MHz Motorola processor, 160x160 resolution monochrome LCD touchscreen, and up to 512kB of built-in memory. These "PDAs" (personal digital assistants), and the PalmPilots and Palms that would come after, became popular because of their relatively low prices and ability to easily "HotSync" with computers through a serial cable. Compared to USB connections, serial HotSyncing is downright awkward and archaic, but in the late '90s it was a revolutionary improvement in device-computer connectivity.
The Pilots also introduced Graffiti, Palm's handwriting alphabet that used simple gestures on a special Graffiti writing area of the touchscreen. Graffiti would remain in use on Palm devices for years after. The Pilot 1000 and 5000 would be the first and last Palm handhelds with the singular Pilot name; a lawsuit from the Pilot pen company ended US Robotics' aspirations for a line of Pilot devices and gave way to the PalmPilot.
2 The PalmPilots "PalmPilot" is the name most nostalgic gadget fans remember, but it only lasted a single generation. The PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional had nearly identical hardware to the original Pilots, but they used version 2.0 of PalmOS, featured backlit screens, and the Professional had a full megabyte of memory.
3 3Com and the March of the Palm IIIs 3Com acquired Palm from U.S. Robotics in 1997, and a year later, the third version of the Palm was released: the Palm III. While it still used at 16MHz Motorola CPU, it ran PalmOS 3.0 and sported twice the RAM as the PalmPilot Professional. The Palm III spawned an entire generation of Palm handhelds, including the memory-expanded Palm IIIe, IIIx, IIIxe, and the very first Palm with a color screen, the Palm IIIc, released in 2000.
4 Wireless and the End to Roman Numerals The Palm IIIs were followed up by the Palm V and Palm VII lines. Neither had the color screen of the Palm IIIc, and both were in many ways very similar to the higher end Palm III models with one very important exception. The Palm VII was the first Palm product with wireless data access, thanks to a huge antenna that could tap into the Palm.net service. It supported limited Web browsing and zip-code-based location-driven content. In the pre-Wi-Fi days, the Palm VII impressed us: According to Bruce and Marge Brown, "We bought books from Amazon.com, received directions from MapQuest, checked scores on ESPN, and looked up references in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. With its integrated access technology, the Palm VII ranks on top."
5 m100, m500, and the last of Palm.net The next few generations of Palm were generally incremental upgrades from the Roman numeral Palms, with a few notable exceptions. The Palm m130, m505, and m515 featured color screens, and the Palm i705 was the last Palm device to access Palm.net, like the Palm VII before it. By 2002, the Palm m515 sported a 33 MHz Motorola CPU and a whopping 16 MB of RAM.
6 Palm's Founders Split Off The founders of Palm Computing left 3Com during the age of the Roman numeral Palms and started their own independent company, Handspring. The company produced PalmOS-based Visor handhelds until 2001, when they created the first PalmOS smartphone, the Treo. The Visors were unique in their own right, thanks to interchangeable Springboard modules that could add different features to the PDAs, like cameras, GPS, and even cell-phone functionality.
7 Birth of the PalmOS Smartphone PalmOS finally hit the fledgling smartphone market in 2002 with the Handspring Treo. The Treo 180, 180g, 270, and 300 carried the Handspring name, but still ran PalmOS, like the Visors before them. They would be the last Handspring devices to be released, and, along with the Palm Zire, the last PalmOS devices to use a Motorola CPU. For mobile browsing, we found the Treo 180 to sit at the top of a then-tiny hill. Bruce and Marge Brown wrote, "Because Handspring's Blazer 2.0 browser does not support frames or JavaScript, accessing Web sites designed for conventional PCs was only a partial success. Still, the Treo was best at this task out of all the devices we tested."
8 Tungsten, Zire and the Call to ARM In 2002, Palm followed up its m100 series with the Zire series of handhelds. They were consumer-targeted PDAs and, at first, weren't that different from earlier Palms. The original Zire had a monochrome screen, a 16MHz Motorola CPU, and generally wasn't that different from the m100 on paper. Like the original Palm devices, the Zires were particularly appealing because of their low prices. The Zire 21 and onward presented a major shift in PalmOS handhelds. Starting with the Zire 21, the devices used ARM CPUs that were leaps and bounds faster than the old Motorola Dragonball CPUs Palms previously used. This trend continued in Palm's Tungsten series of business-targeted PDAs, which ran alongside the Zires similar to the m100 and m500 lines. The use of ARM processors continues in Palm products to this day.
9 The Palm Treo: Getting Closer In 2003, Handspring merged with Palm, which took over the Treo brand name and further developed the PalmOS-driven smartphone. At this point, Palm was split up nto PalmOne, which handled Palm-driven hardware, and PalmSource, which managed the PalmOS and other Palm software. The first fruit of the union and branching off was the PalmOne Treo 600, a multi-band smartphone available in both CDMA and GSM versions, which ran PalmOS 5.2.1 on hardware that included a 144MHz ARM-based CPU, 32 MB of RAM, and a 160x160 resolution color touchscreen. Like the Zire and Tungsten devices, Treo phones steadily developed in the market for several years and through several versions.
10 The Swansong of PalmOS In 2007, Palm released the Centro, a follow-up to the Treo line and one of the last smartphones to use PalmOS. By the end of PalmOS' lifespan, the Centro used a 312 MHz ARM-based Intel XScale CPU, 128 MB of RAM, a 320 by 320 resolution color touch screen LCD, and even included a 1.3-megapixel digital camera. It also supported both USB and Bluetooth connections, and accepted microSD cards for additional storage. It was a far cry from the original Pilot 1000, which debuted PalmOS.
11 A LifeDrive Experiment After years of sub-par multimedia support, Palm tried its hand at a true media storage/playback device, the Palm LifeDrive. It featured a 4GB hard drive for storing movies and music, and could browse Web sites with Palm's Blazer browser over Wi-Fi. While today these features are standard for almost any handheld device, in 2005 it was a magical thing. As Sascha Segan wrote, "It's a cool new device for the gadget fanatic who wants to do a bit of everything on a regular basis, whether play a movie, game, or music, pull up photos, do some tolerable Web surfing, view or work on the occasional Office document, or look up an address. It's the first device we've seen that can actually handle all these tasks, even if it's not the best at any one in particular."
12 Failure of the Foleo Years before Apple showed everyone the iPad, Palm tried to introduce a different sort of tablet to the world. The Palm Foleo was to be a pseudo-netbook, a 10-inch clamshell computing device that could interact directly with your cell phone to handle email and other communications. When Palm announced the Foleo in May 2007, we asked who would buy it. The answer was no one; Palm canceled the Foleo in November of that year.
13 WebOS and the Next Generation Two years after the release of the Centro, Palm debuted WebOS, a completely new, Linux-based operating system for its handhelds. The Palm Pre was the first device to use WebOS, followed by the enhanced Pre Plus (sporting double the RAM and storage at 512MB and 16GB) and the sleek Palm Pixi.
14 HP, the Palm Pre 2, and Onward In 2010, Hewlett Packard bought Palm, Inc., and with it the company's WebOS system. The first post-HP WebOS smartphone was the Palm Pre 2, launched in October of last year. It compares favorably to other current smartphones, with a 1GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, PalmOS 2.0 with Adobe Flash Player 10.1, and even a sturdy gorilla glass screen similar to the one on the iPhone 4. HP just announced that it will be getting an upgrade to WebOS 2.1, the newest version of the operating system.Blight is a channelled Damage over Time spell that lets the most chaotic of spellcasters play with Chaos spells right from the first skill gem choice. When the caster channels, a cone of chaotic force is unleashed in front of them, frequently adding layers of a chaos damage over time effect to enemies. If enemies are afflicted by Blight when they don't have an existing Blight damage over time effect on them, they're also struck by a powerful hinder, reducing their movement speed by 80% for a short time, helping protect the caster from harm.
The faster your cast speed, the greater the rate of these layers applying. Enemies can have a total of 20 Blight layers on them. A player can use increases to skill duration and cast speed to place many layers of Blight on a foe at once, as well as bonuses to chaos, damage over time and spell damage to maximise the power of the skill. The player can also increase the cone range with existing bonuses to area radius. Each Blight layer has its own duration, so the skill provides maximum damage when cast continually.
The skill is available from the Enemy at the Gate quest right at the start of the game. Alongside Contagion, it fills out an early complement of skills for a chaotic character experience. At higher levels it can be used to provide an extra source of damage for an Essence Drain and Contagion character once they've used their one-off damage over time effects, or as a stand-alone skill alongside a Wither totem for an area focused, high cast speed Occultist or Trickster.
Check out this video of the skill in action!
Content Update 2.4.2 is scheduled for next week and so far we've revealed two of the upcoming channelled skills: Blade Flurry and Scorching Ray. Today we're revealing the third and final new channelled skill, Blight!Blight is a channelled Damage over Time spell that lets the most chaotic of spellcasters play with Chaos spells right from the first skill gem choice. When the caster channels, a cone of chaotic force is unleashed in front of them, frequently adding layers of a chaos damage over time effect to enemies. If enemies are afflicted by Blight when they don't have an existing Blight damage over time effect on them, they're also struck by a powerful hinder, reducing their movement speed by 80% for a short time, helping protect the caster from harm.The faster your cast speed, the greater the rate of these layers applying. Enemies can have a total of 20 Blight layers on them. A player can use increases to skill duration and cast speed to place many layers of Blight on a foe at once, as well as bonuses to chaos, damage over time and spell damage to maximise the power of the skill. The player can also increase the cone range with existing bonuses to area radius. Each Blight layer has its own duration, so the skill provides maximum damage when cast continually.The skill is available from the Enemy at the Gate quest right at the start of the game. Alongside Contagion, it fills out an early complement of skills for a chaotic character experience. At higher levels it can be used to provide an extra source of damage for an Essence Drain and Contagion character once they've used their one-off damage over time effects, or as a stand-alone skill alongside a Wither totem for an area focused, high cast speed Occultist or Trickster.Check out this video of the skill in action!There might be as many as four quarterbacks go in the top 10 of the 2014 NFL draft. While many consider Teddy Bridgewater the only sure-fire franchise quarterback, the likes of Blake Bortles, Johnny Manziel and Derek Carr have that type of upside.
eDraft's official top 150 for the draft will be released later this week, but I plan on giving you a sneak peak here for a second. We have Carr as the second-best quarterback and the No. 8 overall player on our big board. I had him with the highest grade at No. 5, while Matt Johnson pegged Carr with the lowest grade of the 12-man panel as a late first-round option.
In any event, we at eDraft are extremely high on Carr. As to where other outlets wonder aloud whether he's even going to go in the first day of the draft, we conclude that the Fresno State product won't find his way out of the top 10.
Here are some reasons why.
Bottom Feeders Need Quarterbacks
In a quarterback-driven league, the necessity to get that franchise guy makes it nearly impossible to pass up on a highly-ranked signal caller. As many as six teams in the top 10 might be looking at a quarterback, depending on how you view the St. Louis Rams and Sam Bradford. That's a whole heck of a lot of options for Carr to go off the board early on.
Let's say Carr is the fourth quarterback off the board with Bridgewater, Bortles and Manziel going ahead of him. Even then, it's hard to imagine a team like the Oakland Raiders or Minnesota Vikings passing up on him. Just for giggles, let's look at those scenarios for a second.
Scenario 1 Scenario 2 Scenario 3 Scenario 4 Scenario 5 1. Bridgewater 1.Clowney 1. Bridgewater 1. Clowney 1. Clowney 2. Matthews 2. Matthews 2. Matthews 2. Matthews 2. Watkins 3. Manziel 3. Bridgewater 3. Manziel 3. Mack 3. Bortles 4. Bortles 4. Manziel 4. Bortles 4. Bridgewater 4. Bridgewater 5. Watkins 5. Bortles 5. Carr 5. Watkins 5. Matthews 6. Clowney 6. Mack 6. 6. Robinson 6. Robinson 7. Mack 7. Matthews 7. 7. Mosley 7. Mack 8. Carr 8. Carr 8. 8. Manziel/Carr 8. Manziel/Carr
The last two scenarios is where it might get interesting. Who is a better fit for the Minnesota Vikings? I have gone back and forth on this one, originally concluding that Manziel would bring a certain swagger to the locker room in Minnesota.
After extensive thought, I have reversed course a tad here. With the likes of Cordarrelle Patterson on the outside, doesn't it make more sense that they would go with the down-field passing threat that Carr brings with him to the NFL?
Then you have the Oakland Raiders.
Raiders Higher on Carr Than Manziel
This could be a game changer. If the Raiders have the choice between Carr and Manziel at No. 5 overall, it is my expectation that the brass in Oakland will go with the Fresno State product. Talking with those close to the situation in Oakland, this wouldn't even be much of a decision on their part.
Oakland hasn't ruled out the possibility of trading down in the top 10 with the idea of nabbing Carr later on. Potential teams looking to move up for either an offensive tackle or pass rusher include the Atlanta Falcons at six, Tampa Bay Buccaneers at seven and Detroit Lions at 10.
Either way, it's evident that Oakland is higher on Carr than other teams selecting atop the 2014 NFL draft. It could be the real wildcard when all is said and done.
Talent, Talent and More Talent
None of this would really matter if Carr didn't possess the necessary talent to be a franchise quarterback. While there are concerns about the way he handles pressure, mainly from a mechanics standpoint, there is little questioning the talent that Carr possesses.
At 6'2" and 214 pounds, Carr is your prototypical dropback quarterback. He boasts the strongest arm of any upper-echelon quarterback prospects in the draft with an ability to hoist the ball 60-plus yards down the field on a dime. Progressions and reads won't be too much of an issue, either. While Carr focused on Davante Adams a great deal at Fresno, he showed the ability to hit his secondary target on intermediate routes. That's going to be huge for his progression as a quarterback down the road.
Some conclude that Carr focused too much on his checkdown in college. This might be true, but there is one major reason for this. Fresno State didn't have a complementary receiver to Adams, which left Carr out in the cold when his No. 1 target was covered. If you watch the tape, Carr never really took his eyes off down the field until it became apparent he didn't have a window to throw through.
As it is, Carr also boasts above-average intermediate accuracy and underrated athletic ability. He may not pull a Colin Kaepernick at the next level, but Carr is a threat to run when he's rolling to the outside.
One fo the biggest components I looked at when scouting Carr was his ability to hit the right sideline from the left hash 30 yards out. That's the most difficult throw to make on the football field...he made it look easy.
When all is said and done, we can conclude that Carr is a lock to be a top 10 pick come May. It's now all about where he's going to land. My money is on Oakland or Minnesota.
What say you?The US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has issued a report predicting that the outstanding federal debt of the United States will balloon to $19.4 trillion at the end of this year, and hit $28.2 trillion by 2026.
reports:It has been hard for the federal government to control spending, and it appears that the situation will not improve in the near future, according to the CBO's economic outlook.The CBO calculated that, due to growing outlays for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, as well as discretionary spending and higher net interest, government spending will rise by 5%, or some $178 billion, by the end of this year. The revenue, meanwhile, is expected to grow by just 1%, or some $26 billion.The US government budget deficit will climb to $590 billion by the end of 2016, it is predicted, which is $152 billion more than last year, the agency reported. By 2026 the deficit will approach an unsustainable level of some $1.4 trillion.Debt held by the public will amount to almost 77% of GDP by the end of 2016, and three decades from now it is projected to be about twice that number.Meanwhile, a weak labor market is expected to further slow the nation's economic growth rate, with record-low labor force participation being caused by such federal policies as Obamacare and the tax code, the report stated.With spending, deficits, and debt expanding dramatically over the next decade, America has put itself on a path to a major fiscal crisis, the budget office stated.Sam Mohan/yolk studio
On 12 April, Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan posted an update to his more than 2,500 Facebook friends. It announced a bold plan from India's Department of Biotechnology (DBT) — the agency that VijayRaghavan leads, and the country's largest funder of biomedical research — to establish a new marine-biology institute and research stations along India's vast coastline. Within hours, 500 people had 'liked' the post and more than 60 had left comments of congratulations.
Only one offered a critical note. A graduate student said that starting programmes is all well and good, but the DBT must hold the researchers whom it already funds accountable for the quality of their science. Shortly after, VijayRaghavan replied: “Your words are very wise and correct! Thank you. We must keep your points in mind if we are to get maximum for our Rupee and have quality science.”
It is rare for a public official to be so responsive and open to criticism, especially in a country as steeped in bureaucratic hierarchy as India, says biologist Inder Verma at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California, who has served as a scientific adviser to the Indian government since the 1980s. Yet almost anyone who contacts VijayRaghavan by Facebook, Twitter or e-mail gets a personal response in minutes. “Vijay is a breath of fresh air,” Verma says.
VijayRaghavan is more than that. He is a respected fly geneticist and administrator who helped to build the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, one of India's most prestigious institutions, from the ground up. In January 2013, he left his job as NCBS director and moved to New Delhi to lead the DBT. He says that he wants to inject rigour into Indian science and train scientists to work together on tractable problems. As grand visions go, his can seem muted, almost modest. “I'm not going to be stupid and try something completely nutty; I'm going to try something within my grasp,” he says.
Researchers are optimistic about what he might be able to achieve. “It's very rare to have a scientist of Vijay's calibre heading a government department,” says Jyotsna Dhawan, a stem-cell biologist who worked with VijayRaghavan for seven years. “So I think all of us in the scientific community have very high hopes.”
But they also recognize the challenges, which include wrangling with New Delhi's murky politics — known for ensnaring plans in red tape — and the DBT's long, painful grant-review process. In the past couple of years, the Ministry of Finance has made it difficult for the agency to honour even approved grants. And although the DBT is a major funder of extramural research, the money that it actually gets each year — a little more than 14 billion rupees (about US$225 million) — is a fraction of that commanded by analogous agencies elsewhere, such as the US National Institutes of Health.
Given the challenges, even the most ardent well-wishers are holding their applause. “It's not entirely apparent to me what an individual, even one so dynamic and forward-looking as VijayRaghavan, can do to cut through the red tape,” says Dhawan.
A passion to learn
A self-described “air-force brat”, VijayRaghavan grew up all over India, moving every few years. He was hungry for knowledge, and, as a teenager, used to cycle to his local branch of the British Council or the US Information Service — the main sources of foreign publications in those days — and read every book and magazine that he could find. “In the pre-Internet days, that was my food,” he says.
After studying chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, VijayRaghavan was preparing to leave for a bioengineering PhD programme in Switzerland when he chanced on an article by renowned molecular biologist Obaid Siddiqi on using genetics to understand the nervous system. It was a departure from the work that VijayRaghavan had originally planned to do, but, he says, “I found the formalism of genetics easy to grasp, and that excited me very much.”
He sought out Siddiqi at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, where he began a PhD programme. It was, at the time, a place that afforded considerable freedom to its students. “You did what you pleased and you joined whomever you wanted to for your research,” VijayRaghavan says. “It was an exhilarating experience.”
But there was a growing air of complacency and nepotism at the TIFR that frustrated Siddiqi. For years, he had been planning to build a new institute, and he saw a natural ally in VijayRaghavan. The pair began to hatch plans, even as VijayRaghavan embarked on further training at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and later, |
across the country. Since 2009, 92 new college programs have been established, seeping into new states like Arkansas, Mississippi, California and Michigan.
The disconnect is troubling enough that the N.C.A.A. has revamped its ticket pricing for this year’s event and begun to offer bargains on hotel packages. It has held off deciding where to stage the Final Four after 2016 and will consider bypassing N.F.L. stadiums in favor of smaller sites. There has been discussion about holding the annual event in one location, the way Omaha hosts the College Baseball World Series.
The concern, according to Phil Buttafuoco, executive director of the men’s lacrosse coaches association, is that lacrosse might face the same struggle as soccer has in the United States: It is adored by legions of children but has difficulty translating that into viewership at the higher levels.
“We’ve got to build the bridge for them,” Buttafuoco said, “to understand how great college lacrosse is.”Important Information: If you are a fan of the Borderlands franchise, check out all the Borderlands 2 games and accessories available for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC.
Important Information: Downloadable version requires the Steam client to install & play.
Important Information: © 2012 Gearbox Software, LLC. Published and distributed by 2K Games. Gearbox Software, Borderlands, and the Gearbox and Borderlands logos are trademarks of Gearbox Software, LLC. 2K Games and the 2K Games logo are trademarks of 2K Games in the US and/or other countries. The ratings icon is a trademarks of the Entertainment Software Association. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. All rights reserved."
Important Information: Check out all the latest Battleborn games and accessories available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.As it often happens with new technologies — especially the ones that aim to replace fundamental, widely used parts of our digital devices — the early implementations are often challenged by a series of missteps and various other problems.
The latest concrete example of this is the promising-yet-troubled USB-C, which led to a few controversies as of late. However, it seems, with its latest G5 flagship, LG may be one of the few manufacturers that got it right (via gtrusted)…
While Type C theoretically allows for things such as charging, data transfer and video output all in one — thus potentially fulfilling the dream of a one-to-rule-them-all cable, all while being conveniently reversible — the standards it requires are somewhat strict.
Benson Leung, the now-famous Google engineer who essentially surveyed a bunch of supposed USB-C cables and found that many were non only not compliant but outright dangerous — such as the OnePlus 2‘s — had to happily backtrack with LG’s implementation.
To keep the USB-C standard as open and universal as possible, the USB Power Delivery spec states that, for instance, proprietary charging technologies such as Qualcomm‘s Quick Charge are forbidden. Because of that, Leung initially had concerns with LG, whose latest flagships supports the chip manufacturer’s charging option.
However, as gtrusted‘s series of mini investigations proved, the G5 manages to support both the standard Power Delivery fast-charging option as well as Qualcomm’s own. “This is an extremely pleasant surprise for me,” Leung wrote in its post.
As it turns out, USB-C may in fact be even more capable than we initially thought. Leung mentioned that Alternate Modes’ support for things like VESA DisplayPort may work out of the box with the G5, which could also use a generic Chromebook‘s USB-C cable without too much trouble thanks to Power Delivery 2.0.
“Another possibility is that charge-through hubs that would not work well with last years’ Nexus phones (hubs that charge the phone, but allow the phone to expose USB-A ports) would work with the G5 as well,” he said.
Sure, more testing needs to be done, and all of the above needs to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, but it still opens up for bigger possibilities not just for the G5, but for a standard that is only going to become more and more ubiquitous as time passes.Report: Ohio voting machines have 'critical flaws,' could undermine 08 election Adam Doster
Published: Saturday December 15, 2007
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Print This Email This One of the most important swing states in America still cant safeguard the vote. So says a new report, commissioned by Ohios top elections official, that found all five voting systems used in the Buckeye State to have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election. It was worse than I anticipated, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said of the investigation. I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others. The $1.9 million federally financed study, conducted by corporate and academic teams in parallel assessments and released Friday, found that voting machines and central servers made by Elections Systems and Software; Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold; and Hart InterCivic; were easily corrupted. According to the New York Times, at polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers. Ken Fields, a spokesman for Election Systems and Software, said his company vehemently opposed some of the reports conclusions. We can also tell you that our 35 years in the field of elections has demonstrated that Election Systems and Software voting technology is accurate, reliable and secure, he said. Brunner -- a Democrat who succeeded controversial Republican and Bush-backer J. Kenneth Blackwell -- ordered the study as part of a promise to revamp voting after the state made headlines for hours-long lines in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, also was home to a scandal that led to the convictions of two elections workers on charges of rigging recounts. The Times reports that Brunner proposed replacing all of the states voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohios 88 counties. She also wants all counties to employ optical scan machines that electronically record paper ballots that voters fill in by hand. In addition to switching machines, Ms. Brunner recommended purging polling stations that are used for fewer than five precincts and introducing an early voting period 15 days before Election Day. Read the whole story HERE.Kylie Jenner attends Sacramento prom as student's date
A Sacramento teenager showed up to his high school prom with a very high-profile date: Kylie Jenner.
Jenner reportedly attended the dance at Rio Americano High School Saturday night as high school junior Albert Ochoa's date.
Social media erupted with photos and videos of Jenner, along with her best friend Jordyn Woods, wearing floor-length gowns and corsages, as they made their way through a crowd of eager high schoolers who had ditched their dates in an effort to snap a selfie with the reality star.
Zach Effron as my prom date next??? pic.twitter.com/fF0NgcA170 — $el (@ssoochoa) April 9, 2017
The 19-year-old celebrity isn't much older than the teens at Rio Americano High, but she certainly didn't blend in.
Earlier in the evening, Jenner shared a photo on Snapchat from her private jet, en route to Sacramento.
RELATED: Celebrities spotted around the Bay Area recently
Kylie Jenner surprises High School students at their prom: https://t.co/9hlujAzJ8j pic.twitter.com/7fKxy6cuyR — E! Online UK (@EOnlineUK) April 9, 2017
Since the dance, there has been a lot of buzz on Twitter, as users wonder how Ochoa scored such an A-list date. We haven't heard any answers from him yet, but one thing is nearly certain: he'll be bragging about this one for years to come.Reading mum Tracey Fidler has told of her relief that Reading Council's court case against her has been dropped.
Miss Fidler had appeared at Reading Magistrates Court on Friday, September 25 facing charges involving not sending her son to school following the death of his father Kris Jarvis.
Yesterday she attended the lunchtime meeting at the Reading Civic Centre, supported by Karen Rowland, founder of the Baker Street Area Neighbourhood Association and Councillor Tony Jones, the lead councillor for education in Reading Borough Council.
Afterwards she said: "I am angry that it got as far as it did, but I'm grateful that it's over."
The charges against Miss Fidler came after her son Adam was absent from Battle Academy following the death of his father Kris Jarvis who was killed by Purley driver, Alexander Walter in February last year.
After Mr Jarvis' death Miss Fidler said: "Everyone was completely in shock and no one [in the family] went anywhere.
"I tried to get them back to school. Luke couldn’t cope he couldn’t do anything. Adam, he couldn’t sleep at night, he wouldn’t leave my side. He was afraid I wouldn’t come back if I left."
Adam, 11, has been back at school since Easter, at Prospect School where his older brother Luke, 16, also goes and has been settling in well.
However, the recent court proceedings have distressed and disrupted the whole family.
Miss Fidler said her daughter Emma, 13, was still angry with Battle Academy for bringing the issue so far.
She added: "I just wanted it all dropped, we just wanted to carry on and get on with things.
"I tried to keep it quiet. I didn’t want anyone to know. I think someone must have seen me go in the court.
"I didn’t want it [the court case] to upset Adam, he has just managed to get himself sorted."
Following her meeting with the council she said: "[Adam's] not sleeping at night again so now hopefully he can try and sort himself out again."
After Miss Fidler's letter ordering her to appear in court she contacted Cllr Tony Jones who has been helping her deal with this issue.
Of the meeting Miss Fidler said: "It was Tony that worked his magic. He's been amazing."
Cllr Jones said: "I worked very hard with Tracey behind the scenes, I'm pleased that both she and the council officers were very constructive despite all the stress this has brought.
"I believe we have come up with the right solution.
"I do believe that the council should have these kinds of powers but, given the circumstances I don't believe that this was the best for Tracey."
The council's statement said that they would work with Miss Fidler and her family 'to provide any support they need' and Cllr Jones said that the council will be in touch with Miss Fidler and she will be able to work out any support with them and he said he would be keeping in touch with Tracey himself.Nearly 17 years after troops returned from the first Gulf War suffering from mysterious symptoms the UK government is set to officially recognize Gulf War Syndrome.
The Manchester Evening News reported at the weekend that the Ministry of Defence will finally recognize the existence of Gulf War Syndrome after sustained pressure from veterans and their families, as well as many in the political and scientific arenas.
It seems Defence Minister Lord Drayson admitted the change of position to Manchester peer Lord Morris, who has been an outspoken critic of the way veterans have been treated. Lord Morris has consistently sought to bring the problems faced by veterans to the attention of those in power.
The MEN quotes Lord Drayson as saying: "The issue of Gulf War Syndrome will be fully recognised by the Ministry of Defence and I accept on behalf of the MoD that this issue has not been handled well from the beginning.
"The department was slow to recognise the emerging ill- health issues and to put measures in place to address them. We have apologised for this and I repeat that apology today."
The MoD has reportedly written to veterans to tell them they can use the term Gulf War Syndrome to describe their illness. They also said they are collaborating with doctors and other experts to develop a suitable rehabilitation program for those affected.
There is however no sign of an official announcement informing the public that Gulf War Syndrome is now officially recognised as an illness caused by service in the first Gulf War and no national media sources seem to be carrying the story.
If this does turn out to be an official recognition of Gulf War Syndrome it should make it much easier for thousands of veterans to secure pensions based on their ill-health. The situation was previously improved for veterans following a landmark tribunal appeal in October 2005, in which a sick veteran was awarded a military pension due to his illness. At that time the MoD said it accepted Gulf War Syndrome as a "useful umbrella term".
The allies have all been slow to officially recognize the syndrome but the UK has been one of the slowest. Towards the end of 2004 the US government performed a u-turn and conceded, after years of denials, that Gulf War Syndrome does exist as a distinct disease.
The American's official acceptance came after an official report from the US Department of Veterans Affairs Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses. The report concluded that, a substantial proportion of Gulf war veterans are ill with multisystem conditions not explained by wartime stress or psychiatric illness.
The report suggested illness had resulted from damage primarily caused by nerve gas and its antidotes, and organophosphate insecticides (OPs). All of these substances block an enzyme called cholinesterase which normally breaks down acetylcholine, an important neurotransmitter involved in muscle contraction and important brain functions such as memory.I'm just slowly moving past my BLT binge, which consumed nearly all of my sandwich-making capabilities for the whole summer. Luckily, I ran into some figs at the produce shop, and before I knew it I was at the Chocolate and Zucchini site, gawking at this warm sandwich. How could I not go for this? It seemed soothing and a perfect dish for the slight cool in the air.
When I imagined this recipe, for some reason, I thought prosciutto was part of the plan—which it wasn't—and went so far as to buy some at the store. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking. I decided to add it anyway, and it turned out to be a fortunate mistake. The salty bite bulked out the sandwich, making for a more filling meal. The last secret is to bake the whole sandwich in the oven until the bread warms and the cheese starts to melt just slightly.I wish there was an interesting story about how I acquired this can of Otter Creek’s Fresh Slice White IPA, but sadly there isn’t one. During a recent lunch time Craft Beer run to The Foodery, I noticed this bright and cheery little can in their beer fridge and decided to pick one up for an eventual review. I get to pick up mixed six pack of beer during my lunch hour. That’s certainly much better than having to do stuff like paying your mortgage or argue with the Philadelphia Parking Authority during your lunch hour. When you put it all into perspective, a lunch time Craft Beer run may not make for much of a story, but there are a hell of a lot worse things that I could be doing.
Before we get to my review, here’s a brief video from the good people at Otter Creek Brewing that explains what their Fresh Slice is all about:
And now for my review…
Appearance : Cloudy, pale orange color with a good bit of sediment floating throughout. Thick off white foam that tops out at about 1.5 inches and dissipates really slowly.
: Cloudy, pale orange color with a good bit of sediment floating throughout. Thick off white foam that tops out at about 1.5 inches and dissipates really slowly. Aroma : Hints of coriander and clove along with a blast of citrus. The brewer says they added clementines and I am inclined to believe them. Push past all that stuff, and you definitely get a healthy dose of citrusy hop notes.
: Hints of coriander and clove along with a blast of citrus. The brewer says they added clementines and I am inclined to believe them. Push past all that stuff, and you definitely get a healthy dose of citrusy hop notes. Taste : Moderately carbonated with a creamy mouthfeel. Starts off like a Belgian Wit, i.e. with some prominent clove and coriander flavors. At the middle, the tart citrus and hops take over, but never overwhelm. Gets quite astringent at the finish with a pithy tartness thats leave your mouth kinda dry.
: Moderately carbonated with a creamy mouthfeel. Starts off like a Belgian Wit, i.e. with some prominent clove and coriander flavors. At the middle, the tart citrus and hops take over, but never overwhelm. Gets quite astringent at the finish with a pithy tartness thats leave your mouth kinda dry. ABV: 5.5%
I’m intrigued by the White IPA. It’s an interesting mash up of beer styles, i.e. the thirst quenching qualities of a Belgian Wit mixed with the hoppy bitterness of an IPA. While I enjoy the occasional Belgian Wit, they can get boring after awhile, so adding a dose of hoppiness into the mix definitely adds a bit of intrigue. As far as the Fresh Slice goes, while I definitely liked it overall, I’m a little disappointed by the finish. It’s a wee bit overly pithy, i.e. the aftertaste is what I imagine my mouth would feel like after chewing on an orange or lemon rind.The PM says there is no basis for an inquiry into the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, yet editorial opinion in the media overwhelmingly backs one. Has the meaning of book Hit & Run been obscured by all the claims and counter-claims in the media?
Photo: RNZ / Jeremy Rose
Three weeks have passed since Hit & Run co-authors Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson accused the New Zealand Defence Force of covering up the consequences of raids in Afghanistan.
The book says our SAS soldiers failed to kill the insurgents they were after and civilians died instead. Hit & Run provides names, faces, and some evidence. It says the SAS failed to help the wounded, destroyed houses and a prisoner was beaten and handed over to Afghan forces that are known for torture.
But according to some commentators, it was the PR skills of Nicky Hager that propelled the book into the headlines.
In an editorial calling for an inquiry into the book's findings, The Listener said it was “released with the usual array of manipulative PR tricks to achieve massive and uncritical initial media coverage”.
The authors held a book launch in a book shop, issued a press release and held a press conference later. Everything the authors want people to know is laid on in the pages of their book. It's hard to see what is "manipulative" about all that.
A few copies of the book were made available to a handful of journalists a short time before the initial release. Some pundits criticised the authors for handpicking friendly reporters for a heads-up, while Dominion Post columnist Rosemary McLeod reckoned not giving out more books beforehand was media manipulation.
"Some books are released to media in advance of publication, giving the opportunity to follow up allegations. This book was not - a guarantee that it would receive saturation coverage while anyone who doubted its claims would look as if they were trying to hide something," she wrote.
Online outlet Vice asked Nicky Hager this week if the release of Hit & Run was an exercise in spin.
"Part of the job is making sure it gets noticed," he replied.
"However, I do think that the ‘PR mastermind’ line is just one of the various things people raise when they don't want to debate the issues at hand. It's a way of denigrating the activity without actually having to address what's going on," Mr Hager told Vice.
Follow the leader?
"Nicky Hager knows how to play the media, which laps up his every utterance," Rosemary McLeod concluded in the Dominion Post.
Not quite. Hit & Run closes with claims that the SAS - though only a small elite unit - has become too influential within the NZDF. Lines of authority and command need to be urgently reviewed, the book warns.
Coverage of the book has overlooked that angle. Indeed, some in the media dismiss what Mr Hager says just because it is him saying it.
After the book's release, Newstalk ZB weekend host Andrew Dickens wrote that fellow hosts Mike Hosking and Leighton Smith had said they did not like Mr Hager and therefore did not believe him. Talkback callers followed suit, he noted.
"Despite having never read the 120-page book, the majority of callers were prepared to dismiss it just because Hager had written it," said Mr Dickens.
The day the NZDF broke its silence with a dense briefing for the press that was streamed live by several news outlets online, Defence Force head Lieutenant General Tim Keating conceded there may have been civilian casualties during the raid. He insisted the “central premise” of the book was incorrect and there were “major inaccuracies" - most notably, the location of the SAS-led raids described in Hit and Run.
Hager and Stephenson insisted that did not change the story in any significant way. The Defence Force briefing had not explained the deaths and injuries suffered by people who were obviously not insurgents, they said.
Houses destroyed, the lack of assistance to the wounded and mistreatment of a prisoner described in the book were also not addressed in the briefing, along with claims of a cover-up.
The New Zealand Herald’s David Fisher reported an SAS soldier confirmed civilians were killed in 2010. The soldier said that was widely known among elite soldiers.
"I'll stack my evidence up against Tim Keating's any day of the week. I'll meet him any place, any time," Jon Stephenson responded bullishly on the AM show the next morning.
Photo: screen
The case of the casings
Nicky Hager accused the Defence Force of trying to sow doubts about the rest of the book by highlighting minor discrepancies, but they weren’t the only ones.
On Friday, 31 March, the New Zealand Herald published a story trailed like this:
Exclusive! Another shadow has been cast over the accuracy of Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson's book Hit & Run.
Photo: screenshot
Newstalk ZB's political editor Barry Soper said a caption under one of the book’s many photos showed bullet cartridges that Hit & Run's authors claimed were fired by SAS snipers.
A weapons expert told The Herald those cartridges were too big to be fired by soldier's guns and they probably came from a US helicopter.
Was this a smoking gun that shot down Hit & Run? Not quite. The story disappeared from The Herald's website when Mr Hager complained to the editor and pointed out that another photo in the book had identified the same cartridges as ones likely to be from a from a helicopter’s gun.
Mr Hager also noted he could have pointed that out to The Herald - had they contacted him before publishing that "exclusive".
The Herald’s story went back up online again later in the day with Mr Hager’s explanations and objections awkwardly bolted on at the bottom.
But Newstalk ZB’s political editor Barry Soper stuck to his guns in an opinion piece for the ZB website, in which he said the caption on that picture of cartridges, coupled with the earlier discrepancy over the location of the raid, undermined the book.
"There was only one attack in the valley on the night and the book's account of it is virtually the same as the military's, but any chink in the book's armour - unfortunately - weakens their argument," wrote Soper.
The Dominion Post seemed to agree. In its weekly 'Below the Beltway' list of what’s going up and down in politics, The Dominion Post said General Keating was on the up.
Photo: PHOTO / RNZ
“His rebuttal of some key information in Hit & Run seems to have staved off a government inquiry,” said the paper, though this was far from clear at that point.
Meanwhile, Hager and Stephenson were going down:
“Some basic errors in Hit & Run have weakened their case for an inquiry,” it said, but the paper did not say what these "basic errors" were.
On the same page of the paper, columnist Martin Van Beynen - a senior Christchurch-based journalist - asked this question:
Can New Zealanders trust Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson?
His answer was - essentially - yes, but he was not so sure about the NZDF because it had moved from its 2010 position that reports of civilian casualties were “unfounded.”
Photo: PHOTO / RNZ
‘‘Unfounded’’ is one of those weasel words useful to spin merchants. It suggests that no civilian casualties occurred when, in fact, it could simply mean no evidence of civilian casualties has emerged because no-one has looked for it," said Martin Van Beynen.
"The word’s use suggests very strongly that the army has something to hide," he added.
The Listener, The Press, The New Zealand Herald, The Gisborne Herald and The Northland Age among others have all called for an inquiry in recent editorials. The Dominion Post has done so twice.
While Van Beynen was not sure about the need for a commission of inquiry, he thought Hit & Run's authors "aimed too high by suggesting the operation may have resulted in war crimes."
"Even if all they say is true, it seems more likely the perpetrators made mistakes rather than being reckless or homicidal," he wrote, even though Hit & Run's authors have said all along they were leaving the possibility of war crimes questions to the experts.
In this week’s Listener, Bill Ralston said he was sure the SAS did not commit war crimes.
"The words “war crimes” imply an atrocity, a deliberate act of murder of unarmed civilians rather than inadvertent deaths that occurred as a result of fire exchanged during a conflict. Even Hager and Stephenson do not allege the SAS deliberately lined up civilians and shot them," he wrote in The Listener.
Indeed they did not, but war crimes are not synonymous with cold-blooded murder.
On The Spinoff website, Mr Hager’s lawyer Felix Geiringer pointed out it can be a war crime merely to destroy the property of an adversary.
"The fact that the homes belonged to an insurgent cannot itself be an excuse to destroy them. The requirement that the destruction 'be imperatively demanded by the necessities of the conflict' is a very high test. Receiving some peripheral military advantage could never satisfy this test," he wrote.
In The Listener, Ralston - a former head of news at TVNZ turned media trainer and pundit - went on to compare the claims and counter-claims to a traffic accident.
"If you interviewed a dozen witnesses several years after the event, you would probably have a dozen differing accounts. So it is with the Hit & Run story," he said.
But witnesses to routine road accidents do not carry high-end military gear with cameras and GPS, and they do not complete detailed post-mission reports for the record. Nor do they have in-house legal scrutiny on the case - as the NZDF said they did on the raids in question.
So far only Prime Minister Bill English has seen evidence the NZDF has shown to him.
"Many folk have seized on the issue to politically attack the government, via the military," Ralston wrote in The Listener.
He's not the only pundit to point out the media debate about all this has become political, but many people calling for transparency are not so concerned about the political consequences or even the conduct of our Defence Force.
Many just want to know if innocent people in Afghanistan have been harmed by our soldiers, and whether we are obliged to try to put things right.“You have to highlight that the infrastructure all the way from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa to Sindh is ruined,” Commander Zahid said, referring to Pakistan’s northernmost and southernmost provinces. “It will take years to rebuild.”
Nearly 20 million people have been significantly affected, about the population of New York State, the United Nations said. The number in urgent need is now about eight million and expected to rise. More than half of them are without shelter.
The government’s estimates of the damage are equally grim. More than 5,000 miles of roads and railways have been washed away, along with some 7,000 schools and more than 400 health facilities.
Just to build about 500 miles of road in war-ravaged Afghanistan, the United States spent $500 million and several years, according to the Web site of the United States Agency for International Development.
And the agency has spent $200 million to rebuild just 56 schools, 19 health facilities and other services since the momentous earthquake in the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir in 2005.
One estimate, in a joint study from Ball State University and the University of Tennessee, put the total cost of the flood damage at $7.1 billion. That is nearly a fifth of Pakistan’s budget, and it exceeds the total cost of last year’s five-year aid package to Pakistan passed by Congress.
Standing on the edges of the floods, the scale of the damage is evident. The water has torn mile-long breaches atop two of the main canals in Sindh Province, where tens of thousands of people were evacuated Thursday. Until the gaps can be repaired, water will continue flooding districts along the right bank of the Indus, officials said.
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Floodwaters have ripped up the road from here to Jacobabad, cutting off the main highway that reaches both Baluchistan Province, Pakistan’s poorest, and into Afghanistan, one of the main supply routes used by United States forces.
What the waters have not destroyed, rescue workers have been forced to, in some cases. In the southern provinces, Pakistani government workers pointed out places where they had to blow up roads, embankments and even the railway line to steer the flow of water away from the larger towns.
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The velocity of the floods was greatest in northern Pakistan, home to steep mountain valleys, and the infrastructure damage there was the worst.
The mountainous Swat Valley, which was still struggling to rebuild from the army’s campaign against Taliban insurgents, has lost every bridge and whole sections of its roads. An entire neighborhood of the town of Madyan, along with the hospital compound and an electricity station, were swept away, leaving sand and stones in their place.
Great chunks of the famed Karakoram Highway — a celebrated feat of high-altitude engineering built by the Chinese over two decades — have disappeared as cliffs fell away in the torrent. The route, which winds hundreds of miles from the Chinese border in the Himalayas to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, may now be impassable for years, officials said.
A number of hydroelectric dams in the north, which are being built by China, have also been damaged. Five workers, including two Chinese engineers and three Pakistanis, drowned when floods swept through one construction camp earlier this month, the government reported.
The United States has agreed to help the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank conduct a damage and needs assessment for the Pakistani government. The figure is bound to be big.
The recovery cost will have to be met by a mixture of domestic money, international donations and loans from development banks, the administrator of A.I.D., Dr. Rajiv Shah, said after a tour of flooded regions on Wednesday.
The lack of electricity, especially through the infernally hot summer months, is a constant problem for the government and a reason for repeated strikes and public protests throughout Pakistan, even in ordinary times. The damage to the electricity and power sector alone could run to $125 million, according to a government report shown to The New York Times.
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Water and energy were a prime focus of the five-year $7.5 billion American aid package for Pakistan passed by Congress last year. The Obama administration had hoped to use the legislation as the centerpiece of a lasting strategic partnership with Pakistan and to help buttress the economy and Pakistan’s weak government institutions.
Now, American officials fear that money will end up being spent just to get Pakistan back to where it was before the “super flood.” The United States has already redirected $50 million of the aid package to help with the flood recovery, and the disaster will force a review of all projects that had been planned, Dr. Shah said.
“Priorities will necessarily have to shift and shift so that there is more of a recovery and reconstruction approach than people were thinking just a few months ago,” he told reporters during a trip to Sukkur.
He and other American officials are insisting that the disaster be treated as an opportunity for Pakistan to “leapfrog” ahead and help it build water and energy systems better than what was destroyed.
They point to successes that grew out of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, namely the creation of the National Disaster Management Administration, which is now spearheading the government response to the floods. But diplomats said government accountability and reforms in the rule of law would have to accompany the effort and the aid money.
“This is going to be very, very difficult, this is a huge scale disaster,” Dr. Shah said. “But we have to continue to be optimistic and look for those opportunities to help Pakistan to use this to build back better.”By Michael Andersen, People for Bikes
As Triple Pundit has been reporting with this series, there's an emerging consensus in U.S. cities that making biking a popular way to get around is terrific for the economy.
The physical activity makes people more productive at work and reduces health care costs. Retailers where bike lanes are part of the streetscape tend to see higher retail revenue because bikes bring in customers without gobbling up parking space.
There's only one problem, of course: in the U.S., biking for transportation isn't very popular yet. But the tectonics are shifting.
Inspired by thriving Northern European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, which in the last 40 years dramatically increased the share of trips taken by bike to more than 35 percent, many U.S. cities are embracing one of the main tricks in the European bag: bike lanes that are physically protected from auto traffic, just as a sidewalk is.
Pioneered in this country by New York City in 2008, bike lanes protected by curbs, parked cars and plastic posts are now going in everywhere from Atlanta to Long Beach to Lincoln, Neb.
But 43 percent of the growth since early 2012 has come from just six cities: Austin, Chicago, Memphis, Portland, San Francisco and Washington. These are the ones selected two years ago as focus cities for the first round of the PeopleForBikes Green Lane Project.
Starting Friday, the Green Lane Project, a nonprofit program that helps cities design and build better bike lanes, is welcoming city governments' applications to join its second two-year round of focus cities. For the six cities that will be chosen, the program is free.
The selected cities will receive a swarm of professional and technical support from national and international experts, intended to catalyze and enable major improvements to a city's bike network.
"It's really, in some ways, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with people who are on the cutting edge of an innovation," said Randy Neufeld of the SRAM Cycling Fund, one of the project's creators.
The project generally does not fund infrastructure projects directly – the idea is to make the work replicable in cities everywhere. But the Green Lane Project does award cities small grants of $20,000 to $25,000 that can be used for flexible purposes such as research or communications.
"It really lights a fire"
Cities are selected not based on their streets' current bike-friendliness but on their demonstrated commitment by their public and private sectors to improving streets for bikes.
Nathan Wilkes, an associate engineer for the City of Austin, said this week that the simple process of applying for the Green Lane Project's first round had been a big part of his city's success in rapidly adding protected bike lanes since 2012.
Trying to compete nationally to get admitted into the program, and then once you've committed to the program, living up to the commitments … It really lights a fire to put those types of facilities on the ground," Wilkes said. "On multiple levels, from the staff level to the political support, the way they've set it up, you as a community are backing the vision of getting protected lanes on the ground. That's very powerful.
"While you're doing that, it's great to have the support of other cities that are doing the same thing and trying to find solutions and make it work," Wilkes added.
City technical experts receive travel scholarships to a series of domestic workshops attended by peers and street design innovators from around the country. They also receive site visits from the Green Lane Project's own team of experts, participation in international study tours to the Netherlands and Denmark and ongoing collaboration with other cities in their cohort.
"I described it as therapy, grad school and summer camp all wrapped up in one delicious pastry," said Seleta Reynolds, livable streets section manager for the City of San Francisco.
To apply, visit greenlaneproject2.org. A letter of intent to apply is due Nov. 15, with the final application due Jan. 15.
Michael Andersen is staff writer for the PeopleForBikes Green Lane Project. He doesn't live to bike, but he does bike to live.Larry tells us that his last show is going to start off the same way that his first one did, confides how he feels about successor Piers Morgan and weighs in on the rumors he’ll be working with Ryan Seacrest!
After more than 25 years and 40,000 interviews on Larry King Live, Larry King is finally ready to step down from his hosting duties and pass the torch to successor Piers Morgan. But before he goes, the 76-year-old broadcast interviewer plans on giving his CNN talk show a bittersweet, nostalgic ending!
“[My final interview] is the same person I started the show off with,” Larry told HollywoodLife.com exclusively at the Brent Shapiro Foundation event in Beverly Hills, Calif. Sept. 11. “[It will be 52nd Governor of New York] Mario Cuomo, the first guest 25-and-a-half years ago. We’re flying him out to LA to do the show.” The final show date: December 16, 2010.
As for handing the reigns over to America’s Got Talent judge Piers, Larry is all for the |
on each side of the fault dropped down to 80 PSI. They are afraid that if they go any lower in oil pressure any gas in the oil will come out of solution and cause an explosive expansion. Not only that, but since there is so much oil embedded in the paper insulation, any sort of gas bubbling (oil foaming) would shred the insulation, rendering the entire feeder useless. They say it could take months to safely let the pressure off to zero. (That is the other reason ($13k/hr) they cannot afford to drain the whole pipe.)
Even at 80 PSI, if they lose a freeze plug they will have a really big mess outside the pipeline. The holes they've dug cannot hold 100K gallons and they're operating on a hill near the beach anyway... (Big pollution threat for LA basin.) Potentially fatal for anyone around. Right now they have LN-2 companies on call from San Diego to San Francisco with contingency plans of all sorts in case there is a major traffic problem with trucks getting in.
They say the repair could take weeks or more, depending on what they find when they get inside. They believe the cause of the fault was the inner conductors slipping downhill inside the pipe and shorting against a metal flange. Even if that's true they wonder where it slipped to, and hence, where it may be bunched up down hill.
Finding the fault was a problem in itself. Since this was all new to them they really didn't know how to start. They tried time-domain reflectometry equipment but got inconclusive information. They tried ultrasound and radar but that didn't work. Then they got a thing called a "thumper" shipped in which got them pretty close. The thumper sends mondo-amp pulses into one end of the cable. The electromotive force tends to cause physical displacement of the conductors which you can hear from the street level. The place where the clicking stops is where the problem usually is. This got them to the defective segment.
What pinpointed the problem in the end was a bunch of car batteries and some millivoltmeters. (From one technology extreme to the other.) They hooked up car batteries to both ends, tapped the cable at several points (maybe there are taps in the vaults?) and, knowing the drops and resistance of the cable, got within a few feet of the fault. (I used to use the exact same technique on memory boards.)
Next came the X-Ray equipment. Sure enough, they can see the cable shorting against the steel wall of the pipe.
Once all of the repair is done they still have to close it up. How do you weld a steel pipe with paper insulation inside? Slowly. They have special heliarc welding equipment and "certified operators" who take 8 hours to weld around one cross section of pipe. They are required to keep their hand on the pipe no more than 3 inches from the tip of the welder. If it is too hot for their hand they stop and let it cool. After all, they can't afford another failure.
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Oct 20, 1989 Update
I am getting all of these bits from a guy named Jim who is the project manager. He looks kinda like a red neck RWK (Jesus in a hard hat with a Harley belt buckle). [RWK is Bob Kerns, an ex-Symbolics person, 6'7" tall, skinny, bearded. -- DLW] He is a really great guy. Jim was one of the splicers on the project 17 years ago when he was working his way through school. He is a now professional electrical and mechanical engineer. After having worked his way up through the ranks at the DWP he is now The Big Boss. He claims to be having the time of his life - back in the field with one of the biggest challenges of his career. If we ever recruit a VP of engineering I would hope its someone like him.
So, what went wrong? Varying load conditions in the three legs of the 3-phase circuit caused tremendously strong and dynamic magnetic field changes. The electromagnetic forces between the three conductors and the steel pipe (gack!) cause the conduit to wiggle around inside the pipe. Over many years (and under the influence of gravity) the thing slipped and wiggled every which way. Also, due to very slight diametric temperature gradients, the differential thermal expansion of a cable that big across causes bending and warping forces. Nobody ever thought of any of this.
Wiggle alone may not have cause the problem, however. The spices between cable segments are much larger in diameter than the cable itself. The steel pipe at these points is much larger than the main run. So the whole affair get fat and then shrinks down every 2000 feet or so. What really screwed them was failure to put any sort of clamp at the splices to keep the fat splice from getting pulled into the narrower main runs. This is what cause the fault.
Jim says the fault lasted 20 milliseconds before breakers tripped. (The breakers for a wire like this are pretty amazing in their own right. They use high pressure gas to blow out the arc as the circuit begins to open. Anything that can cut off this number of megawatts in 20 ms gets my respect.) It blew carbonized oil about 3000 feet down the pipe to either side of the fault. (Compute velocity...)
They will be removing a long length of cable from the faulted area for analysis. The entire length will be dissected. Jim says the insulation they have inspected at so far looks like shredded cauliflower due to the explosion from the fault and the gas bubbling in it. (BTW - The insulation consists of 118 layers of paper tape.)
Based on X ray imaging they are going to have to open up 14 of the 23 splices along the 10 mile run. They'll have to drain the pipe to do so. It will take them 2 months to take the pipeline down (depressurize and drain). (The oil will be recycled - see below.) At each of the opened splices they are going to install special aluminum (non magnetic) collars around the conductors to keep the splices from getting pulled into the necked-down section of the pipe. These collars are being specially fabricated now and will be ready in about a month.
At each splice they have to build a semi clean room to keep dirt, moisture, worker sweat, and any other contaminants out of the joint before closing. After all, we're talking a quarter megavolt! They have special air conditioning and filter units for the vaults. Each joint will take two months of work. They will get some degree of parallelism in the phase of the project.
After repairing and replacing the faulted section of cable, stabilizing all of the splices, and buttoning it all up comes the job of putting the oil back in. First the pipe is evacuated and then back-filled with nitrogen etc as I described earlier. After extensive filtering, the oil is heated to about 230 degrees farenheit. It gets injected into a vacuum chamber at the temperature thorough hundreds of spray nozzles. This gets the maximum possible surface area so all the crap in it boils out into the chamber. The good stuff that's left is collected and pumped immediately into one end of the pipeline.
Then they power it up and see if it works. If not, they start over again. I'll keep you posted.
----
12/11/89
The pipeline is now completely drained and filled with nitrogen at atmospheric pressure. They are still in the process of opening up many of the splices to install the collars. They originally planned on doing 14 of them but now the number is 17.
The splice where the short happened, and the cable for about 40 feet to either side of it, has been completely replaced. Engineering prototypes of the aluminum collars are now installed there and the whole thing is all welded back together. They built new vaults under the street where the new splices are. The trucks, men, and their equipment are all gone and the roadbed has been repaved. They consider the segment where the short happened "fixed". We'll see...
Now that they verified the assembly of a splice with the new collars in it (to make sure they had the details right) they are going ahead with the fab run for the 17 other joints. They won't be done installing them until mid April. Then they'll put the oil in as described above and power it up slowly. I don't expect to have much to report until then and I promise to send an update.
Assuming 8 month down time the cost of the electricity alone will approach $75 million!
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[after many queries of "So how did it all work out?"]
... I am sure that you will all get this final message in due time.
You see, I found out yesterday that even the Department of Water and Power repair crew got copies! It rattled across electronic bulletin boards around the country and eventually ended up in the hands of a DWP manager who promptly showed it to the team. Small world. Every time you turn over a rock you find that we are all connected.
So, here's the scoop:
They are back on line. The failure was attributed to "TMB", short for Thermal Mechanical Bending. There have been several similar failures on the east coast but this was the first out here. TMB causes the cable to wiggle in place due to load surges. This eventually causes insulation failure due to abrasion against the pipe and separation of the many layers of paper tape. They repaired the short, put aluminum collars in most of the joints to hold the splices in place, and have added a load management scheme to reduce the current peaks. They powered it up and the darned thing works. Amazing.
I'll impulse them again in a few months to see if there is any news.Getty Images
Cleveland may be in store for yet another quarterback change.
The Browns’ official depth chart this week lists Kevin Hogan as the first-string quarterback. Joe Callahan, claimed on waivers yesterday, is listed as the second-string quarterback. Josh McCown, who is still recovering from a broken collarbone, is third, while Cody Kessler, who suffered a concussion on Sunday, is listed as fourth.
Hogan’s spot atop the depth chart doesn’t mean he’s going to start on Sunday against the Jets, but it does indicate that he’d be the starter if the Browns had to play today. If Hogan does start he’d be the Browns’ fourth different starting quarterback this season, following Robert Griffin III, McCown and Kessler.
After Kessler suffered his concussion on Sunday, Hogan came in and showed impressive rushing ability, catching the Bengals by surprise with his feet and carrying seven times for 104 yards and a touchdown. Unfortunately, Hogan wasn’t as successful passing the ball: He completed just 12 of 24 passes for 100 yards, with no touchdowns and two interceptions.A University of Newcastle team of researchers has this week launched Australia’s first large-scale demonstration of printed solar panels, as part of a final phase of testing and modifications of the potentially ground-breaking renewable energy technology.
The lightweight and flexible solar panels are made by printing an advanced electronic ink onto paper thin, clear laminated sheets using conventional printing presses.
The UON team, led by Professor Paul Dastoor, has pioneered both the electronic ink and the printing process over a period of more than 15 years, and is now testing the printed solar panels across a 100 square meter site at the UON campus.
As you can see in the video below, the printed “panels” are so light that they were tethered to the roof and walls of the demonstration site by velcro strips, and Dastoor explains that the labour involved in its ‘roll-out’ is exactly that…’rolling out’ a long sheet of the laminated material.
The launch of the demonstration project on Monday, he said, brings the technology one step closer to commercialisation and puts Australia at the head of the pack on printed solar.
“This installation brings us closer than we have ever been to making this technology a reality. It will help to determine the lifespan of the material and provide half-hourly feedback on the performance of the system,” said Professor Dastoor.
“There are just three demonstration sites at this scale that we know of anywhere in the world, so Australia has joined quite an elite group of global leaders poised to make this technology a commercial reality.”
Among the key benefits of the technology are that it can be rapidly – and cheaply, at a production cost of less than $10 a square meter – manufactured, enabling accelerated deployment into the marketplace.
“The low-cost and speed at which this technology can be deployed is exciting, particularly in the current Australian energy context where we need to find solutions, and quickly, to reduce demand on base-load power,” Dastoor said.
“No other renewable energy solution can be manufactured as quickly. On our lab-scale printer we can easily produce hundreds of metres of material per day, on a commercial-scale printer this would increase to kilometres.
“If you had just ten of these printers operating around the clock we could print enough material to deliver power to 1000 homes per day,” he said.
The low-cost and portability of the technology also makes it an ideal candidate for roll-out in developing countries and in cases of disaster relief, where power is needed quickly and temporarily.
A further advantage of the UON’s solar ink is that it is “more sensitive” to low levels of light.
Professor Dastoor says that unlike traditional PV panels, the technology produces a more constant power flow in low-light and cloud cover – and can even generate small quantities of energy from moonlight – therefore exposing users to less dips in productivity.
But the UON demonstration site will, for the first time, allow researchers to monitor how large areas of these unique printed solar cells respond under different real-world conditions.
Depending on the outcome, Dastoor also believes that the innovative technology could inspire a new service delivery model, removing key barriers to solar uptake in the community.
“It might operate like a telephone line, where customers choose a service plan based on their usage requirements but do not need to outlay the physical cost of the line installation and associated upkeep. The system is owned, maintained and updated by the provider and customers could scale their plan up or down as their requirements change,” said Professor Dastoor.
“By reinventing the delivery model we remove the need for initial lump sum outlays, overcoming the key barrier to community uptake and ensuring that the science actually ends up on our rooftops,” he said.
By Sophie Vorrath
Article reproduced with permission from RenewEconomy.Guest Post - Conditioning
That Which Keeps People Subservient to Abusive Leadership
By
Peter Offermann
peter@oceanfalls.org
Try as we might to expand our view of the world, ultimately we can only see the universe through our own eyes. This is why I always enjoying reading other people’s point of view, particularly when that person has a completely different life experience than mine.
Peter, a premium member of Two Ice Floes, fits that bill perfectly. It was our hope when we developed Two Ice Floes to use the “Your Turn To Publish” feature to induce talented individuals to submit their musings for publication (you do not need to be a member to do so) in order to share their life experience and perspective.
While I have written on this subject before, Peter brings a fresh and more in depth focus to the issue. Thank you Peter. – Cognitive Dissonance
To subscribe to 'Dispatches', a periodic newsletter from Cognitive Dissonance and TwoIceFloes Creations, please click here.
Few who are paying attention to world events through a lens more precise than the Main Stream Media (MSM) would deny that the vast majority of humans are being badly abused by their leadership in a variety of venues ranging from local, regional, national, and international politicians and bureaucrats, financial managers, corporate controllers, religious leaders, media moguls and warlords.
The vast majority of humans appear to be oblivious to this abuse and passively accept what is being done to them. Why is that? In one word - conditioning.
The vastly increased access to information that the internet enabled is responsible for a large number of people at least becoming aware of this abuse. However even among this more aware group, taking effective action to stop the abuse is sorely lacking. Why is that? In one word - conditioning.
There is a much smaller group that are proactively attempting to counter the abuse through group protest, but they are losing the struggle. Why is that? In one word - conditioning.
At 68 I am getting on in years. I have lived a full life and have had the time to reflect back on my path through life. As a result I have come to realize that most of the conditioning we are all subject to did not incapacitate me nearly as much as it did most people. I believe the realizations I have come to regarding my seeming immunity to conditioning are a necessary foundation required for people to free themselves from the tyranny that enslaves them.
With that hope in mind I would like to share some experiences from my youth that illustrate the problem (conditioning), and hint at the solution.
Our conditioning begins at the moment of our birth. Although they are not conscious of it, our parents, and family members, begin the process. Our parents have been conditioned before us and all their ‘conditioned’ traditions are passed on to us without considering the consequences. How often have you heard the excuse, “That’s just the way things are, get over it!” There is a great book by Wilhelm Reich called, “The Function of the Orgasm”, that explains the form of, and reasons for, this early in life conditioning. Yes, our sexuality plays a large role.
It is widely accepted that our late childhood, and early adulthood, years are our formative ones and also when we are in our prime both intellectually and physically. Historically people took full responsibility for managing their own lives much earlier in their lives, during what we consider late childhood. There were once 14 year old admirals that oversaw large naval forces. The commitment of marriage and raising a family began much earlier. Pioneers struck out to discover and populate new mysterious lands before they reached their teens.
The most rigid and destructive conditioning is imposed on us during our schooling. That schooling is starting earlier and lasting much longer than previously in history and while we are being ‘schooled’ we are not considered full adults with the responsibilities and freedoms such status implies.
Why is that? Could it be that control in our society is much more rigid than ever before? Those that control us realize that a rebellion of youth is the most dangerous kind. How better to minimize the impact of people in their prime than by keeping their status at ‘children’ with little access to power until well past their prime years? If people cave in to ‘slave hood’ during their prime years, how likely are they to rebel once they are past their prime; especially if they are burdened with excessive debt from their education?
I will only touch on the subject of our schooling lightly here and point out what I see as the most debilitating habits we are taught. The subject is an immense one covered well by people such as John Taylor Gatto, author of, “The Underground History of American Education”.
Disclaimer: I quit school in the early 60’s while in grade 9, at age 14. The reason being I felt I was being made dumber instead of smarter. My parent’s response was, “if you don’t go to school we will not support you.” I left home then and took on responsibility for my own life.
Even though I chose a different path than most I did not really understand intellectually why I did what I did then until recently, about a half a century later. What I did then, I did intuitively, rather than logically while accepting full responsibility for the outcome.
I first spent a few years hoboing around Canada taking whatever work I could find whenever I needed it. No job was too menial or too challenging to accept.
At 17 I took on a job that turned my life around and led to my conditioning mostly sliding off me.
This job was as a fire lookout man with the British Columbia (Canada) Forest Service. For a number of years I worked and lived on remote mountain tops, by myself, for 3 to 4 months each year. Spending that much time completely alone, and removed from civilization, especially during my formative years, had a profound effect on my perceptions about life as a human being and how I fit into society.
Rendered by me from a photo by Kyle Johnson http://kjphotos.com/portfolio/outside
I didn’t have a camera in those days so the image above, which closely represents my situation, is used to illustrate the setting.
Below is a photograph of me taken a few years later in the same general area I spent time on the lookouts. The other photos interspersed in this essay are taken by me as I explored the mountains near my home after my lookout years.
In current society peer pressure during childhood, and early adulthood, is immense. To survive in this setting we must pay close attention to others around us for clues regarding what is and is not acceptable. Because of this pressure the bulk of our energy goes into human interactions and we are pretty much oblivious to everything but our immediate environment. “Use it or lose it”, is sage advice. Because of concentrating on human relations during their formative years, most people have little if any connection to the natural world.
Try to imagine what people would be like if, as youngsters, they spent time exploring and living in nature while being responsible for their own survival and actions instead of hanging out at the mall or partying with their pals.
Is it fair to say that those that hang with the crowd are unlikely to be aware of, or able to understand, large scale events not part of their immediate environment?
What about someone who is tasked with surviving in the greater world using only their own skills? Would they stand a better chance of grasping what is going on?
Is this phenomena related to the common use of a ‘rite of manhood’ by many cultures where young adults leave the security of their group to face the wilderness on their own?
Do the majority of people in modern societies never go through this enabling rite of passage and instead go from the security of their parent’s care to the security of the big brother state? Does this explain why some people never seem to reach adulthood?
Substantial time on the lookout, without peer pressure, made me realize how confining trying to fit into the crowd is. Most people don’t even sense this pressure because it is all they know. It’s like the air we breathe. It’s just there until it isn’t, then we die; unless we are prepared for an airless environment.
Most people also don’t realize how much of their time and energy it takes to be ‘social’. Being removed from ‘socializing’ is enormously stressful if it is all you know.
Many aspiring lookout men needed to come down off the mountains prematurely because they could not stand being alone. Those that adjusted to the isolation came to treasure the freedom of being comfortable for extended periods with just their own company. The amount of time that then becomes available for other, possibly more worthwhile pursuits, is substantial.
In the forefront of these benefits is having the time to look inside youself without constantly being subjected to the opinion of others. Building friendships takes time and effort and becoming your own friend is no exception. Most of us never get the opportunity to do this.
Those that desire to control human behavior understand that people that are not comfortable with themself are much more susceptible to being controlled because they are lonely and need to seek comfort and friendship outside themselves. Virtually every sales campaign, ranging from that of the door to door salesmen to world leaders, is then enabled to easily sell you a bill of goods by convincing you that what they have to offer is going to become your best friend and make your life less lonely.
Short excursions or holidays into nature, most often with others fitted into a busy schedule, do little to increase our awareness of the greater reality that humans exist within. Thanks to modern technology very few of these excursions actually take people far from the human controlled environment they are conditioned to.
It is one thing to climb to the top of a mountain, conquer it, and then immediately return to civilization. It is something totally different to stay in that wilderness environment for extended periods with the time to come to know those other species that are at home in those environs. It makes one realize that humans are not the 'be all, end all' of life on earth. Humility is born which serves us very well. In this environment one soon comes to realize those species include the earth itself. Seeing the constant breathing of weather and daily and seasonal shifts of energies makes one realize everything is made of the same stuff and ‘lives’ in its own unique way.
To assume the earth is a lifeless blob which we can abuse without conscious consequence is a very risky proposition.
Most people’s lives are lived out within an environment created by and for humans. Most; and more all the time, live in an urban environment.
When they holiday people generally take some technological means of travel which quickly takes them to the other place of human habitation they wish to holiday in. Because people’s travel experience is so brief, and misses the detail of the ground they pass over, most of which currently has no human habitants, it is easy for them to agree when told by ‘experts’ that human overpopulation is a crisis.
Yes there are many urban places on the planet that suffer from overpopulation, and many more places on the planet that are being strip-mined to support those urban centers. But all in all there is an enormous amount of free space capable of supporting humans, if only they were able to tear themselves away from the social centers they now depend on and cluster in.
In the early 1990’s while transitioning from life in Canada to life in Mexico I drove between Canada and Mexico every second week for 3 years while gradually weaning my clients off the services I had previously offered. I was a workaholic and saw the time on the road as my own and enjoyed it by taking different highways almost every trip. Eventually I was able to drive between Mexico and Canada while only passing through a very few towns, all smaller than about 10,000 people. Most of the distance on these trips was spent on very remote highways with no other traffic to speak of.
I can say definitively that between, Canada, the USA and Mexico there is enough uninhabited fertile land to accommodate the whole world without the residents being able to see their nearest neighbor.
This vision assumes we overcome our condition of needing to be part of the herd clustering in vast hordes, and also manage to disempower the laws of those that enslave us that currently make this land unavailable to us.
Humans are far more difficult to control if they live in small clusters, all over the place, while paying little or no attention to the MSM. The propagandists can then no longer create a single message that will motive the whole herd of humans to act identically by broadcasting their one piece of propaganda from a single location that reaches everyone.
Propaganda still works, but it must be tailored properly to fit each unique situation in order to get consistent results. If there is no central broadcasting service the message must also be taken to each unique location individually. This is an impossible situation for our rulers and is the reason we are all so heavily conditioned to….
Need to be in close quarters with other humans.
Need the approval of others.
Think alike.
Think we must be/are part of a team.
Become isolated emotionally from ourselves and each other, even while packed on top of each other, so only big brother can offer us comfort.
Desire specialized knowledge which results in only being able to survive as part of the ‘urban’ team.
To desire a ‘carrot’ of reward that only ‘winning’, at any cost(?), within the crowd can present.
Depend on centralized services, especially sources of energy.
Depend on the rule of ‘human’ law to protect us from each other.
The most destructive conditioning takes place in our schools, right at the time we are most susceptible to it, during our formative years. During that period we have little experience of our own to compare to what we are told, and raising questions about the validity of the taught ‘truth’ is ruthlessly punished in order to force us to depend on the wisdom of others instead of our own intuition.
We are ruthlessly regimented to follow orders so that we eventually become incapable of thinking for ourselves and become dependent on the ‘boss’ to do our thinking for us. The intellectual box we become stuck within is then defined by the boss.
Specialization in training, and limiting access to information, (compartmentalization) is critical to our conditioning. If we cannot think for ourselves, and only understand part of the puzzle, and are incapable of deducing or intuiting answers to unknowns, we are trapped within our dependence on others.
I have personally met a number of world shaker class intellectuals that are extremely brilliant in their own field, but figuratively can’t tie their own shoe laces. This situation is not accidental. If only the boss has the full picture, the boss becomes the only one who can act effectively. Everyone else then becomes totally dependent on the Boss. Specialization has its place, but having a well rounded toolkit of life skills is essential to individual freedom.
Being away from civilization where the boss is not handy to hold your hand is a disaster waiting to happen if you cannot think for yourself. Then, unless you quickly learn to identify problems before they destroy you, and also learn to fix problems you can’t avoid intuitively without an instruction manually from the boss, you will not survive long.
Lack of education plus much time spent away from conditioning influences and conditioned humans, has changed fundamentally how I solve problems.
When faced with a problem a conditioned human will go through the channels of historical solutions until they find one that works for them.
Instead I consider the elements of the problem in place, try to intuit the workings of the device/situation, and then pinpoint what is going wrong and consider what might fix it. No manual is needed; just the ability to think a situation through for myself.
Using only this skill I have managed to live my whole life well, if not always comfortably, while being considered an essential resource by many people with far more education than myself, even in areas they have expertise in.
No one is perfect and you will make mistakes when you think for yourself. Mistakes are often painful, but if you accept the possibility of making mistakes, and are willing to learn from them when you make them, you will eventually become a very robust and capable person. What doesn’t break you strengthens you.
If you are afraid of making mistakes you are stuck on the safe (?) road built by our bosses. You still might not be safe, but at least you can then blame your mistakes on someone else.
I have learned far more from my mistakes than from my successes. I am now very thankful for my mistakes, even though some were very painful to navigate.
This essay is getting long so I will end it with one last point about what I learned from my life on the lookouts.
While we are thrust into the middle of ongoing intense personal inter-relationships, especially during our formative years, our attention remains strongly focused on each interaction as it occurs and the rest of the world passes us by unnoticed. We see the trees, but are oblivious of the forest. This is most often a habit we carry throughout life and it is a very dangerous one in our propaganda filled world. We see each piece of new propaganda as a standalone piece of information. We have no perspective to see if how it fits into the forest makes sense. We are then at the mercy of those that would deceive us for their own purpose. All they need to do is grab our attention and they can then do with us as they like.
On a lookout tasked with quickly finding dangerous anomalies, within a vast vista of forests, becoming focused on each tree individually is not productive and makes it impossible to see the whole picture. A good lookout man eventually learns to quickly scan vast vistas without focusing on anything in particular. Taking this approach to finding required data points, such as suspicious smoke, allows our intuition to come to our aid. It always amazes me how glaringly anomalies stand out when using this method.
It works just as well in any other environment, including researching on the internet. When surrounded by questionable ‘news/propaganda’ the fires stick out much more obviously when we also are aware of the apparently unrelated surrounding information that is part of webscape. The ‘trees’ of propaganda do not distract us from seeing the whole situation. If there’s no smoke there probably isn’t a fire. Our intuition can see the difference even though we logically can’t. Following our intuition instead of remaining focused on the propaganda leads us to the information that will then allow us to make sense of the situation.
Although my prognosis of our situation appears very gloomy I am not pessimistic. I see light at the end of the tunnel.
For those who managed to slog through to this point thank you for your attention.
Peter
www.TwoIceFloes.com is unlike anything you will find on the web, a truly unique destination. There you will find distinctive Premium Members only articles as well as discussions on wellness and health, homesteading, spirituality & philosophy and most importantly ‘safe’ forums not found anywhere else. Come by for a peek and stay a while.Democrat Ralph Northam's Tuesday routing of Republican Ed Gillespie to become the next governor of Virginia has significant national implications.
Here are five takeaways from Democrats' big night.
Reinvigorated Democrats score their first big Trump-era victory
Democrats are back from the dead.
Downtrodden liberals finally had a night to celebrate after a year of abysmal electoral returns that started with President Trump’s shocking White House upset and dragged on through several high-profile special-election losses in 2017.
A Northam loss on Tuesday would have sent the party into a tailspin.
Northam, the state's lieutenant governor, was expected to win — the state has gone blue in the last three presidential elections. 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 carried Virginia by 5 points in 2016, and Democrats have grown accustomed to winning statewide races there.
But the polls tightened significantly in the last days of the race, making Democrats nervous in the final push.
The fear of yet another crushing disappointment may have helped drive Democrats to the polls. They overcame the rain and the cold — conditions that typically depress turnout, which often favors Republicans.
It was a strong race from start to finish for Northam.
He soundly defeated a more liberal challenger in the primary, and Democrats were brightened by the fact that the race didn’t devolve into a proxy war between Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: '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' MORE (I-Vt.).
Northam cruised to victory in the general election by running closely to term-limited Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), whose presidential prospects will get a boost in the wake of Tuesday’s outcome.
The victory is also a big one for Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez Thomas Edward PerezClinton’s top five vice presidential picks Government social programs: Triumph of hope over evidence Labor’s 'wasteful spending and mismanagement” at Workers’ Comp MORE.
Perez was only elected chairman in February, but there has already been grumbling that the DNC’s rebuilding efforts were happening too slowly.
Perez barnstormed the state over the last four days, stumping for candidates up and down the ticket. He told The Hill in an interview that winning elections again would act as a salve for the party's wounds from the divisive 2016 presidential primary.
Democrats got that and more on Tuesday night.
Trump-style campaigns won’t work everywhere
On paper, Gillespie looks like a far cry from a Trump-style candidate. As the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a onetime adviser to former President George W. Bush, Gillespie’s resume is full of establishment credentials.
But when polling showed Gillespie was in dire straights, he dove headlong into the culture wars that have been the hallmark of Trump’s administration.
Gillespie accused Northam of working to make it easier for sex offenders to vote and buy guns. He accused Northam of promoting the growth of a violent Salvadoran gang known as MS-13 and accused him of supporting sanctuary cities.
It appeared to be working. The polls tightened and Northam fumbled the sanctuary cities issue, which provoked progressive groups to cut him loose.
But when Election Day rolled around, the strategy backfired.
Gillespie was routed in Northern Virginia, where a Republican with establishment credentials should fare far better.
Gillespie dipped into the Trump playbook and failed. That and the president’s historically low approval rating are sure to be on the minds of Republicans running for office in 2018.
The House is in play for Democrats
The Virginia governor’s race bodes well for Democrats in their effort to pick up 24 seats and take back the House of Representatives.
In addition to winning the three statewide races on the ballot in Virginia, Democrats crushed down-ballot Republicans, picking up more than a dozen seats and cutting deep into the GOP’s 2-to-1 advantage in the Statehouse.
That's a frightening prospect for Republicans seeking reelection to the House, some of whom already see the writing on the wall.
Prior to Election Day, 27 Republicans had announced they would not seek reelection to the House. GOP Reps. Frank LoBiondo Frank Alo LoBiondoLoBiondo launches consulting firm Live coverage: House elects new Speaker as Dems take charge The Hill's 12:30 Report — Presented by The Embassy of the United Arab Emirates — George H.W. Bush lies in state | NRCC suffers major hack | Crunch-time for Congress MORE (N.J.) and Ted Poe Lloyd (Ted) Theodore PoeTexas New Members 2019 Cook shifts two House GOP seats closer to Dem column Five races to watch in the Texas runoffs MORE (Texas) added to that total on Tuesday, when they announced their retirements from Congress.
Republicans argued that Tuesday’s races don’t have broader implications — Virginia is a blue state where Democrats were expected to win.
But Democrats believe history is on their side. They've compared the 2018 political landscape to 2006, when they capitalized on the unpopularity of former Bush and the Republican Congress to take back the House.
Virginia loss could fuel more Republican primaries
The finger-pointing among Republicans started immediately.
Republican Rep. Scott Taylor (Va.) told The Hill the GOP’s losses on Tuesday were a “referendum” on the Trump administration.
The president disagreed.
Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 |
kicked off Overpass on their T-side and with both Wiktor "TaZ" Wojtas and Janusz "Snax" Pogorzelski picking up two frags apiece on the first pistolround, VP were soon off to a roaring start.
Snax was in fine form on both maps for VP
With Snax back in a fine form in terms getting entry frags and round-crushing multikills, Virtus.pro generally proceeded uncontested in the first half and ended it with a domineering 14-1 score.
The second half saw compLexity finally awaken from their thrashing as Bradley "ANDROID" Fodor and Shawn "witmer" Taylor both picked up double kills while attacking on the pistolround. Ultimately however, all VP required was two rounds to close out the map and patient defending rewarded Filip "NEO" Kubski & co. as they closed out the first map 16-7.
ELEAGUE Season 1 Best of 1 Virtus.pro Matchpage 16 7 compLexity 16 Overpass 7
Virtus.pro K - D +/- ADR Rating 2.0 Janusz 'Snax' PogorzelskiSnax 23 - 11 +12 99.2 1.70 Wiktor 'TaZ' WojtasTaZ 23 - 13 +10 97.0 1.57 Paweł 'byali' Bielińskibyali 21 - 15 +6 101.7 1.56 Jarosław 'pashaBiceps' JarząbkowskipashaBiceps 16 - 15 +1 77.0 1.11 Filip 'NEO' KubskiNEO 14 - 15 -1 64.9 0.99 compLexity K - D +/- ADR Rating 2.0 Shawn 'witmer' Taylorwitmer 16 - 20 -4 84.9 1.03 Joshua'sancz' Ballengersancz 15 - 18 -3 71.3 0.86 Rory 'dephh' Jacksondephh 16 - 18 -2 63.5 0.80 Bradley 'ANDROID' FodorANDROID 13 - 21 -8 71.2 0.74 Kia 'Surreal' ManSurreal 9 - 20 -11 63.0 0.52
With Cobblestone being the second map, Virtus.pro quickly claimed the first pistolround as Jarosław "pashaBiceps" Jarząbkowski picked up two USP kills for his team and compLexity were unable to plant the bomb. A risky decision from the Canadian-British-American team to force buy on the next round however paid its dividends with Kia "Surreal" Man snagging two TEC-9 kills and compLexity managed to equalise the score.
Virtus.pro successfully defended on the fifth round but compLexity continued buying and a double entry from Rory "dephh" Jackson gave compLexity another round and the North American team went ahead to a 6-2 score on their T-side.
sancz's one-versus-two clutch on Cobblestone almost gave coL the momentum advantage
However, VP began to claw their way back in characteristic fashion, with the likes of NEO pulling off a triple kill spray while defending drop, and the first half score ultimately finished with a narrow 8-7 lead for compLexity.
A bizarre moment in the second pistolround saw Canadian ANDROID pick up two early USP kills despite both Virtus.pro players having a drop on him and, with a secured pistolround, the North American team climbed as far as 10-7 before Virtus.pro began to fight back.
With Virtus.pro displaying confident executes and a cohesive gameplan, the Polish team continued to roll over compLexity's defenses and, despite a well-played one-versus-two from Joshua "sancz" Ballenger, it was Virtus.pro who marched ahead to a 16-11 win on Cobblestone.
ELEAGUE Season 1 Best of 1 compLexity Matchpage 11 16 Virtus.pro 11 Cobblestone 16
Virtus.pro K - D +/- ADR Rating 2.0 Paweł 'byali' Bielińskibyali 24 - 16 +8 101.0 1.54 Janusz 'Snax' PogorzelskiSnax 23 - 14 +9 91.1 1.37 Jarosław 'pashaBiceps' JarząbkowskipashaBiceps 19 - 16 +3 77.7 1.32 Filip 'NEO' KubskiNEO 22 - 15 +7 78.6 1.31 Wiktor 'TaZ' WojtasTaZ 16 - 15 +1 63.2 1.05 compLexity K - D +/- ADR Rating 2.0 Joshua'sancz' Ballengersancz 20 - 19 +1 81.0 1.01 Kia 'Surreal' ManSurreal 18 - 20 -2 71.1 0.90 Rory 'dephh' Jacksondephh 13 - 20 -7 70.9 0.87 Shawn 'witmer' Taylorwitmer 15 - 22 -7 49.4 0.72 Bradley 'ANDROID' FodorANDROID 10 - 23 -13 49.7 0.56
The next set of matches from ELEAGUE Group F are between Envy and Gambit; the first goes live at 20:20.
stich writes for HLTV.org and can be found on TwitterCopyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
FOND DU LAC, Wis. - A new name has been chosen for the Fond du Lac baseball team.
The team announced that 'Dock Spiders' was the winner for the new Fond du Lac Northwoods League franchise.
There were over 800 names submitted and then the names were narrowed to five finalists. Those names included; Dock Spiders, Barn Owls, Lake Flies, Pipsqueaks, and Shantymen.
“We are excited to open our inaugural season as the Fond du Lac Dock Spiders,” said General Manager Ryan Moede. “The team logos turned out great and we think Fond du Lac will be proud to be the home of the Dock Spiders.”
Fond du Lac baseball will begin its first season in May of 2017.RT and Sputnik: Clean Bill of Health? Fact checking the Russian Foreign Ministry’s claims @DFRLab Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 12, 2017
Contents pages of Ofcom bulletins, showing some of RT’s violations.
The Russian Foreign Ministry says that state-funded broadcasters RT and Sputnik have a clean bill of health. Three times since late April, it has attacked critics of the two outlets by claiming that the UK’s telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has found them not guilty of false reporting. The fact that the Russian government is defending its outlets is not new. (Earlier examples are found here, here and here.) What is new in the latest statements is their appeal to the authority of Ofcom. The invocation is startling, because Ofcom has repeatedly found RT guilty of violating the UK’s broadcasting standards. What lies behind the Russian Foreign Ministry’s statements, and are they correct? Claims and counter-claims The first incident came in April. On April 18, British daily The Times published an editorial criticizing Russia’s policies. The editorial included a reference to “fraudulent propaganda, pushed by fake news outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik.”
The Times editorial of April 18. (Source: thetimes.co.uk)
A week later, the Russian Foreign Ministry responded with a statement accusing The Times of “fiction” and “information attacks.” The ministry said the Times editorial team “should be perfectly aware that the British media regulator, Ofcom, never found any proof that the media in question disseminate false information.” The Russian Foreign Ministry’s retort labeling the Times article as “fake” with its famous big red stamp. (Source: mid.ru/en) The second incident came in May, after The Times published an opinion piece accusing the Russian government of interfering in the US and French elections, and claiming that Russia controls “a formidable apparatus of fakery disguised as news, principally the broadcaster Russia Today (RT) and the purported news agency Sputnik.” On May 20, the Russian Foreign Ministry responded, accusing The Times of “slander,” “fake news,” and “professional jealousy.” The ministry argued, “We assume the UK media circles are aware of the British media regulator Ofcom’s check of the Russia Today (RT) and the Sputnik news agency’s operation. It is known for a fact that none of the information products issued by these two Russian media outlets fall under the category of fakery. Meanwhile, The Times is regularly caught spreading fake news.” The Russian Foreign Ministry’s May 20 attack on The Times. (Source: mid.ru/en) Ten days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also referenced Ofcom in a comment defending RT and Sputnik against claims of propaganda: “As for Sputnik and Russia Today, not long ago Britain’s Ofcom was dealing with similar accusations. It did not find any violations of journalistic ethics. I would like to repeat that this is the opinion of those that are considered independent agencies that are in a position to conduct an expert evaluation.” Ofcom — the background Ofcom is the UK’s independent telecommunications regulator. One of its functions is to enforce standards in broadcasts made over the airwaves — TV and radio, but not, significantly, internet-only products. The standards are published online, and cover a number of issues, including decency, hate speech, the protection of younger viewers, and advertising. Section 5 of the code concerns news reporting, and states that “news, in whatever form, must be reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.”
Ofcom Rule 5.1 on news reporting. (Source: ofcom.org.uk, p. 28)
Ofcom form dated January 4, 2017, showing Sputnik’s cessation of broadcasting on London digital radio. The three left-hand columns indicate frequency use until January 1, 2017; the three right-hand columns indicate use from that date. (Source: ofcom.org.uk)News broke today that actor Leonard Nimoy has died of chronic lung disease at the age of 83. He was most renowned for his portrayal of half-Vulcan Spock since the very beginning of the Star Trek franchise. Nimoy has become an icon in nerd-dom, making beloved guest appearances in The Simpsons and Futurama, as well as portraying Spock in several Star Trek games such as Interplay’s Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, and Star Trek: Judgement Rites, as well as MMORPG Star Trek Online.
Leonard Nimoy also made notable appearances in other video games, including a role as the narrator in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, as well as a narration role in the bizarre Dreamcast virtual pet game Seaman. His most recent work in gaming included a noteworthy portrayal of antagonist Master Xehanort in the Square Enix RPGs Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, and Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance. Interestingly, in Birth By Sleep he was acting alongside Star Wars lead Mark Hamill, who played opposing Keyblade Master Eraqus.
“Live long and prosper.” Leonard Nimoy, you will be missed by many.Hearing that women make a difference in game development is one thing, seeing what it means in practice is another. Recently, David Gaider — lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise — posted a blog about how having women on his writing team affected something in Dragon Age 3.
The team was having a peer review about the game, and it seemed as if everything about a certain plot point was fine. Then, someone spoke up. A woman. The plot point, she argued, could easily be seen as a form of rape. Everyone became stunned — not because she was off-base, but because she was right. She was right, even though the writer didn't intend the scene to come off way, even though the team considers itself to be progressive.
In this case, it was not a long trip for the person playing through the plot to see what was happening at a slightly different angle, and it was no longer good-creepy. It was bad-creepy. It was discomforting and not cool at all. And this female writer was not alone. All the other women at the table nodded their heads, and had noted the same thing in their critiques.
What's curious about the team of writers on Dragon Age 3 is that it is primarily composed of women. Which leads Gaider to ask: what would have happened if that wasn't the case? Had the team been mostly guys — which isn't uncommon — would the scene have gone in? Gaider thinks so.
And this thought occurred as well: if this had been a team with no female perspective present, it would have gone into the game that way. Had that female writer been the lone woman, would her view have been disregarded as an over-reaction? A lone outlier? How often does that happen on game development teams, ones made up of otherwise intelligent and liberal guys who are then shocked to find out that they inadvertently offended a group that is quickly approaching half of the gaming audience?
Crisis averted, as Gaider says. Still, this example seems important in light of recent controversy surrounding the devastating things women in game development have to suffer just to be a part of this hobby we all love so much. They have to go through these things, even though they can often make our games better.
It makes me wonder too — how many creepy sex things in games have occurred because there wasn't a woman on the team that dared to speak up? Maybe you don't know what I'm talking about, but there are quite a few creepy sex scenes or things with awful sexual undertones that sneak their way into games. Things that I doubt were intended to be uncomfortable, or if they are purposefully that way, the intention is not worthwhile/good enough to warrant potentially triggering someone.
I think, for instance, of the Madison Paige's nightmare in Heavy Rain, where she is running away from an assailant in her own home. I think of how a different Bioware game, Mass Effect 2, has you "fixing" Jack — a character with PTSD — by having sex with her while she cries. I think of Quantic Dream's recent Kara video, where a female android begs a man to stop dissembling her.
Maybe these situations seem thrilling, seem beautiful, seem awe-inspiring. Or, they might seem disgusting. It depends, but it's not a stretch for either to be true. Would you realise it without someone telling you that was the case, without having, for one second, some empathy for the sensitivities of another human being?
Regardless of how absurd it might seem, sometimes it does take a woman to notice something is off. Hopefully development studios take this fact to heart.Two newfound Earth-size planets are probably the charred survivors of a near-death encounter with their fading parent star, scientists say.
The planetary pair, discovered using NASA's Kepler space telescope, are about 0.76 and 0.87 times Earth's radius, making the alien worlds the smallest planets detected so far around an active star, other than our sun.
But the planets didn't start small—astronomers think the worlds were once gas giants, akin to Jupiter or Saturn, that were stripped down after being swallowed by their swollen, aging parent.
News of the "deep fried" duo comes hot on the heels of the announcement of the first Earth-size planets found by the Kepler team.
There are some similarities between the Earth-size planets discovered so far, said Valérie Van Grootel, an astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium and a co-author on the latest study.
Kepler-20e and -20f "orbit very close to their star, so they are very hot planets, and that is the case with our planets, too," Van Grootel told National Geographic News.
"But there are major differences, too. In our case, we have a post red-giant star, whereas the other team's planets orbit a star like our own sun. We think that our Earth-size planets are the rocky cores of former gas planets."
Giant Planets Swallowed Whole?
The new planets orbit a subdwarf B star called KIC 05807616, which lies about 4,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Cygnus.
Subdwarf B stars are hot, blue stars that fall between red giants and white dwarfs—the final stage in the life cycles of stars like our sun.
When a sunlike star has depleted most of its fuel, it will swell up to become a red giant many hundreds of times its original size.
As the red giant star balloons, any planets closest to the star are completely vaporized in the inferno.
Astronomers think our sun will enter this phase in about five billion years and engulf the solar system's inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
Meanwhile, interactions with gases in a red giant star's expanded atmosphere will force some planets a bit farther from the star to migrate inward—which actually gives those worlds a shot at survival.
Scientists think the newly discovered Earth-size planets were once gas giants that got sucked in toward the star during its red giant phase.
As the planets plowed through their star's hot atmosphere, their gaseous and liquid layers were stripped off, leaving behind only the rocky cores.
No Chance of Life on New Planets
Not only did some of KIC 05807616's planets survive, scientists think the friction generated by their passage helped strip the star of most if its fiery envelope, hastening its progress from a swollen red giant to a hot subdwarf.
"We think this is the first documented case of planets influencing a star's evolution," study leader Stephane Charpinet, an astronomer at France's University of Toulouse, said in a statement.
And despite their Earth-like sizes, "we are sure there is no life on these planets," the University of Liège's Van Grootel added.
Both planets whirl tightly around the subdwarf at distances roughly 40 times closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun. That means the planets have mean surface temperatures on their star-facing sides of 15,947°F (8,842°C) and 14,110°F (7,821°C).
"It's impossible [for life as we know it] to survive at these temperatures so close to a star" that is five times hotter than our sun, Van Grootel said.WASHINGTON — Sen. Ted Cruz and two fellow Republicans are pressing the State Department to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Congress passed legislation in 1995 that called for moving the embassy to Jerusalem, but Democratic and Republican administrations alike have declined to enact the change, citing security concerns. The latest measure, introduced Tuesday as the new Congress convened, would withhold funding from the State Department until it makes the move.
“Jerusalem is the eternal and undivided capital of Israel,” Cruz said in a written statement. “Unfortunately, the Obama administration's vendetta against the Jewish state has been so vicious that to even utter this simple truth — let alone the reality that Jerusalem is the appropriate venue for the American embassy in Israel — is shocking in some circles.
"But it is finally time to cut through the double-speak and broken promises and do what Congress said we should do in 1995: formally move our embassy to the capital of our great ally Israel.”
The measure is also sponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Dean Heller of Nevada.
During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump vowed to move the embassy from Tel Aviv, where it has been for 68 years, to Jerusalem. Previous Republicans have made similar campaign promises in the past without following through.
Trump's choice for ambassador to Israel, bankruptcy attorney David Friedman, has said he supports moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
The dispute between Israel and the Palestinians over Jerusalem — which is home to sites sacred to the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths — has been one of the thorniest between the two sides for decades.
A senior Palestinian official indicated this week that there will be a new violent uprising if the U.S. Embassy is relocated to Jerusalem.SEOUL, South Korea — The last time South Korea is known to have plotted to assassinate the North Korean leadership, nothing went as planned.
In the late 1960s, after North Korean commandoes tried to ransack the presidential palace in Seoul, South Korea secretly trained misfits plucked from prison or off the streets to sneak into North Korea and slit the throat of its leader, Kim Il-sung. When the mission was aborted, the men mutinied.
They killed their trainers and fought their way into Seoul before blowing themselves up, an episode the government concealed for decades.
Now, as Mr. Kim’s grandson, Kim Jong-un, accelerates his nuclear missile program, South Korea is again targeting the North’s leadership. A day after North Korea conducted its sixth — and by far most powerful — nuclear test this month, the South Korean defense minister, Song Young-moo, told lawmakers in Seoul that a special forces brigade defense officials described as a “decapitation unit” would be established by the end of the year.CTVNews.ca
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko heaped much praise on Canada for its support in the face of a Russian military incursion, in a speech to Parliament punctuated by cheers and standing ovations.
Poroshenko is in Ottawa for a series of meetings about Ukraine-Canada trade ties, and was invited to address parliamentarians during what would have been question period Wednesday afternoon.
“To be frank with you, I feel very much at home with you here today in a country that is very close to Ukraine,” Poroshenko said, after thanking Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella and House Speaker Andrew Scheer for the opportunity to speak.
He thanked Canadian Parliamentarians and citizens profusely for their support in the face of Russia’s military incursion into eastern Ukraine.
“In these dark days, we feel the strong support of you. Thank you very much for that,” Poroshenko said.
“Canada is a friend, indeed.”
Poroshenko spoke primarily in English, but peppered his speech with some French and Ukrainian. He also closed with two quotes from former British prime minister Winston Churchill who once wrote to his wife: “Darling, I’m really attracted to this country.”
Again evoking Churchill, he said: “I love coming to Canada. God bless your country. Thank you very much, indeed.”
The visit marks Poroshenko’s first official visit to Canada. Earlier Wednesday, Poroshenko and Harper reached an agreement on a loan Canada had previously promised to help foster economic and financial sector reforms in Ukraine.
Canada also pledged additional humanitarian assistance, including medical supplies, food, emergency supplies and other help for the millions of Ukrainians living in areas affected by violence.
Canada has previously shown solidarity with Ukraine against the Russian aggression by announcing a series of travel bans and economic sanctions against Russian individuals and companies. Canada will also send about 300 observers to next month’s parliamentary elections in Ukraine.
In introducing Poroshenko, Harper acknowledged the strong ties between the two countries, with more than one million people of Ukrainian heritage living in Canada.
He further pledged Canada’s support in the face of a Russian incursion that led to the annexation of Crimea, and fierce protests and fighting that have left some 3,000 people dead.
“Canada recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, all of Ukraine. And whether it takes five months or 50 years to liberate it, we will never, ever recognize the illegal occupation of any Ukrainian territory,” Harper said.
“This is a matter of kinship, this is a matter of family, this is personal, and we will stand by you.”
During his speech, Poroshenko noted Ukraine gained its independence in the early 1990s “without shedding a single drop of blood.
“That is not true anymore.”
He added: “Today, Ukraine is bleeding for its independence and its territorial integrity.”
There were also lighthearted moments during Poroshenko’s speech, as he joked about the number of Ukrainian-Canadians who have made their mark on Canada, from hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky to astronaut Roberta Bondar.
He said that he could “go on,” but that his speech would go on all day if he catalogued all of the achievements of the Ukrainian-Canadian community.
“Mr. Prime Minister…you mentioned that Canada is probably the most Ukrainian nation outside of Ukraine itself. You know what? This is absolutely true,” Poroshenko said.
He added that “Ukraine is probably the most Canadian nation after Canada itself.”
He also hailed the ratification Tuesday of an agreement that deepens political and economic ties between Ukraine and the European Union, a deal he characterized as “the last farewell” from Ukraine to the Soviet Union.
“That was a Rubicon Ukraine crossed, and we will never ever return back to our awful past,” Poroshenko said. “I strongly believe that our values, or freedom, our democracy, our European future is possible for the Ukrainian nation.”
After his address, Poroshenko joined a rally in support of Ukraine on Parliament Hill. After a passionate speech to the crowd gathered outside Centre Bloc in both English and Ukrainian, Poroshenko ran toward supporters who had gathered up against a security gate, followed quickly by his worried-looking security detail.PRINCETON, N.J. -- Even as relations between the leaders of Israel and the United States reportedly deteriorate over disagreement about how to handle Iran's nuclear program, Israel has retained its broadly favorable image in the U.S. over the past year. Seventy percent of Americans now view that country favorably, and 62% say they sympathize more with the Israelis than the Palestinians in the Mideast conflict. By contrast, 17% currently view the Palestinian Authority favorably, and 16% sympathize more with the Palestinians.
These attitudes, from Gallup's Feb. 8-11 World Affairs survey, are unchanged from a year ago, suggesting that neither the evident friction between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, nor the 50-day conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip last year, greatly affected how each is perceived in the U.S.
In fact, Israel's public image in the U.S. has been fairly strong since 2005, with an average 68% of Americans viewing it favorably. But from 2000 to 2004, when hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians were running high, its favorable score averaged 60%. Prior to that, Israel's favorable rating was even more volatile, reflecting other Mideast events, including the 1991 Gulf War, when positive views of Israel soared after that country suffered Iraqi rocket attacks.
Gallup first measured Americans' impression of the Palestinian Authority, the official governing body of the Palestinians, in 2000, and since then, the percentage viewing it favorably has averaged 17%, diverging significantly on only a few occasions. One of these came in 2005, when favorable opinion of the Palestinians increased in polling conducted shortly after Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed Yasser Arafat as Palestinian president.
Asked to Choose Sides, Six in 10 Americans Favor Israelis
Americans' tendency to sympathize more with the Israelis than the Palestinians in their regional conflict also peaked in 1991 during the Gulf War, then fell in 1993 as President Bill Clinton led intense Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and more Americans favored both sides or neither side. Americans remained largely neutral through 2001, spanning several more peace initiatives, when the 9/11 attacks -- as well as years of failed peace talks that yielded to heightened Palestinian-Israeli violence -- may have fundamentally changed their outlook toward the Middle East. Since 2004, Israel has consistently received the majority share of Americans' sympathies.
Republicans Nearly Unanimous in Support of Israel
A key reason Americans' sympathy for Israel has solidified at a sizable majority level is that Republicans' support for the Jewish state has increased considerably, rising from 53% in 2000 to more than 80% since 2014 -- with just 7% choosing the Palestinian Authority. A particularly large jump in GOP sympathy for Israel occurred in the first few years after 9/11 and at the start of the 2003 Iraq War.
Democrats' support for Israel has also risen since 2000, but not quite as sharply as Republicans'. Additionally, the percentage of Democrats sympathizing with Israel fell 10 points this year to 48%, possibly reflecting the tension between Obama and Netanyahu.
Bottom Line
U.S.-Israel relations have been much in the news over the past year, and tension between Obama and Netanyahu has reportedly worsened since the latter accepted House Speaker John Boehner's invitation to address Congress about Iran this spring -- an offer the White House did not sanction. Meanwhile, Israel and the United States share a strong interest in seeing the international terrorist organization known as the Islamic State group, or ISIS, thwarted. Throughout all of this, Israel's positive image in the U.S. remains broadly intact nationally, even as Democrats' sympathy for Israel may have slipped. The percentage of Democrats viewing Israel favorably is also down, currently at 60%, vs. 74% a year ago. Positive views of the Palestinian Authority are fairly scarce, but no lower than they have been in recent years.
Survey Methods
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Feb. 8-11, 2015, with a random sample of 837 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.
Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 50% cellphone respondents and 50% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.
Learn more about how Gallup Poll Social Series works.A mysterious wave of deaths recently struck Big Major Cay, the uninhabited Bahamas island famous for its tourist-friendly swimming pigs. Up to half of the pig colony died and the bodies were tossed into the sea, according to reports from over the weekend. Early investigations could not identify an explicit cause of death.
Until the deaths, the cay had been billed as a sort of porcine paradise. The pigs dog-paddled through the crystal sea, drank from the island’s spring of fresh water and got fat on a steady supply of food brought by tourists. ( The Islands of the Bahamas )
Wayde Nixon, a Bahamian man who brought the pigs to the island decades ago, suggested that tourists killed the animals with a lethal diet. With unrestricted access to the pigs, visitors had been seen giving the animals hotdogs, junk food and even booze. “We had the government vet in there (and) examined them all thoroughly,” Nixon told the Nassau Guardian. Seven or eight pigs died, he said, leaving about 15 alive. The ones that survived appeared to be healthy. Initial reports that the entire colony had been wiped out turned out to be overstated, but there is still some confusion over how many survived.
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“I understand there are seven or eight pigs still alive,” Kim Aranha, president of Bahamas Humane Society, told the Nassau-based newspaper Tribune 242. Veterinarians collected samples of the dead pigs, but it was unclear how long a laboratory analysis would take. “It’s really a mystery,” Aranha told the Tribune. “It could just be a horrible accident where they ate something poisonous. It could be malicious but I don’t really see why someone would go out of their way to hurt those lovely animals.” She added that there were “silly” people who were known to try to get the pigs drunk, but noted that tour operators out of Nassau treat the animals with respect.
The famous swimming pigs have made appearances in many tourist selfies, not to mention The Bachelor and NBC's Today Show. ( Owen Robert )
Part of the Exuma island chain, Big Major Cay, also known as Pig Beach, sits in the Caribbean Sea to the southeast of Nassau. Until the deaths, the cay had been billed as a sort of porcine paradise. The pigs dog-paddled through the crystal sea, drank from the island’s spring of fresh water and got fat on a steady supply of food brought by tourists, who visit the island by the boatload. Images of the friendly pigs paddling through the water to greet their tourist visitors are posted on many a Facebook page. But selfie-happy tourists were not the only indignities that the four-legged residents survived in recent years.
The pig colony endured an invasion of bikini-clad reality show contestants during an episode of The Bachelor. The pigs had a brief cameo in the 2013 music video for “Timber,” the Pitbull dance-pop number featuring Kesha. Fuelled by celebrity visits, a feature on NBC’s Today Show and a beach made for Instagram, the pigs’ popularity expanded. So, too, did their origin stories. Ancient mariners had left the pigs behind on the island, some said. The cache of would-be pork was forgotten, then rediscovered. Or perhaps the beasts were the only living remainder of a crashed pirate ship. That foreigners had accidentally released pigs into the Bahamian wilds was not an alien narrative. Feral boars on the Great Inagua Island, to the south of Pig Beach, were descendants of pigs housed in a mid-1700s French garrison.
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The truth, according to the Today Show, was that the swimming pigs were the result of a more recent fable. When fears about the cataclysmic Millennium bug reached a fever pitch in the late 1990s, two farmers, fearing that food supplies would crash along with computers, bought the pigs and raised them on the island. After the pigs were discovered dead over the weekend, Nixon, one half of the Y2K farmer pair, lamented that the Pig Beach phenomenon had spiralled out of control.
'When Pigs Swim' is brought to you by GIV Bahamas Inc. and Grand Isle Resort, the official hotel partner. Want to see the pigs? Visit: http://whenpigsswimexuma.com/ and book today!
“Right now it’s blowing out of proportion with people, anybody bringing food there, anybody doing what they (want to) do,” Nixon told the Nassau Guardian. “We have people coming there giving the pigs beer, rum, riding on top of them, all kinds of stuff.” The Bahamas government has now barred tourists from feeding the pigs. Nixon also sought support from the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism to restrict visitors from getting too close to the pigs. Establishing a safe viewing distance would still allow tourists to photograph the famous swimming pigs, he said, while protecting the animals that remain.Brewers Blog The Journal Sentinel sports staff brings fans the latest news and inside information on the Brewers SHARE
By of the
The Brewers placed right-hander Matt Garza on the 15-day disabled list Tuesday with a right lat strain behind his pitching shoulder and recalled righty Tyler Cravy from Class AAA Colorado Springs. The move was made retroactive to April 2.
Garza originally was scheduled to start Wednesday against the San Francisco but was scratched from that assignment Monday and replaced by Taylor Jungmann after being examined by team physician William Raasch. Garza exited his last exhibition start Friday in Houston with what was described as shoulder stiffness at the time.
When Garza didn't improve, he was scratched from his first start of the season and now he has landed on the disabled list. Cravy had been the last player cut by the Brewers at the end of spring training.
With off days Thursday and next Tuesday, the Brewers won't need a fifth starter for several days. That gives them time to adjust and call up right-hander Zach Davies to eventually fill in if needed. Davies was considered next on the list of starters after the first five at the end of camp. Cravy was not stretched out as starter in camp.How do you make the most controversial city in the world just a little more contentious? Add cable cars, of course. Haaretz reports today that Jerusalem authorities are close to finally unveiling their plan for an ambitious cable car project that could transport 6,000 people an hour across the Old City. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat first announced the cable car plan in the spring of 2013, but the city has just hired a contractor to complete a feasibility study.
“It’s like opening a skating rink in the Vatican to increase the number of pilgrims.”
The $31 million project has an important target audience: The growing hordes of tourists who are flocking to the holy city in record numbers. Israel drew nearly 3 million tourists in 2013, 75 percent of whom visited Jerusalem. Tourism added an estimated $11.5 billion to Israel’s economy that year. So it’s no wonder that Barkat has cited tourists while jumping on the cable car bandwagon: “Beyond being a transportation solution, a cable car will be an innovative and unique tourist attraction and offer breathtaking views of the city,” he said in 2013.
The planners also argue the project will relieve foot traffic on the crowded and narrow streets of the Old City, and reduce vehicular traffic by 30 percent for private cars and 50 percent for buses.For 137 days now, a yet to be identified company has left a database containing over 10 million Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs) exposed online with no authentication.
This means that anyone who knows what to look for can mass-scan the Internet and download loads of sensitive information without any restriction.
Discovered by researchers from the Kromtech Security Research Center, the company's experts believe the database was compiled for marketing purposes.
Database leaks user PII, car VINs, sales data, more
Based on the data contained within the exposed database, researchers believe the DB belongs to one or more US-based dealerships.
The database's content is organized into three main sections, each holding information on customers, cars, and sales details.
For example, the database tables pertaining to customer info holds details such as full name, address, mobile/home/work phones, email, date of birth, gender, and the number of children over 12 years old.
The database table holding vehicle information includes a car's Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), model, model year, assigned sales representative name, mileage, and more.
The last part, the one holding info sales pitches includes details such as VIN, mileage odometer, sales gross, pay type, monthly payment amount, purchase price, and payment type (cash, bank, card).
Besides exposing customer PII (Personally Identifiable Information) that could be used in online fraud and identity theft |
That was a disappointment, to be sure. It's not that Thorn and Brand aren't three-dimensional characters. Both are genuine and well-designed protagonists who have been dealt a bad hand and who attempt to go through life as best they can. Both are characters you can easily root for. Trouble is, you know exactly how their fates are intertwined from the very beginning and the culmination of that particular plotline was so predictable as to be dismaying when everything occurred just the way you thought it would. Maybe that's whyis billed as YA? I have no idea...As was the case with the first installment, though there are no major changes in terms of style and tone compared to the author's "adult" works,is different to a certain extent. The wit, cynicism, and dark humor that characterize Abercrombie's backlist are all present, if a little subdued. Unlike, this one does feature sex, however. Once more, the violence is not as graphic as usual, with less blood and gore.is definitely a Joe Abercrombie novel, but again it shows a more self-restrained Joe Abercrombie, one that pulls some of his punches and doesn't go all out the way he did in books likeand. As such,, although it is a good read, doesn't satisfy the way the grimdark Abercrombie titles habitually do.Even though some storylines are relatively predictable, as is usually his wont Joe Abercrombie pulls a few unanticipated surprises out of his hat, especially at the end. All in all,may be a bit weaker than its predecessor, but the novel is nevertheless a worthy addition to this new trilogy and it does set the stage for what should be a very good third and final volume. I'm really looking forward to discovering how Abercrombie will bring this one to a close next year!The final verdict: 7.5/10For more info about this title: CanadaNext Chapter >
A Relaxing Morning
Few sounds satisfy me like the deep, throaty growl of Nissan’s legendary inline six cylinder RB-series engine.
Over the years, I’ve developed an uncanny ability to recognize the unmistakable note of an RB engine from over 20 city blocks away. I didn’t have to strain my ears on my latest Speedhunting adventure though – I was surrounded RB goodness.
The cacophony made by over 200 Nissan GT-Rs from all eras provided the day’s soundtrack. While the RB26 headlined the show, Nissan’s classic L-series and the R35’s current VR38 played strong support roles.
The squad, gang or whatever a large group of GT-Rs should be referred to had made their descent upon Sydney Dragway for the 2017 Nitto Performance Engineering Australian GT-R Festival. Sure, the ‘Machina Magica‘ Show and Shine was a significant element of the festival, but from 1:00pm the dragstrip was opened up, and the assembled crowd had the opportunity to see and hear the majority of cars in action.
2017 was only the event’s second year running and the first to have official support from Nissan Australia and also Nismo, who had a GT3 GT-R on display. The car was still covered dust and rubber from its last race, which was pretty cool; I much prefer the ‘driven’ look to showroom clean on a race car. It’s great to see such a big player in Australian motorsport connecting directly with their fans. The festival is organized and run by the team at Motive DVD and started as something of a hobby event that has since snowballed with the momentum and enthusiasm that Australians have for Nissan’s supercar.
If you’ve been following my work, you may have cottoned on to me being something of a GT-R fan myself. Contrast to the usual running and gunning that is Speedhunting, I spent the first half of the morning at the festival relaxing with my family, doing my very best to indoctrinate my young son to the cult of GT-R. The future is looking bright, although it hasn’t been much of a challenge.
I’m usually running solo and hiding behind a lens when attending festivals and shows these days, but the slower morning was a nice change of pace and reminded me what these types of shows offer to groups of friends and families.
Getting Serious
When playtime was over, the first arduous task would involve me walking through a personal field of dreams, soaking up the details and differences between hundreds of variations of one of my favorite cars. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.
This trio of genuine Nismo N1 GT-Rs all belong to a local Skyline aficionado and ex-president of the largest Skyline club in the Southern Hemisphere, Skylines Australia. While I’d seen all three cars separately, this was the first time I’d have the opportunity to share the same space with them all at once. Speedhunters has been invited to spend some more time with the collection at a later date, too.
I used to own a black R32, but it never looked anywhere near as amazing as this gloss black family tree. I think everyone needs to own at least one black car in their lifetime, even if it’s just to fully appreciate the hard work it takes to get one looking half as clean as these three beautiful examples.
The wildest GT-R on display, JUN II, was enveloped by a constant hive of activity. Croydon Racing Developments (CRD) had all spanners on deck the entire day as the team made their final adjustments and checks before they attempted to break records and reclaim the ‘World’s Quickest Street GT-R’ title in front of an enthusiastic GT-R crowd.
The guys from CRD looked too busy and focused for me to interrupt on the day, so I’ll be following up with a JUN II story a little later on.
Sadly, the car didn’t run until after I’d left the event and I missed seeing it first hand, but the team’s hard work through the day paid off later that evening. You can watch the record-breaking pass in this clip.
Not every car was capable of a 7-second pass though. Everything from pristine, showroom condition cars to JDM-inspired highway warriors were represented, along with every conceivable variation in between. It was a reflection of the broad and varied tastes of Australian GT-R owners.
And just like their owners, no two cars were identical. Some were treated as investments, daily drivers, capable track hacks, drag monsters, or even a mix suitable to meet multiple needs. You can check out more in the massive Cutting Room Floor chapter below.
As the value of classic metal rises, we seem to be seeing more and more on display; collectors and restorers feel reassured they’ll be able to recoup the expense of restoring a piece of Japanese nostalgia. Hopefully, in the years to come, we’ll see the trend continue. I’d love to see more Princes, Hakosukas and Kenmeris surface around the globe; seeing these cult classics in person is a must for any real JDM enthusiast.
It was fun to check the differences and similarities while each generation of GT-R congregated together. I’ve always been a fan of the R32, but more recently, and especially while window shopping at GT-R Festival, I found myself being drawn more to the R34s.
Spending the entire day amongst so many excellent GT-R examples has since seen my time wasted on classified sites triple over the past few days. Is now the right time to buy? Will prices continue to skyrocket at an astronomical rate? Do you see things slowing down anytime soon? Throw your market predictions in the comments section below, and let’s fire up a healthy conversation about the future of the global JDM performance car market.
The rain arrived just five minutes before the scheduled drag racing, but thankfully it only lasted a little while before clearing up. The entire day was peppered with scattered sunshine peeking through dark clouds that did little more than threaten from above.
As punters flocked to the undercover sections of the stadium, a parade that highlighted the heritage of the mighty GT-R rolled past.
Everything from a Prince 2000GT right up to a current GT3 R35 GT-R completed a lap of honor in a roughly chronological order. It was interesting to see how each new iteration translated the key design elements from the previous model.
Now I know it’s a GT-R Festival, so I understand why they weren’t present, but it sure would have been amazing to see an ‘Iron Mask’ DR30 and HR31 GTS-R rolling down the strip with their brethren.
GT-Rs In Action
A well presented GT-R on display is a special thing, but nothing compares to the sights and sounds of a pedigree sports car being used to its full potential.
The display area was book-ended with action; on the western side, a motorkhana course (read: excuse to skid, slide and have fun) was set up by the Skylines Australia club. And yes, I’m aware that isn’t a GT-R in the image above; I guess being a genuine Japanese GT300 S15 Silvia in Australia made it eligible for a special invitation to the event.
For the motorkhana, drivers took part in timed runs through set courses. The courses are usually quite tight and very twisty, designed to limit top speeds and really test a driver’s ability behind the wheel. Hit a marker, go off course, or fail to stop inside the box and you incur a penalty time.
The hard decision is choosing whether to test your abilities and take it seriously, or just to let loose and enjoy what would usually be considered anti-social driving. Don’t look at me, I’m not here to judge. However, I will say that hanging the car out at every opportunity is the preferred option for spectators.
If you’ve not driven in a motorkhana and have clubs in your local area that run them, give them a shot. You won’t even need a fast car to be competitive; you could even potentially even drive your mother’s Camry. It’s some of the best fun you’ll have with your vehicle; I’ve personally learned a lot about driving and my abilities behind the wheel during similar events.
The level of competition on the drag strip seemed far more serious, even if the majority of cars were competing purely against themselves.
Seeing three Hakosukas on the strip at the same time was something I won’t forget in a hurry. Some of you might even recognize these guys as some of the Datsun crew I introduced during my maiden Speedhunters story. While these vintage racers may have been some of the slowest at the event, they all had a blast, laid down some personal bests, and most importantly have started planning how to modify their cars for quicker times at the next GT-R Festival.
The best ET of the crew was a 14.1-second pass, but when they return they’ll be looking to crack into the 13s. While that doesn’t sound terribly quick by today’s standards, a 13-second pass in a 1970s Japanese street car is plenty fast.
The more modern street cars were pushing times down around the 10-second mark; I’m talking legitimate cars that you’d use to buy milk and bread in, too. Technically, you could do some shopping in the mental cars built by Croydon Racing Developments or Maatouks Racing, but I struggle to see them waiting in a McDonald’s Drive-Thru. I’d love to see them order a Cheeseburger and prove me wrong though.
Sydney’s cold winter air provided the right ingredients for the professional cars to lay down some remarkably quick runs, including that world record-breaking 7-second pass by JUN II that I hope you’ve already watched.
It’s quite remarkable the impact that one single red badge from one particular model has made in a country where the majority of models were never officially sold. Such is the power of the mighty GT-R.
Matthew Everingham
Instagram: matthew_everingham
matt@mattheweveringham.com
The Cutting Room FloorFormer President George W. Bush on Thursday warned that "bigotry seems emboldened" in America, and "our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication."
Speaking at the Bush Institute's Spirit of Liberty event in New York, the 43rd president warned against the isolationism and trade protectionism that Trump has long espoused.
"People are hurting, they're angry and they're frustrated [and] we must help them," Bush said. "But we cannot wish globalization away, any more than we could wish away the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. One strength of free society is its ability to adapt to economic and social disruptions, and that should be our goal."
A Bush spokesman later said the former president was not explicitly criticizing President Donald Trump, whose name Bush never mentioned in the speech. Nonetheless, the parallels were obvious.
"We've seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty," Bush said. "At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization.
"Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions, forgetting the image of God we should see in each other. We've seen nationalism distorted into nativism. Forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America."
Bush's speech also appeared to be a direct rebuke to the populist, nationalist themes that defined much of Trump's 2016 president campaign, personified by the views of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
Bush, a lifelong Republican, did not vote for Trump. Instead, he left the presidential section of his ballot blank in 2016.
"Our identity as a nation, unlike other nations, is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood," Bush said Thursday. "People from every race, religion, ethnicity can be full and equally American."
White supremacists at a violent protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August shouted the Nazi slogan "blood and soil."
The former president also made an oblique reference to Trump's claim this past summer that both sides were to blame following the white supremacist rally. "Bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed," Bush said.
He argued that America must strengthen its defense of democracy and democratic institutions under attack from foreign powers, and Russia in particular.
This defense, Bush said, "begins with confronting a new era of cyberthreats. America has experienced a sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our country's divisions. According to our intelligence services, the Russian government has made a project of turning Americans against each other."
He added that "foreign aggressions, including cyberattacks, disinformation and financial influence, should never be downplayed or tolerated." Trump has repeatedly claimed that a Russian campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election is a "hoax," perpetuated by Democrats.
Bush said that the weakening of democratic institutions has made American politics "more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication," he said. Trump has often repeated falsehoods and promoted false conspiracies, such as the claim of widespread voter fraud during the 2016 elections.
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond Thursday to a CNBC request for comment on Bush's speech.
While receiving the Liberty Medal at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Monday, another Republican, Sen. John McCain, took issue with the nationalist and isolationist policies that Trump campaigned on to win the White House. Without mentioning Trump by name, McCain said:
"To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain 'the last best hope of earth' for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history."
Trump responded in an interview with Washington's WMAL radio, saying: "I'm being very, very nice, but at some point I fight back and it won't be pretty."Submitted by Brandon Smith from Alt-Market
Military Rolls Tanks Onto St. Louis Streets...But Why?
I have to say that this event, which is being labeled a "training exercise", makes very little sense to me. U.S. Army troops all the way from Maryland running open exercises in armored personnel carriers on the busy streets of St. Louis? I know Maryland is a small state, but is there really not enough room at Ft. Detrick to accommodate a tank column and some troops? Are there not entire fake neighborhood and town complexes built with taxpayer dollars on military bases across the country meant to facilitate a realistic urban environment for troops to train in? And why travel hundreds of miles to Missouri? At the very least, this is a massive waste of funds.
On the other hand, such an action on the part of the Department of Defense makes perfect sense if the goal is to acclimate citizens to the idea of seeing tanks and armed military acting in a policing capacity. Just check out the two random idiots the local news affiliate picked to interview in St. Louis on the subject. Both state that they think the exercise is a "great idea", because having the military on the streets would help to "reduce crime":
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/06/us-military-to-run-urban-exercises-in-north-st-louis-residents-hope-it-will-cut-down-on-crime/
I suspect that the news affiliate did not go out of its way to get any counter-opinions, even though they admitted to being contacted by those voicing concerns over martial law.
Even so, it's sad and simultaneously terrifying that there are plenty of mindless dupes out there who do not understand the dangers of the Army crossing the Rubicon and acting in a civil law enforcement capacity, never mind that they are completely ignorant of the fact that it violates the Posse Comitatus Act. One of the interviewees even points out that in some countries they don't use police at all; only military. This is true. We call those countries "tyrannies"...
Add to the mix the reality that the DOD refuses to respond to any further inquiries by the press concerning details of the training, and you get yet another suspicious instance of behavior on the part of the establishment that seems preparatory for domestic action. I believe that the high frequency at which these activity reports have been coming in over the past year is certainly cause for alarm..., Employees huddle behind the counter at Fare Well scribbling notes to each other on the backs of receipts. They're not writing nasty notes about customers behaving badly. They're simply communicating. The vegan bakery, diner, and bar on H Street NE employs two deaf workers, including Hillary Peters, who works variously as server, bartender, and manager.
Peters graduated in May 2016 from Gallaudet University, where she studied social work and art history. She's currently working three jobs to save up to for graduate school to study transpersonal art therapy and mental health counseling so she can become an art therapist. But she's not opposed to opening a restaurant one day—perhaps a daytime cafe that evolves into a bar at night. (So hot right now.)
She got her first taste of working in hospitality at an on-campus restaurant called Boomerang Cafe that has since closed. "I discovered that I really enjoyed the customer service, seeing the customers being happy once I give them delicious drink and food," Peters says. Whether she starts an art therapy practice or a restaurant, Peters has a hiring plan. "I would give job opportunities to deaf people only because hearing people already have privilege, and deaf people need them [jobs] much more."
Fare Well owner Doron Petersan says Peters has confided in her about how difficult it is for the deaf to find work outside of D.C., where there's less understanding of deaf culture. "She was telling me stories of friends of hers who are on disability and unemployment because they moved back home after Gallaudet and can't get jobs for the summer," Petersan says. "They say, 'You can’t work here unless you can speak.' How fucking fucked up is that?"
When customers sit down, Peters drops off a note to introduce herself and informs the table that she's deaf. They will need to write down their orders and give her a little wave if they need to summon her. "She’s the most attentive server that we have because she’s constantly focused on her tables," Petersan says. "She's always watching."
Service almost always runs smoothly. "Most people, 99.9 percent of people, are really inviting," Petersan explains. "When people don’t know, they think she’s ignoring them. That's really frustrating for me that we’re in a culture where people don’t ask questions and give people the benefit of the doubt. As a business owner, it's frustrating. As an employer, it's frustrating. As a human being, it's frustrating."
Peters says the most trying day she's had on the job was when the computer system went down. She had to explain the problem to all of her customers, which took a while. But that would be a bad day in anyone's book.
Hiring deaf employees and catering to the deaf community are good for business, Petersan says.. "Going around to different restaurants—Impala, Pursuit Wine Bar, The Argonaut—and watching the way they catered to that crowd, I want to be able to do that," she says, reflecting on the time leading up to when Fare Well opened last summer. "I want to be the place for everyone."
Helming a restaurant that can accommodate everyone was a chief goal of Petersan's because of her personal experience.
"My father had a really rare disease and ended up in a wheelchair," Petersan explains. "The reason people in wheelchairs are grumpy is because life is fucking frustrating, and anything you can try to do to make an open environment is better for everyone." Her father was a huge advocate of inclusivity and worked to help disabled students in public schools get the resources they needed to achieve.
"I think we grew up in a time where people with different abilities were isolated from people who are more normal functioning, and that’s not what we do anymore and I love it," Petersan says.
Tour Fare Well and you'll notice tables that can easily accomodate wheelchairs. There's even a major dip at one of the diner's bar so that someone in a wheelchair could scoot in, order a drink, and watch it being made instead of staring at a wall. The cases displaying the pastries are also lower. "A lot of places, the counters are high so people in wheelchairs can’t see, and that’s not nice," Petersan says.
Going the extra mile to be inclusive can pay off. "At our very first location [of Sticky Fingers], we had a doorbell for people in wheelchairs," Petersan says of her first business. "There was a couple who chose us for their wedding cake because of that doorbell!"
Fare Well, 406 H St. NE; (202) 367-9600; eatfarewell.comSAN BERNARDINO >> Two men and a boy — the 9-year-old son of one of the men — were shot and killed late Friday outside a San Bernardino liquor store, police said.
One man died at the scene and the other man and the boy died later at Loma Linda University Medical Center, said San Bernardino police Lt. Brian Harris.
Police were dispatched about 9:20 p.m. after a report of gunfire at Superior Liquor, 2950 Del Rosa Ave., about a block north of the 210 Freeway.
The three victims had exited the liquor store when a man who had been loitering in the parking lot confronted them, said Police Chief Jarrod Burguan. Investigators don’t yet know why, but he opened fire on the three victims with a handgun, Burguan said.
• Photos: One child, two adults killed in San Bernardino triple shooting
The boy collapsed in front of the store, Burguan said. One of the men ran across Del Rosa before collapsing on the other side, while the other man ran south on Del Rosa and then west on Carpenter Street before collapsing a short distance later.
Burguan said the male suspect ran south on Del Rosa and disappeared.
Police closed Del Rosa between Date Street and Lynwood Drive during their investigation.
Anyone with information about the shooting can call the police department at 909-383-5311.
Richard Brooks contributed to this report.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the boy’s age from 10 to 9 after more information was provided by authorities.Scores of nations have missed a soft deadline for submitting plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the planned December signing of a global climate treaty in Paris to avoid the worst effects of global warming. But policy analysts said they remain optimistic because the nations that have responded represent 60 percent of global emissions.
Only the European Union, comprising 28 countries, as well as Switzerland, Norway, the United States, Russia, Mexico, and Gabon had formally submitted their pledges — known as “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs) — to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) website by the March 31 set by the U.N.
That means 162 nations have not formally outlined actions they intend to take under a potential global agreement. The INDCs will largely determine whether the world achieves a comprehensive climate treaty in Paris and is put on the path toward a low-carbon future.
But some experts cautioned against viewing the missing pledges as an indication that progress is not being made.
“While this has been called the deadline and the U.S. and EU and others wanted it to be a firmer deadline, the actual requirement is soft — that’s why you see a lot of countries not meeting the deadline,” John Coequyt, director of the International Program for the Sierra Club, told Al Jazeera on Thursday. “Our expectation is that many countries will commit their INDCs well in advance of the (December) session.”
After the INDCs are submitted there will be an assessment phase to review the pledges and possibly adjust them ahead of the Paris Climate Summit (COP 21). Each country will contribute what it can, in the context of its national priorities, circumstances and capabilities. But the collective effort will be aimed at reducing emissions enough to limit the average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, which many scientists believe would avert the worst affects of climate change.
Another reason to be optimistic, based on the few pledges that have been submitted, is that those already represent about 60 percent of global emissions.
The EU has said it plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030, with a 1990 baseline. Russia has said it will reduce emissions by 25 percent by 2020, based on 1990 levels. The U.S. has promised to slash emissions by up to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
The U.S. pledge also represents an acceleration from its earlier plans for emissions cuts. Its target “will roughly double the pace of carbon pollution reduction in the United States,” according to its official INDC submission.
“Some countries that haven’t indicated what their target will be have publicly stated what they intend to do — obviously the most important is China,” Coequyt said.
China announced its plan to cap its emissions by 2030 in a joint statement with the U.S. last November.
In addition to pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, INDCs will also include planned actions for climate adaptation and descriptions of what support they will need from, or would be able to provide to, other countries.
“A lot of the supply for the transition (to a low-carbon economy) will come from China,” said Joe Robertson, global strategy director of the Citizen Climate Lobby, a nonprofit organization focused on national policies to address climate change. “If China is producing technology like solar panels and turbines to facilitate the rate of emission cuts in the U.S., then China’s also doing something relevant to these negotiations by increasing its capability to cut emissions.”
Developing countries that lack the capability to produce technology to speed the transition to a clean economy will buy the low-carbon technology such as solar panels or wind turbines in what is known as a “tech transfer,” Robertson said. Eventually, the plan is that China will use the technology it developed for others to reduce its own emissions, he added.
“If you look at the U.S., EU, and China commitments, they’re bold in some ways but not enough to set a standard for the whole world,” Robertson said. “But the rate of acceleration of what’s being done looks like it will be enough if we keep the momentum going.”
That’s the goal adopted by Pathway to Paris, an initiative by the Citizen Climate Lobby, a coalition of citizens, stakeholders, NGOs, scholars, and policy-makers working to coordinate a strong agreement in Paris.
“I’m optimistic partly because of what I do, working with citizen volunteers actively building relationships,” Robertson said. “We don’t have to argue about climate change or throw snowballs — that’s all distraction. What’s happening is that we’re getting closer to a time when ideology is no longer a part of the discussion. Instead, it will be about how fast and efficiently are we going to do this.”
With wire servicesWill 3D printing make global supply chains unnecessary? That's a real possibility, states a recent report from Transport Intelligence.
3D printing (or "additive manufacturing," as it's called in industrial circles) takes offshore manufacturing and brings it back close to the consumer. It has enormous potential to shift the trade balance. Goods will be cheaper to reproduce within the domestic market, versus manufacturing and then shipping them from a distant low-wage country.
The report, authored by John Manners-Bell of Transport Intelligence and Ken Lyon of Virtual-Partners Ltd., points to the growing role of automation in production resulting from 3D printing:
"New technologies which are currently being developed could revolutionize production techniques, resulting in a significant proportion of manufacturing becoming automated and removing reliance on large and costly work forces. This in turn could lead to a reversal of the trend of globalization which has characterized industry and consumption over the last few decades, itself predicated on the trade-off between transportation and labor costs."
Manners-Bell and Lyon admit that a disintegration of global supply chains isn't likely to happen anytime soon, as 3D printing is still in its infancy. But companies may gradually move away from long-distance production as it gets cheaper to mass-produce at home. "There is obviously an enormous leap between a manufacturing process which can presently produce one-offs and one that can replace large scale manufacturing," they say. "However, in theory, there is no reason why advances in technology could not increase the speed of production and reduce unit costs."
The report adds that 3D printing "is already very good at producing products (even with moving parts) which previously would have required the assembly of multiple components," and that by "eliminating the assembly phase there will be huge savings for the manufacturer in terms of labor costs." 3D printing-based production could also reduce or eliminate storage, handling and distribution costs.
Eventually, products may even be produced right in consumers' homes, reducing what was a series of supply-chain interactions to a software-based transaction.
Manners-Bell and Lyon predict the following disruptions to the global supply-chain market:
"A proportion of goods which were previously produced in China or other Asia markets could be ‘near-sourced’ to North America and Europe. This would reduce shipping and air cargo volumes."
"The ‘mass customization’ of products would mean that inventory levels fall, as goods are made to order. This would have the effect of reducing warehousing requirements."
"As manufacturing processes are increasingly re-bundled within a single facility, tiers of component suppliers are done away with, as is the need for supplier villages, line side supply etc."
"Build-to-order production strategies could fundamentally impact the manufacturer-wholesaler-retailer relationship. In the future the shopping experience could also be vastly different. In some sectors, retailers will either cease to exist or become ‘shop windows’ for manufacturers, keeping no stock of their own. Orders are fulfilled directly by the manufacturer, and delivered to the home of the consumer."
"A major new sector of the logistics industry would emerge dealing with the storage and movement of the raw materials which ‘feed’ the 3D printers. As 3D printers become more affordable to the general public, the home delivery market of these materials would increase."
Global and national parts warehouses as well as forward stock locations will become unnecessary. "At present billions are spent on holding stock to supply products as diverse as cars to x-ray machines. In some cases huge amount of redundancy is built into supply chains to enable parts to be dispatched in a very short timescale to get machines up and running again as fast as possible. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand the benefits for a service parts engineer of being able to download a part design from an online library, 3D print it and then fit it within a very short time window."
Thanks to Ella Copeland of Supply Chain Digital for originally surfacing this report.
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.comJungo Fujimoto, a midfielder with national team experience, will move from Nagoya Grampus to Yokohama F. Marinos, it was learned Thursday.
The 29-year-old native of Kanagawa Prefecture, moved from J.League club Shimizu S-Pulse to Grampus in 2011. Fujimoto scored three goals in 28 games for the Nagoya-based club this season.
Also Thursday, J.League first-division side Sagan Tosu on Thursday announced the acquisition of defender Michihiro Yasuda from demoted Jubilo Iwata.
Yasuda, who has one goal in seven international games for Japan, had been with Dutch outfit Vitesse Arnhem since January 2011 until he returned to Japan this past September with Jubilo. He did not score in seven games for the club from Shizuoka Prefecture, which will compete in the second division J2 next season.
Sagan were 12th in the J1 this past season, but allowed 63 goals — a total exceeded by only last-place Oita Trinita.To usher in the Year of the Sheep, the Liberal Party of Canada threw a reception on Thursday for leading members of the Chinese-Canadian community. Justin Trudeau was the headliner, and his controversial guest of honour was the Chinese ambassador Luo Zhaohui.
Gathering at the exclusive but casual Boulevard Club in Toronto, 200 or so attendees were lavished with dim sum and entertainment. A trio of girls in sequined miniskirts sang about being too sexy in this club (this one, certainly). A young diva belted out an impressive aria. Although it was billed as a private event, the Chinese community channel CCCTV and the local multicultural channel OMNI were positioned to capture the money shot of Mr. Trudeau with Mr. Luo, a moment meant to evoke a historical echo, given Mr. Trudeau's father's storied closeness with the autocratic country. Ultimately, the federal Liberal Leader arrived; the ambassador, however, was a no-show.
Mr. Luo, it was announced, had to "prepare for high-level meetings." At the same time, appearing at this kind of event could be risky or unseemly for a diplomat, who shouldn't be seen as interfering in domestic affairs– an issue that is especially sensitive for China, which rebukes any criticism of its handling of Tibet or Hong Kong. On Thursday, the NDP criticized the gathering. "It's a partisan event attempting to raise awareness for the Liberal Party," said Charlie Angus, the official Opposition's ethics critic.
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Yet these kinds of photo-ops are political manna for winning new minority votes in the heavily contested suburban Toronto ridings, where the Liberals lost significant ground to the Conservatives and the NDP in the last federal election. Already there have been indications that Liberal candidates – and their Leader – are using foreign endorsements to burnish their multicultural credentials or even bulk up their war chest for the upcoming contest.
Pakistan's consul-general in Toronto, Asghar Ali Golo, was at a party fundraiser recently with Mr. Trudeau in Mississauga and also appeared at the opening of the headquarters of Salma Zahid, who is running in Scarborough Centre.
While this kind of activity does not constitute any breach of electoral rules, it lives at the complicated intersection of diplomatic protocol and multicultural politics. "That kind of thing is going over the edge," said Fen Hampson, distinguished fellow and director at CIGI's Global Security & Politics Program, before Thursday's no-show. "You'd be seen as courting the opposition, or worse, playing to their electoral song sheet. You can be badly burned if that party doesn't form a new government and find yourself on the list where calls won't get answered by a minister if you were seen as dabbling in domestic politics."
Mr. Golo could not be reached for comment.
When asked about how to navigate this zone of pre-election politics, a senior G7 diplomat said that visiting the campaign headquarters wouldn't be a problem, provided that respects were also paid to the rivals. Going to a fundraiser, on the other hand, crossed the line. Why go if you wouldn't be contributing financially? "There's a risk of being seen as being involved with internal politics," the diplomat said.
Some eyebrows have been raised by an endorsement given to Gary Anandasangaree, who is running in Scarborough-Rouge Park. Recently, the human-rights advocate and lawyer promoted the praise emanating from Rajavarothiam Sampanthan, the leader of Sri Lanka's Tamil Party.
"We earnestly seek the support of all our people for Gary Anandasangaree," he implored. The nominee's explanation? "It's just for my own nomination, not for the party," he said.
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Liberal spokesman Cameron Ahmad said he isn't aware of any party strategy to leverage endorsements or appearances for votes, nor should these associations surprise anyone. "It wouldn't be unusual for a diplomat to be in touch with a politician," he said.
Mr. Ahmad also said that the Boulevard Club lunch was not a partisan event, adding that guests did not pay to attend. The half-dozen guests that The Globe and Mail spoke to confirmed as much.
"It was a little disappointing that the ambassador didn't come," said Irwin Li, a businessman and president of the Association of Chinese-Canadian Entrepreneurs who is not a Liberal Party member.
"But Justin Trudeau showed that he's approachable and impressive. He took a picture with every person in the room.He's not your traditional politician who shows up and walks away."
The luncheon had some partisan kick. Flanked by Chinese-Canadian candidates running across the top of Toronto – who the party hopes will capture votes from the emerging bloc of Mainlanders – Mr. Trudeau reached out to the audience by invoking his legacy. "It is an auspicious year for me because my father was born in the Year of the Goat," he said, referring to the Chinese New Year's other animal name.
It didn't take him long to pounce on his enemies back in Ottawa – political animals |
Catalunya with illness
“I really wanted to win the time trial on Sunday so it is disappointing to not be lining up,” said Dennis, who made his European racing appearance of 2016 at the Classic Sud Ardèche last weekend, having already competed at the Tour Down Under and Cadel Evans Great Ocean Race in Australia.
“I've felt the illness lingering a bit in the past few days but today it has really hit me and we don't have enough days ahead of Sunday for a proper recovery. At the end of the day my health is the priority and I'm focused on recovering well and lining up at my next race.”
Dennis was due to target the opening time trial and then ride in support of his fellow countryman Richie Porte at Paris-Nice. His BMC team said that the remainder of his Spring schedule is unlikely to be altered as a result of his illness. The Rio 2016 Olympics time trial is the expected centrepiece of Dennis’ season.
"Rohan is suffering from sinusitis, and although it is nothing too serious he will not be fit to race at Paris-Nice. His condition worsened this morning and given we are only two days out from the opening prologue, there is not enough time for him to fully recover, especially considering we are expecting cold weather and rain in Paris," BMC team doctor Daniele Zaccaria said.
"With antibiotics and some solid rest he should be back on the bike within the next five days and we don't expect this illness to affect his racing program beyond Paris-Nice.”
Dennis has been replaced in the BMC line-up for Paris-Nice by Peter Velits. As well as defending champion Richie Porte, BMC’s team for the Race to the Sun will also include Philippe Gilbert and Amaël Moinard.
Tejay van Garderen, meanwhile, will lead BMC at next week’s Tirreno-Adriatico, where he will be joined in the team by Greg Van Avermaet and Taylor Phinney.
BMC team for Paris-Nice (March 6-13): Marcus Burghardt, Philippe Gilbert, Ben Hermans, Amaël Moinard, Richie Porte, Michael Schär, Peter Velits, Danilo Wyss.
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Review title of SeaBiscuit1117 It was fun for a while
This game pack definitely had me interested for the first few days. This game pack adds a relitavely small world called Forgotten Hollow which I really liked. The vampire powers that your sim could unlock were cool. The create a sim items were awesome, and the build mode items were amazingly themed to match the dark theme of the pack. My only dislike is how often vampires need to feed. Yes, I know they need blood, but it would get on my nerves sometimes when they just had like 3 plasma fruits and they want more. Their need to feed so often was kind of the only negative part of the pack. Overall, I loved it. By the way, vampires are immortal ;) they don't age from young adults so they live forever!!SEX ADDS YEARS TO YOUR LIFE!
The Flashing Images above are designed to provide a "Mental Image" of what takes place when your brain's Pleasure Pathway is stimulated by activities associated with feeling good. Science now believes positive stimulation of your built in reward system can add many quality years to your life. Few activities stimulate our pleasure pathway more than Sexual Intercourse...........
Science has concluded our Pleasure Pathway plays a much greater role in our lives than just the survival of the species. It is now believed this Reward System has to be sufficiently stimulated as often as daily, if we are to feel, function and perform to our maximum potential. We don't have to become "Thrill Seekers" to stimulate our Reward System. Even the wise use of the basic necessities of life, such as eating, drinking and physical exercise stimulate our "Pleasure Pathway." But staying sexually active has its own set of rewards because you receive so many benefits from one activity. According to recent studies frequent orgasms, at least 100 per year, can increase Life Expectancy by 3 to 8 years.
Regular sexual activity is so beneficial to our health it is amazing how seldom it is discussed within this context. It lowers blood pressure, improves cholesterol, and increases circulation. It raises the heartbeat from 70 to 150 beats per minute. Some studies have found that people who indulge in regular sex are half as likely to have heart attacks and strokes than those who don't have sex at all. Every muscle in the body is worked and toned during sex, particularly the pelvis, buttocks, stomach and arms. Thirty minutes of sex can burn as many as 200 calories. There is substantial evidence it reduces food cravings, helps control your appetite and assists your body in absorbing the nutrients from food more easily. It boosts immunity, aids in tissue repair, increases cognition, reduces stress, improves sleep, promotes strong bones and one study found that regular orgasms even dramatically reduces the incidence of the common cold.THE British government is drawing up contingency plans for a possible collapse of BP.
This is amid mounting fears that the oil giant could be broken up or taken over in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.
The talks, which are being led by officials at the Department for Business and the Treasury, reflect growing concern within Whitehall about the implications that a corporate failure of BP, formerly Britain's biggest company, would have on British interests domestically and around the world.
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BP, whose value has more than halved since the April 20 accident, has liabilities of up to $US70 billion ($84bn), according to estimates by Goldman Sachs.
The company employs 10,105 British staff directly and generated tax receipts of pound stg. 5.8bn ($10bn) in 2009.
It also owns much of Britain's most critical energy infrastructure, including the Forties Pipeline System that connects more than 50 oil and gas producing fields in the North Sea.
In addition, BP controls vital strategic assets overseas, including the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that bypasses Russia and Iran to connect Europe with the rich oil and gas resources of Azerbaijan and the Caspian region. As well as the political ramifications stemming from a collapse of BP, the government is also concerned about the impact on millions of British pensioners for whom the company's dividends have served as an important plank of their retirement income.
Prime Minister David Cameron and Energy Secretary Chris Huhne are set to discuss BP's future with US officials during a trip to Washington on July 20.
Speaking in Toronto at the G20 on June 25, Mr Cameron warned that BP faced potential destruction unless US authorities stepped in to prevent its compensation costs escalating out of control.
The Department for Business declined to comment on the contingency plans, which are believed to still be under discussion and have encompassed a range of subjects from pension arrangements to the future of BP's international empire.
A person familiar with the talks said: "It is not clear how bad this will get, but the government needs to be prepared for any eventuality."
BP already faces crippling costs from the accident but if the leak cannot be plugged by drilling a relief well, there is a growing threat of a takeover, with ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell touted as the most likely candidates.
One insider claimed that one possibility mooted was whether, under extreme circumstances, the government should consider intervening to protect BP, which was a nationalised company until 1987.
Such an approach would raise the prospect of a bailout similar to the rescue of RBS and other stricken lenders during the 2008-09 credit crunch.
BP dismissed fears of a collapse. "We will recover from this, but there are undoubtedly going to be big changes in the way the company and the industry operate," a spokesman said.
News of the discussions surfaced as BP insisted that it had no plans to issue new shares, either to strategic investors or in the form of a conventional rights issue, despite the huge financial pressure caused by the spill.
However, the oil giant did say that it had been actively encouraging sovereign wealth funds and other potential investors in the Middle East to acquire shares at the present depressed price.
That interest was reflected on Monday when a senior Libyan official suggested that the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi would consider an investment in BP. Shokri Ghanem, chairman of Libya's national oil company, said: "BP is interesting now with the price lower by half and I still have trust in BP. I shall be recommending it."
The Times
Setting the agenda for Australia's $150BN agribusiness sector The program for Australia's premier agribusiness conference - The Global Food Forum - is set. Hear from more than 30 industry leaders including PepsiCo's CEO, Danny Celoni, Jayne Hrdlicka, CEO of A2 Milk Company, Barry Irvin, Executive Chairman, Bega Cheese and Costco's Managing Director, Patrick Noone. Sheraton Grand Sydney Hyde Park Book NowThe Scottish Cup tie will feature a mixed supporters section for the first time in decades.
SNS Group
St Mirren's Scottish Cup tie against Partick Thistle in January will have a dedicated section of the ground where opposing fans can mix and enjoy the game together.
The clubs have been drawn to meet in Paisley in the Fourth Round of the competition and the tie has been scheduled for Friday January 8, with a 7.30pm kick-off.
That match will be St Mirren's first home game of 2016 and with Thistle set to 'first foot' the Buddies, both clubs have worked together to add to occasion.
The stadium will have sections open to both sets of supporters, allowing them to mix in a move St Mirren say is "something not seen in most Scottish football grounds for decades".
A mixed section for families will also be created and as part of the entertainment the clubs have promised "a Kingsley Vs Paisley Panda face off to see which team truly has the best mascot".Peter Van Valkenburgh is director of research at Coin Center, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit research and advocacy group focused on cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
In this opinion piece, Van Valkenburgh analyzes new model legislation that he believes could clear the way for U.S. states to broadly regulate bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, while still encouraging innovation.
The Uniform Law Commission (ULC), a private body of lawyers and legal academics, has voted to finalize and approve a uniform model law for the regulation of virtual currency businesses.
Now an official model for states to follow, I’m hopeful that over the next year, we’ll see state after state pass this language as legislation. For states with badly drafted regulations (like the New York “BitLicense”) or vague money transmission statutes that may or may not cover bitcoin businesses (like in California), this new legislation would be a major improvement and a huge win for our community.
For one thing, the model act’s language is explicitly clear on what types of digital currency businesses are and are not regulated.
In many states, poorly written or outdated legal language that does not account for the properties of open blockchain networks has created legal gray areas for entrepreneurs. Whether or not they even need licenses is often open to interpretation – a looming prospect that hangs over the head of anyone trying to build a business in those states.
Sensible definitions
So, what’s to like? Under the ULC’s model act, precise and sensible definitions are laid out that specifically encompass only businesses models in which a third party takes control of user funds, because only in those situations can that third party then lose or steal the funds.
Therefore, any licensing system meant to protect consumers should only cover those businesses and exclude all others. An example can help explain how this could work in practice.
Imagine someone earning bitcoins by running a node on the Lightning Network. The node operator is helping hold some bitcoin transactions off-chain until they eventually are settled on the bitcoin blockchain. Prior to settlement, the node operator is part of a multi-sig payment channel that is holding those bitcoins. There is no way the node operator can steal or otherwise lose those coins.
So, should they be licensed?
Under California’s money transmission law, the determination is based on whether or not the business is “receiving money for transmission.” And under New York’s BitLicense, the question is whether the business is “receiving virtual currency for transmission or transmitting virtual currency, except where the transaction is undertaken for non-financial purposes and does not involve the transfer of more than a nominal amount of virtual currency.”
Neither of those rules cleanly accounts for the Lightning Network arrangement, which means they are open to interpretation by the regulator. Suddenly, simply running a Lightning node could require you to hire a lawyer and go through an expensive process just to figure out if you need to go through an even more expensive licensing process.
Clearer picture
Under the ULC model act, that gray area is totally eliminated.
It is clearly spelled out that licensure is only required of companies that have control of a customer’s cryptocurrency, with control defined as the “power to execute unilaterally or prevent indefinitely a virtual currency transaction.”
A Lightning Network node does not have that power, so they are not covered. Easy.
But it isn’t just about Lightning Network nodes. You can run any sort of activity through this test and come up with an easy answer about whether it would be regulated. If you are a bitcoin exchange holding people’s bitcoins for them? Yes, you have control, you need a license.
But with almost anything else, you don’t. Try the test with mining, software wallet development, core development, key recovery services and running a full node. In all those cases you cannot “unilaterally execute or indefinitely prevent” transactions with someone else’s bitcoins; you just can’t and therefore you are excluded from the regulation.
Try running any of those activities through California or New York’s tests, and you will end up with more questions than answers.
The ULC model act also has a clear exemption for people or businesses using digital currencies on their own behalf. That means over-the-counter traders, token creators, miners selling their rewards, or people helping their family members acquire some digital currencies are all clearly free of any restrictions.
Regulatory clarity like this has been the stuff of dreams for digital currency entrepreneurs for years now. Coin Center and others have made modest progress approaching states one by one, although, more often than not, our victories have been helping a state turn a very unsound approach into a slightly less unsound approach.
Now, with the passage of the ULC’s model act, states wanting to pursue a licensing approach have been handed the best possible path to encouraging digital currency innovation by a trusted body of lawmakers.
American flag image via ShutterstockLONDON — Trying to address accusations of anti-Semitism in Britain’s opposition Labour Party, its embattled leader, Jeremy Corbyn, provoked more outrage on Thursday by comparing Israel to “self-styled Islamic states or organizations.”
Mr. Corbyn’s comment drew instant condemnation from colleagues and Israeli politicians, who initially believed that he had said “Islamic State” rather than Islamic states. But members of his staff insisted that he had been referring to countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — which are not self-styled and generally are called “Muslim nations” — or to organizations like Hamas. (Israelis would hardly be mollified by the clarification, given that Hamas is a Palestinian group classified as terrorist by Britain and the United States.)
The comment was made at the public introduction of a report on anti-Semitism within the Labour Party that had been ordered after two senior figures in the party — Naseem Shah, a lawmaker, and Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London — were suspended in April over what was deemed to be anti-Israel commentary.
After the report was introduced, Mr. Corbyn was also accused of failing to intervene when a Jewish Labour lawmaker, Ruth Smeeth, faced what she called “anti-Semitic smears” from an activist. Ms. Smeeth called on Mr. Corbyn to resign, saying that under his stewardship the party “cannot be a safe space for British Jews.”An American tourist was stabbed to death during a fight with a Vietnamese man in Ho Chi Minh City's backpacker district on Thursday night.
Police have identified the suspect, allegedly with a history of drug addiction, and are searching for him, HCMC Police’s news website reported.
An initial investigation found that Stephen Marshall Pendeeton had got caught up in a fight with a Vietnamese man on Pham Ngu Lao Street, a popular nighttime venue among foreigners.
The 22-year-old tourist reportedly tried to escape down an alley but was chased after and stabbed to death. His attacker then fled the scene.
The cause of their conflict is not immediately known.
Pham Ngu Lao is part of the city’s popular backpacker district with bars, spas and clubs staying open until late at night. It draws up to 2,000 foreign visitors every day.
Ho Chi Minh City is one of the top tourist destinations in Vietnam, welcoming more than five million foreign arrivals last year. But safety issues such as muggings and violent street attacks remain a concern for visitors.Radovic's second put Legia in front and the forward later set up the hosts' third
Ronny Deila suffered a nightmare first loss as Celtic boss with a heavy defeat by Legia Warsaw in the Champions League third qualifying round first leg.
Celtic had taken an early lead in Poland with a curling shot into the top corner from Callum McGregor.
However, Miroslav Radovic scored twice, and it got worse before half-time when Efe Ambrose was sent off.
Ivica Vrdoljak twice missed from the penalty spot, but Michal Zyro and Jakub Kosecki both found the net late on.
If it was not for some heroic goalkeeping by Fraser Forster, this could have been a real embarrassment.
Media playback is not supported on this device Interview - Celtic boss Ronny Deila
As it is, their hopes of progress are still alive, although they need to win at least 3-0, but the away goal and the balanced nature of the match in the first half will give Deila belief his side can turn the tie round.
However, the disjointed nature of Celtic's performance and their lack of ability to close the game down after being reduced to 10 men must be a concern.
There was no sign of the chaotic manner in which the game would unfold when McGregor added to his burgeoning reputation as he opened the scoring, just as he had in Iceland in the previous round.
The goal had a similar feel about it too as he cut in from the right before beating the goalkeeper at his near post, this time with a curling shot beyond the fingertips of the diving Dusan Kuciak.
But Celtic let the lead slip almost as soon as they had created it.
Efe Ambrose was sent off for Celtic in the first half
Radovic was allowed space inside the box and his well-hit effort was too powerful for Forster to keep out.
The game was extremely open, with neither defence looking entirely comfortable and more goals seemed a certainty.
And though Kris Commons and Teemu Pukki went close for Celtic it was the home side who took the lead.
Again Celtic's back-line - and Ambrose in particular - looked vulnerable and when Ondrej Duda headed across goal, Radovic was unmarked and gleefully slid in to beat Forster from close range.
McGregor forced a decent save from Kuciak but there was further bad news for Celtic to contend with before the interval.
As Michal Kucharczyk bore down on goal, Ambrose attempted to get a toe to the ball only to bring down the Legia man, leaving the referee a straightforward decision to brandish the red card.
Ambrose's departure meant Charlie Mulgrew dropped back to defence and it was the captain's careless challenge on Lukasz Broz that led to Legia being awarded a penalty.
But as the few Celtic fans in the stadium began to sense their Champions League dreams fading, they were granted a brief reprieve as Vrdoljak sent the spot-kick wide.
Legia pressed hard for the goals they hoped would put the tie beyond Celtic and Zyro rounded off an impressive performance with a headed goal following great work by the excellent Radovic.
Forster then saved a Vrdoljak penalty but in injury time substitute Kosecki added a fourth, to leave Celtic needing a monumental performance at Murrayfield next Wednesday if they are to avoid a place in the Europa League play-offs.
It could have been even worse for Celtic had Fraser Forster not saved a penaltyIn the Express Lane: Learning the Cello as an Adult
by Ethan Winer - written in 1997
Be sure to see my complete Music Theory course on YouTube.
(Some segments are blocked in some countries, so it's also on Vimeo.)
I began playing the cello at the age of 43, and at the time considered myself fortunate to undertake this admittedly large project as an adult. As an adult I didn't have to contend with the trauma of outgrowing an instrument. I'd also played other instruments (electric guitar, Fender bass, some piano), and already understood how music "works." Perhaps most important, I had a determination to succeed that few children possess.
But starting as an adult also has unique drawbacks. Playing endless variations of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" is hardly interesting to someone who's studied musical scores and performed publicly. Worse, I knew how good music is supposed to be played, and my early efforts were not even close. Beginner children don't know how bad they sound, and thus are not so easily discouraged! Having played blues lead guitar for many years I knew what it felt like to be in control of an instrument - to play with feeling and conviction. I really hated being demoted to mediocre status as a beginner on the cello, and wanted to get past that phase as quickly as possible. What I hoped would be an enjoyable pastime soon evolved into an obsession to become proficient as quickly as possible that now occupies three or four hours of each day.
In the five years since I began playing the cello I've made a number of observations that I believe other adult beginners and intermediate players - especially those who are ambitious and are willing to work hard - will find useful. Like Sergeant Joe Friday on the TV show Dragnet, I have always been a seeker of "just the facts." I'm not interested in guesses, half-baked opinions, or anything that can't be substantiated. The facts I wanted to know are 1) What skills are needed to become an accomplished cellist, and 2) How do I get there in the shortest amount of time?
In a previous career I owned a software company, and wrote books and magazine articles about computer programming. Being a successful programmer requires knowing the facts, and learning to play an instrument really is no different. However, to become a proficient player requires learning the facts and also developing the necessary mechanical skills. A good musician possesses "fine motor control" as well as the artistic sense to know how to apply that control.
I'm convinced that what is often mistaken for musical talent or aptitude is really persistence and enough belief in one's self to keep at it. It takes thousands of practice hours to achieve competence and even more to become truly polished. Unfortunately, many people give up long before then, mistakenly believing they don't have the needed ability. But like walking and talking, most of the skills necessary for playing an instrument are purely mechanical and can be developed by anyone given enough time. How one actually applies that mechanical, muscular control is what distinguishes the truly talented from the merely competent.
WHAT YOUR TEACHER WON'T TELL YOU
Most of my studying has been with one teacher, to whom I remain devoted. But I've also taken single lessons from a number of other teachers, to get additional opinions and to hear as many different viewpoints as possible. The more my understanding of the cello has grown, the more surprised I am that few of these teachers addressed certain mechanical aspects of playing the cello - in particular, the importance and difficulty of the bow.
Many professional cellists and teachers achieve a beautiful tone, yet cannot describe what it is they do physically to get that tone. I've been told, "Draw the sound out, don't push it inward," which conveys no information and provides no guidance for how to do that! Likewise, comments such as "Make a big sound" and "Play with more resonance" are equally useless. Resonance is a physical property (a propensity to vibrate), not something that a player controls. And a good cellist can make a "big sound" even when playing very softly. In the pursuit of a beautiful tone, bowing is the single most important skill to master. Bowing is the cello's voice, and everything else revolves around that.
Bowing an instrument is an inherently awkward act. It is easy for a teacher who has been playing since an early age to overlook the amount of strength and control needed just to draw the bow smoothly. What happens in the first few milliseconds of a note has an enormous bearing on the perceived character of the entire note. A scratchy tone or flat pitch caused by too fast or too slow a bow speed - even if corrected quickly - will make the entire note or passage sound amateurish. Controlling a bow and changing its direction are some of the most difficult things to master, yet smooth bow changes are fundamental to playing the cello. Until you can change bow direction without making a scratching sound, every note you play will sound lame. If you listen to a recording of any great cellist playing a slow passage you will note that every bow change is flawless and beautiful - all you hear at each note transition is the slightest dip in volume.
Note initiations can be sudden with a biting effect, or they can be gentle followed by a gradual increase in volume. But a biting start should never be distorted or scratchy. Cello strings are thick and heavy, and it takes a lot of strength to get them moving. But pressing even a little too hard or drawing the bow even a little too fast ruins the sound. Even more difficult is changing bow direction while also changing the bow to a different string. These are the things a beginner must focus on the most to overcome sounding like a beginner.
Another obstacle is developing an independence of the left and right arms and hands. Not unlike the joke about walking and chewing gum at the same time, it is harder to move your left hand accurately on the fingerboard while also changing the bow direction. I've theorized that the brain splits its concentration between the two hands, making it harder to control the bow and the left hand fingers at the same time. There are difficult passages I can play confidently and in tune using pizzicato, but that are weak and out of tune when played with the bow. Likewise, I can do a smoother bow change if I first stop the vibrato. I know in time bowing will become automatic, and at that point I'll work at continuing vibrato up to the exact moment when a new note begins.
Finally, many teachers stress that you should remain relaxed when you play. But how can you possibly relax as you approach a passage you know you have only a small chance of playing well? The fact is you can't! By all means try to relax - in my case I tend to grip the bow too tightly in a vain effort to gain control - but also accept that you won't become fully comfortable until you've been playing for many years.
PRACTICE SMARTER, NOT HARDER
I won't dispute the value of conventional learning methods - studying etude books and progressively more difficult student pieces - but I'm convinced there's an even faster way to become a competent cellist. It's been said that a month of on-the-job training is equal to a year of college. By extension, you will progress faster by working on real pieces rather than etudes and student compositions. Further, if you practice etudes for three years, all you have to show for your effort is, well, etudes. However, if you start now on a real concerto or sonata, you'll have learned and be able to play a beautiful and meaningful piece of music for the same amount of effort. But you also need to develop mechanical facility.
My practice hours are divided about equally between works from the standard cello literature and highly focused mechanical exercises. It is these exercises that I want to share here, and I'm convinced they are more useful than an etude book for a motivated adult student. I have practiced these exercises daily for five years now, and I can attest that they work and work well. By focusing directly on the most difficult mechanical aspects of cello playing, you can reduce what might otherwise take ten or more years to substantially less than that. After mastering the mechanics you can then work on the more artistic aspects of this noble craft.
In the pursuit of a clear tone, the Number One issue is achieving the ideal ratio of these three interrelated factors: bow speed, bow pressure, and bow distance from the bridge. As the bow is drawn faster, more pressure is required to maintain the optimum amount of friction. It is this optimum friction that makes for a "big" sound. Cellists sometimes use less bow pressure or more speed to get a beautiful silky tone, which can be enhanced by placing the bow farther from the bridge. A special effect called Sul Ponticello uses a similar technique with the bow placed very close to the bridge. But first you must develop the bow control needed to create a clear tone - what I call a "pure buzz."
If the bow moves too fast at the start of a note it creates a scratching sound; on sustained notes too much speed or too little pressure makes the bow skate over the string instead of digging into it. When the bow speed is too slow or the pressure is too great the note becomes distorted, or even flat in pitch. Likewise, when the bow is nearer to the bridge more pressure is needed or, alternatively, the bow must be drawn more slowly. This is especially apparent when playing fast passages on the lower strings when changing bow direction for each note. Different notes - even on the same string - also have a different optimum speed for a given amount of pressure. As you play the short example in Figure 1 (all on the G string), notice how difficult it is to prevent a brief scratching sound as each new note begins.
Achieving the optimum ratio of speed and pressure is hardest when bowing near to the bridge, due to the very slow speed needed to sound a clear tone. It's hard to keep such a slow speed steady. Yet this is where a soloist must play during loud passages, to rise above the rest of the orchestra. It is harder still to bow slowly very near the frog end.
I practice three similar exercises to develop the control needed to smoothly change bow direction and maintain a pure tone during slow passages. The first exercise is simply drawing the bow back and forth on each string twenty times, trying to avoid a scratching sound when the bow changes direction. The scratching is caused by the bow traveling too quickly, and these exercises force you to work at reducing the speed. Place the bow within an inch of the bridge and an inch from the frog, and draw about two inches of bow in each direction keeping the bow in contact with the string at all times. The other two exercises shown in Figures 2a and 2b are variations that help develop smooth bow crossings. Do each of these exercises as cleanly as possible on each string pair bowing near the frog, starting both down- and up-bow, at least 20 times every day.
Equally valuable is practicing slow scales, always drawing the bow fully from one end to the other. It is tempting to avoid the last few inches at each end of the bow, but I urge you not to. If something is hard to do or uncomfortable, that's a sure sign you need to practice it! Again, try to achieve a pure buzz, with no scuffing sound when the bow direction changes. Also practice drawing the bow on each string as slowly as possible, sustaining a single bow in each direction for at least 30 seconds or longer and as smoothly as possible. This is easiest to do when the bow is farther away from the bridge. Baseball players develop strength and control by swinging two bats at once. In a similar manner, trying to bow more slowly than you'll ever really need expedites developing a steady bow arm. The secret of making a powerful tone at low volumes is keeping the bow very steady. It is the slight fluctuations in bow speed and pressure that make a note sound wimpy, like it's played by a beginner.
Another useful exercise is what I call "touch downs," which help develop the ability to drop the bow onto a string without it bouncing. This is especially difficult to do near the tip of the bow. Starting at the frog end of the bow about a half inch above the C string, lower the bow slowly and carefully, draw one inch of bow, raise it, back up a half inch, and repeat until you have reached the tip. Do that once again working toward the frog, and then repeat on the other strings. (I joke to my friends that I spend half my practice time trying to keep the bow from bouncing when I don't want it to, and the other half trying to get it to bounce when it won't.)
Also valuable are what I think of as the bowing equivalents to tongue twisters - exercises that for one reason or another are more difficult than they might appear on a printed page. Changing the bow direction while also going to a different string is more difficult than staying on the same string. By focusing on bowing exercises that demand this movement you will practice the needed moves more often than they would occur in a normal piece or etude. These are shown in Figures 3a through 3e.
I spend a few minutes every day on each of these exercises, going as slowly as necessary to sound each note clearly and not accidentally hit two strings at once. Then I do them again as fast as possible, ignoring that the bow doesn't dig optimally into the strings, to get my hands used to "making the motions" quickly and smoothly. Do the exercises in Figures 3d and 3e starting both down- and up-bow, and also on every string-pair.
The exercises in 4a and 4b are also harder to play than they look because the fingering itself is tricky. Figure 4c is a real challenge to play in tune because it leads with the fourth finger descending instead of the first finger which is more usual. Push yourself to play these as quickly as possible, but without making a jumble of the notes.
Besides the difficulty of mastering string crossings, it is a challenge just to coordinate bowing and fingering. The tried and true exercises in Figures 5a and 5b will be useful to players at any skill level; you can never play them fast enough or cleanly enough. Again, do them starting both down- and up-bow, and first slowly and then quickly. Also do the exercise in Figure 5a in the key of D (a whole step higher) to get your left hand fingers used to the large stretches needed to play in that key in first position.
Bowing is important, but so are smooth position shifts. The exercise in Figure 6 is meant to be played all on the G string, but you should also repeat it on the other strings. At each shift point try to make the shift as smoothly as possible - never sudden or jerky. If you're not sure how to shift positions smoothly ask your teacher to show you. There's a special way to do that which is not necessarily obvious. Go up and down each string at least eight times, and you'll be amazed at how soon you are comfortable playing near the very top of the fingerboard.
I also urge you to explore thumb position if you haven't already, and practice scales and arpeggios daily that extend to the highest positions on the neck. Playing a four-octave arpeggio is not something you'll be able to do all of a sudden one day "when you are good." You have to start sometime, so why not today? Go as slowly as necessary to start, and don't be discouraged by how slowly you have to play to stay in tune.
Finally, make up your own exercises based on pieces you find difficult to play. There are many other bowing and fingering exercises not shown here that I practice every day, and many were derived from one passage or another that I stumbled over during the course of playing real pieces. For example, when I had trouble playing this phrase from the Dvorak Concerto (Figure 7):
I made up the exercise shown in Figure 8 and added it to my daily to-do list.
For an additional challenge, use the second left hand finger instead of the third for the high note in the middle of each figure. Then do it again using the first finger each time for that high note. This exercise is especially useful because it requires shifting repeatedly over the awkward area where the neck joins the body of the cello.
BEYOND EXERCISES
Mechanical exercises are valuable because they focus on specific aspects of cello technique. They are admittedly boring, but the work must be done. However, exercises won't help you with sight reading, or further your understanding of musical concepts. The best way to improve your reading skills is to keep working on new pieces. Try to find a local orchestra to play with, or start a piano trio or string quartet. It's difficult to find advanced players willing to practice with a beginner, but at least try to find others who are as dedicated as you so you won't outgrow them. Many towns have a community orchestra you can join even if you are not that advanced. Play the passages you can, and rest or play softly during the hard parts. Or play only the first note in each group of four sixteenth notes. Nobody will mind if you can't play everything perfectly, as long as you don't wreck it for the others by playing out of tune too loudly. Joining an amateur orchestra has the added benefit of sitting beside someone more experienced who can show you fingerings and other techniques. After struggling for several months to learn spiccato, a cellist in a local group showed me the basic moves in five minutes during coffee break.
Equally valuable is attending concerts and watching video tapes. I have most of the cello videos available, and I've learned something useful from every one of them. The Shar catalog (800-248-SHAR) lists a number of videos - both teaching and complete performances - and for about the cost of an hour-long lesson they're a good value. I've also bought quite a few play-along tapes from Music Minus One (914-592-1188). The only problem with accompaniment tapes is they're played at full tempo, which is often too fast for a beginner. Also, minor variations in tape speed may require you to retune your instrument for each tape. But nothing beats playing along with superb musicians who get it right every time. I've also created my own accompaniments in my MIDI recording studio, which has the advantage of letting me vary the playback tempo over a very wide range without altering the pitch of the instruments.
AL FINE
If you watch an expert cellist playing a difficult piece, it is tempting to think, "That must be very hard to do." But obviously it is not hard for that cellist! I have a wise friend who once pointed out |
Make a Nuclear Deal — Leaving Israel Isolated" was written by Larry Cohler-Esses.A theater group at an all-women’s college in Massachusetts is drawing criticism on campus for canceling their annual production of feminist classic The Vagina Monologues, on the grounds that it’s not inclusive enough.
Campus Reform published a school-wide email sent by Mount Holyoke’s Project Theatre Board, in which they announced they were retiring the play. “At its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman,” explained group representative Erin Murphy:
“Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive,” the email, obtained by Campus Reform, said. Replacing the play will be Mount Holyoke’s own version that will be trans-inclusive and fix the “problems” supposedly perpetuated by Ensler. Murphy also claims that there are problems with race, class, and “other identities” within the play.
The all-women’s college, which recently began admitting trans students, really could have just announced that they were writing an all-original play called Compelling Monologues About Non-Normative Gender Experiences; or, Hooray for Intersectionality, but the cancellation — along with the rationale behind it — is being met with intense debate from the Mount Holyoke community, with many wondering whether the jab at The Vagina Monologues and its purpose (people talking about having vaginas) was necessary.
“I love how people who have never been able to discuss or embrace their vaj-wahs aren’t going to find an avenue here, either, since female-validating talk about vaginas is now forbidden. That’s so misogynistic under the guise of ‘progress,’” one student wrote. “But we can’t present a show that is blatantly transphobic and treats race and homosexuality questionably, when one of the conditions of getting the rights to the show is that you can’t critique it or alter it,” another student said.
It bears mentioning that while The Vagina Monologues became a standard-bearer for 1996-era feminisim, it’s also received plenty of criticism for its treatment of race, both in an academic and pragmatic sense (particularly as a fundraising vehicle for organizations that focus on what can best be described as first-world white woman problems).
But as early as 2004, Ensler updated her play with a monologue called “They Beat The Girl Out of My Boy,” which came from a series of interviews she did with transwomen about their experiences transitioning from male to female. The monologue was first performed at an all-transwoman production of The Vagina Monologues in Los Angeles, and transgender activists Calpernia Addams and Leslie Townsend performed it at the show’s 10th anniversary celebration in the Superdome.
[Campus Reform]
[Image via HBO]
—
>> Follow Tina Nguyen (@Tina_Nguyen) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comBISMARCK -- Bismarck Police and the Burleigh County Sheriff's Department worked more than 300 hours of overtime at the Donald Trump event in Bismarck in May.
Police put in a total of 272 overtime hours at a cost of $10,884, said Gloria David, public information officer for the city of Bismarck.
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The sheriff's department had an extra eight people on duty, who worked 76 overtime hours, for a total cost of $2,193, Maj. Kelly Leben said.
Both agencies are billing the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference for the hours.
To provide enough security for the more than 7,000 people in attendance, 56 Bismarck police officers, 39 highway patrolmen, 19 Burleigh County deputy sheriffs and seven Bureau of Criminal Investigations agents worked the event, Bismarck Police Sgt. Mark Buschena said in May.
To help pay for the cost of extra security, as well as use of the arena, the North Dakota Petroleum Council charged $30 per ticket for the general public wanting to hear Trump speak, spokeswoman Tessa Sandstrom said in May.
Leben said the deputies enjoyed the opportunity to work together with other local law enforcement, even though their feet got sore guarding the doors all day.
Highway Patrol troopers helped on the motorcade and around the Event Center, but did not bill the conference for their time, Cpt. Eric Pederson said.
"That's our job to help agencies do something like this," said Pederson, adding that it was good training for the department.Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) Chairman Danilo Lim on Thursday said travel time in major thouroghfares in the metropolis is now faster by five percent after the suspension of transport network company Uber.
“So from what we heard, ‘yung mga report — pati ‘yung data natin sa Metro Base — show na mukhang nakatulong sa pagbawas ng traffic,” Lim said in a Palace briefing.
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“Of course, ‘yung traffic natin eh talagang malala pa rin, but kahit paano nakatulong daw,” he added.
The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) on August 14 suspended for a month the operations of transport network company (TNC) Uber after it defied its July 26 order not to accept and activate new drivers into its platform
Uber Philippines Public Policy Head Yves Gonzales earlier said they had at least 66,000 activated units.
Since the suspension, Lim said traffic flow improved by about five percent.
“Siguro mga five percent, mga ganun, sa travel time,” he said.
He said the volume of vehicles on the road remains to be a contributor to traffic congestion in Metro Manila.
“Well, sa mga narinig natin, mukhang lumuwag nang konti ‘yung traffic because of the [suspension ng Uber] because the problem talaga in Metro Manila is a volume problem of vehicles,” he said.
“Talagang napakaraming sasakyan at ‘yung mga kalsada natin ay hindi naman nadadagdagan,” he added. ASU/JE
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MOST READAlex Katz: ‘Ultimately, content is not important. The style is what is important’
As his student subway drawings go on show alongside recent paintings and sculptures at Timothy Taylor, London, Alex Katz explains why he believes content to be unimportant, and what he means by seeking only to portray the ‘immediate presence’
by ANNA McNAY
Born in Brooklyn in 1927 to Russian parents, Alex Katz entered the prestigious Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan in 1946, where he was taught to paint from drawings, and exposed largely to modern art. Throughout the period of abstract expressionism, Katz remained a staunch figurative painter, spending his summers in Maine, where he made landscapes en plein air. In the early 60s, influenced by film, television and advertising, he began painting large-scale works, with dramatically cropped faces. His work is often described as “very American”, but Katz seemingly has no agenda. His motivation is to capture what he sees before him, be it landscape, cityscape, or portrait, and, unlike many artists, he doesn’t hanker after timelessness or immortality, recognising, rather, that time keeps moving and reality doesn’t exist beyond what he terms the “immediate presence”.
Alex Katz. Man with Newspaper on the Subway, c1940s. Black ink, 4 7/8 x 7 7/8 in. © Alex Katz / DACS, London / VAGA, New York. Courtesy Timothy Taylor 16×34.
For Katz’s latest exhibition in London, gallerist Timothy Taylor has chosen to bring out some very early pencil and ink drawings made by the artist on the New York subway during his student days and to show these alongside recent landscape paintings and sculptures. Studio International met with Katz in the Mayfair gallery, ahead of the exhibition opening.
Anna McNay: The starting point for this exhibition is a series of drawings you made on the New York subway when you were a student at the Cooper Union Art School.
Alex Katz: I was trying to learn how to draw so I could stay in school and not get thrown out, so I started drawing whatever was in front of me, on the subway, going to school, coming back – I just kept drawing for about three years. I learned to draw quickly, between stops, maybe working for 10 minutes or so.
Alex Katz. Subway Scene Couple, c1940s. Black ink, 4 7/8 x 8 in. © Alex Katz / DACS, London / VAGA, New York. Courtesy Timothy Taylor 16×34.
AMc: Were you using ink?
AK: At first I was working with pencil, but then it went to ink.
AMc: You didn’t intend to show those drawings when you made them, did you?
AK: No, they were never shown. Then Timothy [Taylor] got this small gallery in Chelsea [New York] and I said, “You know, those drawings would look good there”, and he thought it was a good idea.
AMc: Presumably, these were all pages in sketchbooks, which you have torn out for the exhibitions?
AK: Yes.
AMc: When they were shown earlier this year in New York, they were shown alone, just the drawings by themselves, but for this show in London there are also paintings and sculptures. How did that evolve?
AK: It was Timothy’s idea. It’s his show. I didn’t choose anything. The paintings are from a couple of years ago, but they were somehow never shown before.
Alex Katz. Departure (cut-out), 2017. Archival inks on shaped powder-coated aluminium on white bronze base, 56 x 22 x 6 cm. © Alex Katz / DACS, London / VAGA, New York. Courtesy Timothy Taylor 16×34.
AMc: Are they all from Maine, where you spend your summers painting?
AK: Not really. Most of my big paintings – about 90% of them – are from Maine, yes, but one of these is from Pennsylvania and one is from New York City. We have a place in Pennsylvania that my wife and son use a lot for the weekends.
AMc: You also have a place in Maine, where you have been going every year since 1949, when you spent two summers at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and later bought a house in Lincolnville.
AK: Yes, we bought the small house in 1954 and have been going there ever since.
Alex Katz. Two Men, c1940s. Black ink, 8 x 5 in. © Alex Katz / DACS, London / VAGA, New York. Courtesy Timothy Taylor 16×34.
AMc: What is it particularly about the place that keeps taking you back?
AK: It has great light. It’s softer, and most of the colours are richer, that’s one reason. But also painting in Maine is like being a carpenter, it’s an accepted vocation. In Queen’s, where I grew up, when I put an easel out in the street, people would say: “Oh, that’s crazy! Look at him, he’s at it again.” Whereas, in Maine, I ran into a plumber who I hadn’t seen for 20-odd years and he said, “Hey, are you still painting?” and I said: “I like to keep my hand in.”
AMc: You work en plein air with your easel and palette. Do you make sketches first?
AK: I make small paintings first and then I make larger ones later.
AMc: Do you use photography at all?
AK: Now I do, I’m using my iPhone. But I can’t get the light and the colour right with that, so I have to back it up with actual painting. I started with the iPhone about two or three years ago. With the iPhone, I can capture more gestures in a shorter period of time than I can with drawing, so I get gestures that I would otherwise never get.
AMc: How much of a part of your practice is drawing still?
AK: Oh, I spend most of my time drawing. I spend far more time doing that than the larger paintings. It’s about getting the drawing and the logic right. Once you transfer that to the canvas for the painting, what you see is what’s there. My technique is wet paint into wet paint, so my paintings are not worked over.
AMc: Do you still work with ink or pencil sometimes, too, or do you just “draw” with paint?
AK: If I’m not sure about something, I’ll sometimes go back and make an ink drawing.
AMc: When you look back at the subway drawings now, do they take you back to when you were making them? Do you remember specific instances and scenarios?
AK: I remember meeting a pretty girl at four in the morning on a train coming from New York to Queen’s. We had a conversation, but she got off before I got her phone number and I remember that to this day – regrettably!
AMc: When you’re making quick sketches like that, what is it that you’re trying to capture? Is it a physical likeness?
AK: No, it’s basically the sensation of what you see. Translating what you see on to the canvas. It’s not naturalistic or literal. You’re trying to get the equivalent of the sensation in translation.
Alex Katz. ADA, 2017. Polished stainless steel, absolute granite base, 11 ft. © Alex Katz / DACS, London / VAGA, New York. Courtesy Timothy Taylor 16×34.
AMc: You’ve been making sculpture, too, since 1959, when you began working with plywood. The single-line sculpture inspired by your wife, Ada, included in this exhibition, really towers over everything and everyone.
AK: I could see it in my mind how I wanted it, and I got a big piece of paper and kept changing the size of it. It didn’t make any sense at six foot, but by the time it got up to ten-and-a-half foot, it made sense.
AMc: You said very early on that the reason you made your paintings so big was a wish to stand up to the abstract expressionists and create something figurative that would, to quote you, “knock them off the wall”. Is there still a competitive element to your work?
AK: Yes, definitely. On the one side, I’m competing with the kids, who are now making painting, and I’m also still competing with the old guys.
AMc: Is that part of what drives you?
AK: When you’re painting, all you’re thinking about is painting, the canvas and what you’re putting on to it. But you have to have something that makes you go, yes.
Alex Katz. Two Trees, 2015, Oil on linen, 120 x 96 in. © Alex Katz / DACS, London / VAGA, New York. Courtesy Timothy Taylor 16×34.
AMc: You’ve said before that painting should be shown on its own, not in a “food show”, where you walk by taking samples.
AK: Yes, painting should be shown with other painting. If it’s shown with mixed media, it becomes a little difficult.
AMc: How do you feel about showing drawings and sculptures side by side in this exhibition? Is it different, when it is all your own work?
AK: Yes, that’s OK. And it can be shown in museum shows alongside other people’s paintings. That’s OK, too.
AMc: Has your style changed much over the years?
AK: The basic premise of what I do has changed very little, but the solutions have changed. No solution in painting is valid after a while; it becomes obsolete. In my own mind, if I can’t get it right, it keeps changing.
AMc: What sort of things have you changed?
AK: In 1959, I was working with flat backgrounds. I’m working much more baroque now. My tastes have changed.
AMc: Do you look at much art by other artists – for inspiration, maybe?
AK: I like looking at art. You’re always looking and learning and changing your perception about things.
AMc: When you are composing a painting, you have mentioned before about the “grammar” of a painting being abstract.
AK: The grammar of a painting is always abstract.
AMc: You have never painted something that you would call abstract in itself though.
AK: No, I don’t paint abstract.
AMc: At the same time, you don’t agree with the concept of subject matter.
AK: Subject matter is inspiration.
AMc: And what would you say is the subject of a painting?
AK: The subject is style – line, colour, how the whole thing is put together. Ultimately, content is not important. The style is what is important.
AMc: Where does the idea for a new painting come from?
AK: It just comes out of the sky. The unconscious puts it there and you just follow it.
AMc: Do you know what the finished work will look like when you set out?
AK: No. You look at it at a certain point and say: “Why am I working on this?” In the preparatory stages, you have some idea and then when you’re painting you have to keep asking yourself what you like about it and what you don’t like about it and how you can make it better. And you have to make those decisions quickly.
AMc: Do you ever destroy paintings?
AK: Not any more. When I was learning how to paint, I destroyed maybe 1,000 paintings. But what happened was I learned how to paint.
AMc: So, now you always find a way to make it work?
AK: More or less.
AMc: Can you say something about the idea of the “immediate presence”, which is key to your work?
AK: That’s why I get a lot of trouble with my paintings, because I’m telling you, “This is what it looks like” and I’m telling you, “This is what a good painting is”, and it’s a rejection of a lot of modern art. It makes a lot of people insecure and unhappy. When people say such things as, “A great work of art is a joy for ever”, I say, “Well, there is no for ever”. “For ever” is absolutely fixed in time and I don’t believe in that. Everything is moving. There’s no reality, it’s moving. Reality is subject to fashion and so you get something where there’s no past tense, there’s no future tense, there’s only now. And I want to paint the now. That’s the immediate presence. And that’s what consciousness is. Our lives are subject to fashion and the fashion industry tries to hook on to this. It’s the same for painting, writing, music and clothes. Everything is subject to fashion. My paintings are not narrative. Narrative is time. If you strip a painting of narrative, it’s just an image, and if that image has enough energy, it will get you where you want to go.
AMc: In your portraits, the clothes, the bathing suits, the hats – they are all markers of the fashions of their time.
AK: Yes, everything is of its time. You paint what is in front of you.
AMc: You are not worried that this will date you?
AK: No, not at all. A lot of people want to paint something timeless, but I paint the immediate presence.
• Alex Katz runs until 18 November at Timothy Taylor, London.( A ) Discrimination performance as a function of comparison PF. Comparison PF is reported as a percentage of reference PF for one electrode E2.6 and two reference (ref) PFs, 50 and 100 Hz. Points indicate percentage of test stimuli correctly identified as stronger or weaker than the reference over 20 pairwise trials, and the dashed line is the sigmoidal fit to the raw data. ( B ) Combined discrimination curves from multiple electrode contacts across two subjects under three conditions (PF discrimination, 50-Hz reference, n = 6; PF discrimination, 100-Hz reference, n = 7; PW discrimination, n = 7) (solid line denotes the mean and shaded area denotes the SEM). (Inset) Weber fractions calculated as JND divided by the reference value for the three conditions. Weber fractions were significantly lower for PW than either PF condition (t test, P < 0.001 for both) but did not differ between PF at 50 Hz and PF at 100 Hz (t test, P = 0.61). Open circles denote all data; bars denote the mean and SEM; filled circles correspond to curves in (A). ( C ) Intensity discrimination performance with variations of both PF and PW averaged across subjects (n = 2). Values indicate the percentage of times that a particular test stimulus was identified as stronger than the reference stimulus (center square). The reference was compared to nine test stimuli that varied in both PW and PF and included combinations of the following: lower than the reference PF level, at the reference PF level, and higher than the reference PF level; lower than the reference PW level, at the reference PW level, and higher than the reference PW level. The high and low PF and PW values were chosen to be slightly greater than or less than one JND, respectively, as determined by testing shown in (A) and (B). The stimulus with the highest PW and PF is in the lower right corner, and the stimulus with the lowest PW and PF is in the upper left. Whenever one or both of the parameters increased, the percentage of times the stimulus was judged stronger than the reference increased.
Systematic changes in stimulation parameters yielded systematic changes in the perceived magnitude of the evoked percepts, as evidenced by smooth psychometric functions, which are similar to those found in intact sensory systems ( Fig. 2A ). The just-noticeable difference (JND) is defined as the change in a stimulation parameter that yields 75% correct discrimination. The JND for PF was 16.5 ± 1.6 Hz (mean ± SD) and 29.6 ± 4.6 Hz at 50- and 100-Hz references, respectively. To compare discriminability across stimulation conditions, we computed the Weber fraction, which is the JND divided by the reference. The Weber fractions obtained at the two reference frequencies were 0.33 and 0.30; these were statistically indistinguishable (unpaired t test, P = 0.61; Fig. 2B, inset). The JND for PW was 6.7 ± 1.0 μs, yielding a Weber fraction of 0.05, which was significantly lower than Weber fractions obtained with changes in PF (unpaired t test, P < 0.001 for both PF JNDs). We also found that discriminability was higher when both PF and PW increased or decreased together than when either changed in isolation or when they changed in opposite directions ( Fig. 2C ).
We can discern the level of pressure applied to our fingertips with high accuracy based on neural signals from the skin ( 24 ), which are critical to our ability to dexterously manipulate objects ( 25, 26 ). For upper-limb neuroprostheses to be clinically viable, it is not sufficient to acquire and interpret control signals to move the limb, for example, from descending fibers in the nerve or from the activation of residual muscles; sensory information about the pressure exerted on objects must also be conveyed. Without these sensory signals, the ability to manipulate objects will be severely compromised. One approach to intuitively convey information about pressure is to modulate the intensity of electrical stimulation according to the applied pressure, with greater pressure signaled by greater intensity ( 4 – 6 ). With this in mind, we first sought to establish how changes in stimulation intensity led to distinguishable percepts. We had subjects discriminate the perceived intensity of pairs of stimulation pulse trains that varied in PW, PF, or both. These experiments yielded psychometric functions relating discrimination performance to differences in stimulation intensity (PW, PF, or both). To the extent that small increments in either parameter are discriminable, a large number of intensity levels can be signaled to the subject via the neural interface.
The perceived magnitude as a function of average current was different depending on the mode of stimulation (t test comparing regression slopes, all P < 0.001; Fig. 3E ): slopes were steepest for PW, shallowest for PF, and intermediate for the combination of PF and PW.
( A and B ) Normalized perceived magnitude as a function of PW (A) or PF (B) for one electrode (E2.7, all other stimulus parameters held constant). Points indicate mean ratings (n = 10); error bars denote the SEM; the colored line is the line of best fit. ( C and D ) Normalized perceived magnitude as a function of PW (C) or PF (D) averaged across electrodes (n = 4). Shaded areas denote the SEM. ( E ) Average normalized perceived magnitude as a function of average current for individual electrodes. Manipulations of PW (red), PF (blue), or PW and PF combined (green). Slopes were significantly different depending on stimulation condition (t test, P < 0.001).
Discrimination performance does not provide information about the range of elicited sensations. All pulse trains might have elicited percepts whose magnitude was only slightly different but reliably so. Achieving natural somatosensory feedback would require that the artificial sensation perceptions span a wide range of sensory magnitudes that matches the range experienced in everyday life through an intact limb. To test the breadth of evoked sensations, subjects were asked to provide judgments of perceived intensity across the range of safe and comfortable stimulation parameters in a free magnitude scaling paradigm ( 12, 16, 27 ). As expected, the perceived intensity increased because PW ( Fig. 3, A and C) and PF ( Fig. 3, B and D) increased over the range of values tested. Perceived magnitudes of artificial touch spanned a wide range, increasing about 10-fold from the lowest to the highest intensity tested. To compare across stimulation parameters, we examined the intensity as a function of the average stimulation current, which is defined as the total stimulation charge applied per second (in units of microamperes) (1)
( A and B ) Indentation depth matched to PW (A) and PF (B) for one electrode (E2.2). Points indicate mean depths (n = 5); error bars denote SEM; the colored line is the line of best fit. ( C and D ) Normalized indentation depth matched to PW (C) or PF (D), averaged across subjects and electrode contacts (n = 5). Shaded areas denote SEM. ( E ) Relationship between PF and PW regression slopes for each electrode, where each point represents a different electrode contact (n = 5; correlation analysis, r = 0.96). ( F ) Indentation depth as a function of average current for each electrode when matched to PW (red) and PF (blue). PW and PF had significantly different effects on matched indentation depth (t test, P < 0.001).
Having established that varying pulse train parameters can elicit a large number of discriminable intensity percepts and that these percepts span a wide range of intensities, we sought to directly compare the magnitude of electrically evoked sensations to that of mechanically evoked ones. To this end, subjects were instructed to match mechanical skin indentations on their intact hand to electrical stimulation such that the sensory magnitude of the former matched that of the latter. This process was repeated for electrical stimuli that spanned the range of perceptible and comfortable PWs and PFs. We found that PW and PF were approximately linear functions of indentation depth matched for perceived magnitude ( Fig. 4, A to D). The slopes of the functions obtained by varying PF and PW were consistent for each electrode contact but varied across contacts. Electrode contacts that yielded a high slope for indentation depth versus PF also yielded a high slope for indentation depth versus PW (r = 0.96; Fig. 4E ). The slopes of the functions were likely affected by several factors, including mechanical sensitivity at the location of the indentation, which probably varied across skin locations, and electrical sensitivity of the stimulated fascicle, which varied according to its geometry and distance from the stimulating electrode (see Biophysical model of afferent recruitment in the Supplementary Materials). As was the case with the magnitude estimates, PW and PF had different effects on matched depths when stimulation was expressed in terms of the average stimulation current (I ave ) (t test comparing regression slopes, all P < 0.001).
Total neural population spike rate encodes perceived intensity
Having established that changes in PF and PW have similar, but not equivalent, effects on sensation magnitude, we explored the implications of our findings on the underlying neural code. To this end, we applied stimulation recruitment principles to understand how these parameters might shape the neuronal response. Specifically, we examined how changes in PF and PW affect the activated neural population. Increasing the PF of stimulation results in an increase in the firing rate of activated neurons with miminal influence on the number of fibers activated, whereas increasing PW results in recruitment of additional neurons while minimally affecting the firing rate of the activated fibers because each pulse is too short to evoke multiple spikes in a given fiber (28–30). Electrical stimulation allows us to vary population size (via PW) and population firing rate (via PF) independently, which is not possible with natural stimulation because these two factors generally covary with mechanical stimulation of the skin.
Previous studies involving paired neurophysiological and psychophysical experiments yielded two theories of the neural basis of perceived intensity (12). According to the “hot zone” hypothesis, the perceived intensity is determined by the spike count across the population of afferent neurons whose RFs are directly under the stimulus, weighted by fiber type (12, 31). According to the “population” hypothesis, the perceived intensity is determined by the spike count across the entire population of afferent neurons that is activated by the stimulus, again weighted by fiber type. These two hypotheses could not be disambiguated on the basis of neurophysiological responses from the nerve and psychophysical ratings of perceived magnitude, as measured in monkeys and humans, respectively.
Results from the present study provide evidence against the hot zone model of perceived intensity. According to the hot zone model, increasing the PF of stimulation increases the sensory magnitude by increasing the firing of neurons while miminally recruiting additional neurons. In contrast, increasing the PW recruits additional neurons while minimally affecting the firing rate and has little impact on perceived intensity. On the other hand, the population model of perceived intensity predicts that increases in both stimulation parameters should affect the perceived magnitude because they both modulate the total number of spikes elicited: one by increasing the spike rate of activated neurons and the other by recruiting more neurons. In other words, both temporal and spatial summation seem to play a role in shaping perceived intensity.
On the basis of the hypothesis that the population model could quantitatively account for the behavioral results, we derived an expression to estimate how the population firing rate evoked by electrical stimulation varied as a function of PW and PF (for detailed derivation, see Derivation of activation charge rate in the Supplementary Materials). This model was predicated upon three assumptions: single fascicle activation, monotonic fiber recruitment, and single action potential per stimulation pulse. First, we assumed that only one fascicle was activated by any given stimulus, an assumption that is supported by in vivo tests of FINEs in animals (32) and by the observation that, in these experiments, the spatial extent of the projected field was stable across stimulation parameters (see fig. S6). Second, the number of fibers that were activated within the fascicle was a smooth, monotonic function of PW. This assumption is supported by the observation that perceived magnitude increased smoothly with increases in PW across the range tested. Recruitment, the proportion of fibers in the fascicle that are activated by each pulse, can be described as a sigmoidal function of PW (Fig. 5A). Whereas the threshold and slope are expected to vary across electrodes depending on the distance between the electrode and the stimulated fascicle, the precise electrical properties of the interposed tissue, the layout of surrounding fascicles, and the cross-sectional area of the fascicle, among others, a sigmoid is a generic description of the recruitment function (33). We implemented a detailed biophysical model of the human median nerve and of the effects of electrical stimulation on recruitment, showing that simulated recruitment curves were well approximated by a sigmoid function (fig. S7). When the stimulation is above threshold and in the linear range of the sigmoid, the total number of fibers activated is well approximated by a linear function of the total charge per pulse above threshold. Third, we assumed that each pulse produced a single action potential in each activated fiber, given the short PWs (all ≤255 μs) (28).
Fig. 5. Graphical representations of hypothesized neural response to stimulation intensity and spike frequency. (A) Recruitment of nerve fibers is hypothesized to increase with increased stimulation intensity (charge per pulse). Arrow indicates the putative location of the perceptual threshold. (B) Neural population firing rate as a function of ACR. Assuming each pulse produces one spike per activated fiber, this yields an approximately linear function. Threshold is assumed to be independent of PF (see fig. S3).
To estimate the total population spike rate, the proportion of activated fibers was multiplied by the stimulus frequency to yield a quantity we termed ACR (2)
Because the stimulation pulses are square, the charge (Q) is the product of PA and PW, and Q thresh is the charge at perception threshold. According to this model, the population firing rate is approximately linear with ACR (Fig. 5B).
When the electrical stimuli were expressed in terms of ACR and accounting for the effects of adaptation (see Measuring and modeling threshold adaptation in the Supplementary Materials), the psychometric functions obtained in the discrimination experiment and the resulting Weber fractions were consistent across the stimulation paradigms (t test for each pair, P = 0.61, 0.25, and 0.61, respectively; Fig. 6A). That is, the discriminability of two electrical stimuli could be predicted on the basis of this metric regardless of which stimulation parameter was varied. Similarly, the magnitude scaling and indentation matching functions obtained when varying each of the two parameters (PW or PF) overlapped almost completely when expressed in terms of ACR (Fig. 6, B and C), and the slopes were highly consistent across tested conditions (Fig. 6, D and E, all P > 0.05, except Fig. 6D, leftmost panel, P = 0.0059). In other words, the perceived magnitude of any electrical stimulus could be predicted on the basis of ACR regardless of the specific stimulation parameters. Given that ACR is a proxy for the evoked population firing rate, the present results are consistent with the hypothesis that the perceived magnitude of a tactile stimulus is determined by the total firing rate evoked in the population of mechanoreceptive afferents innervating the skin.Washington State University Provost Dan Bernardo with his "beard" consisting of thousands of bees. Bernardo agreed to wear the bees to raise awareness about honey bee health and to raise funds for the university to build a new 15,000-square-foot bee research facility, estimated to cost $16 million. Screen capture/WSU CAHNRS/YouTube
PULLMAN, Wash., June 22 (UPI) -- A Washington State University provost allowed thousands of bees to crawl on his face in the shape of a beard to raise awareness about honey bee health.
Provost Dan Bernardo and the president of Fungi Perfecti, Paul Stamets, volunteered to wear a "beard" made of bees in hopes of raising funds for a new Honey Bee and Pollinator Research Center at the university.
Bernardo remained calm throughout the stunt and told WSU News that he had complete confidence in the staff on hand.
"Initially, there's this scratchiness, sort of moving sensation," he said. "It's very noisy, maybe a little nerve-wracking. But I wasn't nervous. We had paramedics and every bee expert within 1,000 miles here, so I figured I was in good hands."
Stemets donated $50,000 to the new facility and Bernardo and beekeeper Eric Olson agreed to match all donations to $25,000.
"I believe in the intelligence of nature," Stemets said. "I study fungi, and I think using mushroom mycelium to help the bees will be key to saving them. We want to give back to bees what they give to us. I hope this small donation will go a long way to help the bees."
The total cost of the proposed 15,000-square-foot facility is estimated to be up to $16 million.Doubledecker Vegan Tostadas with Refried Black Beans
I struggled a bit with what I should call this. It's something like a quesadilla, but with spicy refried black beans instead of cheese. It also resembles a tostada because it features corn tortillas deliciously pan-fried in oil. But unlike tostadas, it has a second tortilla on top. So it's a “doubledecker vegan tostada” for want of a better name. What is not in doubt is my love for them. When corn tortillas get a few days old, their texture becomes a little rubbery. The solution is to fry them up. And it's a very good solution.
Ingredients
canola oil
1 red onion
1 white onion
1 green pepper
1 red pepper
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
dash red wine vinegar
8 corn tortillas
1 1/2 cups refried black beans
tomato salsa and other condiments as desired
Directions
You can buy the tortillas and refried beans or make your own. I usually make these tostadas with the leftovers from tacos. If I'm feeling ambitious on taco day, I make fresh corn tortillas and chipotle refried black beans from scratch.
With the beans and tortillas squared away, the only other prep job is sauteeing the onions and peppers.
To get the peppers ready, I'm going to show you a little trick I learned from Gordon Ramsay.
First, cut the stem off the pepper.
Next, lay the pepper on the cutting board on its head.
Take a sharp knife and slowly work from top to bottom on one of the pepper's lobes. It's a little like peeling an apple.
Repeat for all of the lobes and you've got all the flesh.
All the seeds and ribs are left whole and are easily tossed |
people in this neighborhood, known as Água Espraiada. But he believes the changes have been for the better. “I have witnessed a complete transformation of this area,” says Uilton, whose bar sits in one of the area’s last untouched favelas. “Now we have a medical center nearby, a good avenue and everybody is living together in harmony.” More From San Francisco Neighborhood Models Resilience Planning From the Grassroots Up
With Open Ahjo, A Clear Window Into Helsinki City Council's Actions
Going "Garbage-Free" Is Not Easy In Bangalore If Uilton’s approval of all this gentrification sounds unusual, that may be because the rules behind redevelopment here are a bit different, too. Água Espraiada is one of two São Paulo neighborhoods to benefit from an innovative financing tool that has become something of a model in Latin America. The strategy has raised phenomenal amounts of public revenue to pay for infrastructure projects in the area — including public housing projects for the favela residents to move back into.
Here’s how it works. City leaders identify a redevelopment zone, and issue a number of bonds to be sold to developers at auction. The bonds entitle the developers to build bigger buildings than the law would normally allow. Revenue from the bond sales are invested back into housing, roads and other infrastructure in the same redevelopment zone. Developers don’t seem to mind bidding for these bonds, at least in areas such as Água Espraiada where there is tremendous demand for new construction. And the auctions have yielded the city a massive windfall. In 12 years, São Paulo has raised about R$ 4.5 billion, or close to $2 billion in U.S. dollars, through these sales. About three-quarters of that total came from the Água Espraiada area alone. Many ways to tap value São Paulo’s model is one of many mechanisms cities around the world use to do what is known broadly as “value capture.” The idea is that cities sometimes do things through regulation, planning and investment that unlock massive amounts of land value. And when they do, the public — not just landowners and developers — should enjoy some of that windfall. In São Paulo’s case, the action to unlock land value is “upzoning” an area for more intense development. In other cases, the city action might involve public investments, such as building a transit line through a certain area or building a park as a neighborhood amenity. The principle works in rich and poor cities alike. Paving over a dirt road can increase surrounding land values in a city, as can introducing reliable water service to an area for the first time. “Many administrative actions result in huge increases in land prices,” says Martim Smolka, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the author of a 2013 study on value capture mechanisms in Latin America. Value capture, Smolka says, is about “equalizing and redistributing the benefits to all the citizens.”
The tools cities can use depend a lot on the land laws and traditions of their countries. São Paulo’s approach was authorized under Brazilian law, which was itself fashioned after policies in Canada and France. That particular approach of selling building rights would be less effective in countries where landowners generally have more property rights, such as the United States. In the U.S. context, value capture is more likely to occur through property taxes, special assessments on developers, tax-increment financing, or simply negotiating with developers to pay a share of infrastructure costs. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a proposal to build a 62-mile rail transit line linking 13 cities, the international airport and multiple existing light-rail lines would rely on value capture to pay for a significant amount of the project. The plan calls for a transit-oriented development district along the corridor with dense but walkable neighborhoods around the stations. Landowners would contribute some of the upfront rail construction costs, while other revenue sources captured within the special district would provide funds to pay back the financing. “Value capture is not a magic bullet,” says Scott Polikov, a value-capture enthusiast and founder of Gateway Planning, a Dallas-based consultancy working on the project. “It’s a way to fill a financing gap when there’s a gap. But you still have to have a large proponent of the public infrastructure on the public-sector side. Value capture will never fully close the gap.” Redeveloping favelas In São Paulo, the idea began to surface in the mid-1980s. At the time, Brazil was emerging from a 20-year military regime that had largely ignored social problems such as the growth of favelas. Redevelopments in slum areas, known as “urban operations,” began. Developers could receive density allowances if they included social housing for displaced residents, or made a payment to the government. The idea evoked both criticism and praise. Supporters saw advantages to eliminating favelas from the city’s central areas quickly and replacing them with modern development. Opponents argued that local residents were rapidly being displaced from central areas to the outskirts of the city. Transparency was also a problem, as deals between the city and developers were negotiated on a case-by-case basis. CityFixer Solutions for an Urbanizing World Go The process got an overhaul in 2002, setting up the more transparent, market-based system in place today. The city sets out an area to be redeveloped and sets aside a certain number of “CEPACs” — or certificates for additional construction potential — that entitle developers to build extra density in that area. These bonds are auctioned through the Bank of Brazil, and the sales are overseen by the national Securities and Exchange Authority. The market is robust enough that CEPACs are widely traded and have become an established investment vehicle for pension funds and others looking to invest in Brazilian real estate. Each sale of CEPACs gives the city government a new pile of cash to invest in the redevelopment area. That up-front revenue has been key to the program’s success, says Claudio Bernardes, president of Secovi, the association of companies involved in the housing and construction sector. CEPACs, Bernardes says, have been a “very positive mechanism, which allows the municipality to anticipate revenues and perform improvements before the private sector projects fully occupy and densify the area.” Raquel Rolnik, an urbanism expert from the University of São Paulo is more skeptical. She says targeting certain neighborhoods where developers want to build is distracting city leaders from making more universal urban plans for the whole city. “The companies want to invest in a certain area,” Rolnik says, “so the city designs a plan for the area and offers CEPACs. The market buys the papers and the mayor says the plan was a success. It is all like a dog biting his own tail.”
Another criticism is that some CEPACs have led to wasteful spending. In Água Espraiada, the bonds raised R$ 3.5 billion, or about $1.5 billion in U.S. dollars, all of which by law had to be spent in the same area. Some R$ 300 million ($135 million U.S.) was invested in an enormous bridge. While the bridge’s X-shaped tower and white cable stays have become an iconic postcard image of the city, many think it was not really needed, and it has not produced much benefit in terms of mobility. Changes coming? São Paulo’s city council is currently debating a couple of changes to the program. The first would address the bridge-to-nowhere problem by allowing some CEPAC money to be spent in neighboring areas. That would allow funds to be spent on public transportation, since buses, trains and subways pass through different areas of the city. The other proposed change would require one-quarter of the CEPAC money to be invested in low-income housing. Current law forces that housing to be located directly within the redevelopment area. The new plan would allow it to be located in an adjoining neighborhood. “This will ensure affordable housing in areas under intervention,” says Nabil Bonduki, a former housing secretary of the city who is now the councilman behind the proposed changes. These reforms have passed one city council vote but will need to pass another to take effect. Neither of them, however, would address the last major criticism of the CEPAC mechanism: When should its use come to an end? That’s a question made more acute by the role CEPACs have come to play as an investment vehicle in financial markets. At some point, all the bonds will be sold and all the public revenue invested — but financiers will surely want to hold on to their CEPACs as investments. Bonduki says the council is aware of the problem and will prepare a response to it. Raquel Rolnik argues there should be a deadline for the use of CEPACs. And on this count, Claudio Bernardes agrees with her. “Current laws do not provide a ‘way out’,” says Bernardes. “The law does not say how or when the zone returns to the normal rules of the rest of the city.” Top image: Thiago Leite / Shutterstock.com This story originally appeared on Citiscope, an Atlantic partner site.A U.S. Navy A-4E Skyhawk of VA-164, from the USS Oriskany, en route to attack a target in North Vietnam in November 1967 (Public Domain | National Archives and Records Administration)
An aircraft flown by a civilian contractor has crashed on public land adjacent to Nellis Air Force Base. Air Force Officials confirmed that the aircraft was an A-4 Skyhawk, a military aircraft used during Vietnam War era.
Nellis emergency services responded to the scene. The unidentified pilot is being treated at the hospital located on base. The cause of the crash is under investigation.
Air Force Base officials said in a press release that the aircraft was crashed by a civilian adversary air contractor, Draken International, who was supporting 57th Wing -- a unit that provides advanced training operations.
Draken International is private company that operates the fleet of jets that were once owned by the New Zealand military. The injured pilot ejected from the aircraft after declaring an emergency. Witnesses reported seeing two parachutes, however only one person was on board.
There were no injuries on the ground. An air force press release states that the crash is contained and the aircraft poses no threat to the community or natural resources in the surrounding area.
The Clark County Fire Department first reported the aircraft crash in North Las Vegas, near Nellis Air Force and the Las Vegas Motor Speedway around 7:40 Thursday Morning. The crash took place near Sloan Lane and Las Vegas Blvd, south of I-15.
Temporary flight were placed into in effect in the area as emergency services responded to the crash.Kathmandu, June 29
Nepal's Drafting Committee has endorsed the first draft of the long-pending constitution, which, if promulgated, would recognise the country as "secular, inclusive and multi-ethnic" for the first time.
The draft, drawn up on the basis of the 16-point agreement reached by Nepal's warring political parties, will be presented to the full 601- member Constituent Assembly (CA) later on Monday.
Four major parties representing more than 90 per cent seats of the CA had reached the landmark agreement on June 8 in the wake of the April 25 earthquake that caused widespread devastation following.
The CA had given the Committee 15 days to draw up and submit a draft of the new constitution.
With the new Constitution, Nepal will be a Hindu nation in the Constitution only.
The constitution envisages a parliamentary system of governance where executive powers are vested on the Prime Minister, who will be elected from the Parliament through majority votes.
Political parties have agreed to adopt mixed electoral system in both the federal parliament as well as the state assemblies, with 60 per cent to be elected through direct voting or first-past-the-post system and 40 per cent through proportional representation system.
The federal parliament will have 275 members of which 165 will be elected through direct voting and the remaining 110 will be elected through proportionate voting.
The new constitution has adopted the principles of pluralistic multi-party competitive democracy with federal democratic republican parliamentary system. Multi-party democracy based on pluralistic principle is a non-amendable provision in the Constitution.
Other normal provisions of the Constitution can be amended through two-thirds majority votes.
Under the provision of the new constitution, citizenship can be acquired in the name of either father or mother.
The President will be elected through an electoral college consisting of members of the federal parliament and state assemblies and to become victorious, one has to secure more than 50 per cent votes.
There will be a bicameral Parliament at the centre while the state assembly will be unicameral.
“The draft constitution will be presented in the CA on Monday for discussion on issues that have yet to be settled,” Nepali Congress general secretary and Constitution Drafting Committee Chairman Krishna Sitaula told reporters. PTIScaramucci laid out big vision for White House communications in internal memo
CLOSE It was one of the most dramatic ousters we’ve seen yet, and now Anthony Scaramucci is ready to tell his side of the story. Buzz60
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci had big plans for the Trump administration's comms shop before his 11-day stint in the role ended, according to an internal memo Scaramucci sent to his staff and was obtained by media outlets Wednesday.
Both CNN and conservative media personality Mike Cernovich released a copy of the five-point plan to bring about change to the communications team.
Among the main objectives Scaramucci laid out were improving culture, presenting President Trump in a more positive light, mending relationships with media outlets and controlling better the daily media cycle surrounding the White House.
"No more threats about leaking and internal game playing — anyone who takes actions that do not serve the President will be dismissed — period. We will eliminate the bad eggs and send a powerful message to the remaining staff that well-intentioned mistakes are acceptable, but misconduct is not," the memo reads.
Scaramucci made it clear that part of his goal was to end leaks coming from the White House. In an interview with the New Yorker, Scaramucci threatened to fire his entire communications staff over the leaks.
The memo was dated after the interview with reporter Ryan Lizza, and Scaramucci wrote that he wanted to meet with Lizza, "not to litigate the past — to reset moving forward."
Lizza was just one of many reporters, politicians and administration officials Scaramucci intended to meet with. Also on the list: White House Chef of Staff John Kelly, who was sworn in on the same day Scaramucci left his role as communications director.
More: Anthony Scaramucci out as White House communications director
Related:9 other people who also left their jobs under Trump
Under a section concerning how the communications team serves the president's message, Scaramucci wrote that all actions need to consider how they help the president.
"To this end, I will lead by example and make sure that my overall conduct, tweets, internal and external comments meet this standard," he added.
Improving relations with news outlets appeared throughout the memo, referring to the media as "an important Comms customer."
Scaramucci also noted that while Trump can fight with the press when he wants, the communications team should not.
The memo touches on new projects Scaramucci wanted to undertake, too, with a special focus on creating content that is tailored to Trump.
"POTUS is the greatest TV star in history. Comms should produce video content that constructively operates as 'The President Donald J. Trump' show," the memo reads.
The plan also sought to "burnish (Trump's) image. For example, POTUS is the best golfer to serve as President." Scaramucci then suggested creating a national online lottery to golf with Trump, "or a charity auction."
Follow Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2wnKYJ8Randy Cassingham
Author, The Dvorak Keyboard and byAuthor,and This is True
The Dvorak keyboard is an ergonomic alternative to the layout commonly found on typewriters and computers known as “Qwerty”. The Qwerty keyboard was designed in the 1870s to accommodate the slow mechanical movement of early typewriters. When it was designed, touch typing literally hadn’t even been thought of yet! It’s hardly an efficient design for today’s use. By contrast, the Dvorak (pronounced “duh-VOR-ack”, not like the Czech composer!) keyboard was designed with emphasis on typist comfort, high productivity and ease of learning — it’s much easier to learn!
There were several variations in the Dvorak’s design in its first few decades, but these were settled when the American National Standards Institute approved a standard for the layout of the Dvorak in 1982. The diagram above shows the standard layout as adapted for PC use.
Because computers weren’t even a researcher’s dream in the late 1920s and 30s, the Dvorak design took about 12 years to perfect, and included extensive study of languages using the Roman alphabet (mostly English), the physiology of the hand, and practical studies. Dr. Dvorak (Univ. of Washington, Seattle; b.1894, d.1975) used his research to design two other keyboards specifically for people with only one hand (one each for the right and left), which allow people with the use of just one hand to type very easily and efficiently — at speeds up to 50 wpm.
The Dvorak has the most-used consonants on the right side of the home row, and the vowels on the left side of the home row. Among other design features, it is set up to facilitate keying in a back-and-forth motion — (right hand, then left hand, then right, etc.) When the same hand has to be used for more than one letter in a row (e.g., the common t-h), it is designed not only to use different fingers when possible (to make keying quicker and easier), but also to progress from the outer fingers to the inner fingers (“inboard stroke flow”) — it’s easier to drum your fingers this way (try it on the tabletop). The back-and-forth flow obviously makes typing quicker and easier: try typing the word “minimum” on the Qwerty keyboard, then look how you’d type it on Dvorak. The design puts fully 70 percent of all English keystrokes on the home row (only 32 percent of Qwerty’s are on the home row), making Dvorak much easier, faster, and — probably (no formal studies have been done as yet) — less likely to result in carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive motion injuries.
Remember when you took typing classes, probably in high school? You got to do drills with such words as “fff”, “jjj”, “jkl;”. Added to the awkward physical motions Qwerty requires, these “nonsense words” are counter-intuitive, making Qwerty very hard to learn. On Dvorak, the keys on the home row make up literally thousands of words (we have a list of nearly 5000 from one electronic dictionary alone!), meaning you could have typed real words on your first day of typing class… if you had learned on a Dvorak keyboard.
The row above the home row contains the next-most-used letters and punctuation. Why? Because it is easier for your fingers to reach up on the keyboard than down. The least-used keys are on the bottom row.
Even if you don’t want to switch (it’s actually fairly easy — I did it, and my typing speed went from 50 WPM to over 100), why the heck are we forcing children to learn the draconian ergonomic failure “Qwerty” when there’s a such a good alternative available? Why teach kids for weeks and weeks and weeks to master a complex skill when in two or three weeks they could learn Dvorak and then get on with what they’re at the keyboard to do! Writing, programming …creating!
If it’s so good, why isn’t everyone using it? Clearly, a good question. There are a lot of reasons for it, and they are too numerous and complicated to explain fully here (they are fully explained in the book The Dvorak Keyboard). Mainly, the Qwerty keyboard became entrenched in tradition. By the time Dr. Dvorak came up with his design, there were hundreds of thousands of typewriters, and it would have cost millions to convert them all over. The switch was just about to be made, but then World War II broke out, and the War Dept. ordered all typewriter keyboards be set to the most-common standard — Qwerty — and typewriter manufacturers retooled to produce small arms. By the end of the war, Qwerty was cast in concrete.
There are other reasons, too. Unbelieveably, there are people with personal vendettas against the Dvorak. In 1956, a U.S. government researcher published an astoundingly biased “study” that railed against the Dvorak layout. When other researchers found the conclusions suspicious, they asked to see the raw data — but the government researcher had destroyed it all! Yet the anti-Dvorak still point to the “study” by the General Services Administration as “proof” that there’s something wrong with the Dvorak. But their “evidence” doesn’t even exist. Such vendettas exist now, too. The most commonly quoted anti-Dvorak screed over the past few years is one by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. Randy responded to that one way back in 1995 (copy of that here).
Certainly, people are using it. How many? Who knows — unlike typewriters, which needed precision mechanical work to convert them, computers are by their nature programmable, and it’s a cinch to convert them to Dvorak. So how many people have actually done it? The only way to really find out is to do an expensive controlled survey, and no one is rushing forth with the money to fund such a study.
To learn more about the Dvorak layout, we recommend two levels of information. Browse through our Dvorak Research Materials linked below for what you want to know. For the ultimate in design reference, Freelance Communications is the exclusive distributor of Typewriting Behavior, Dr. Dvorak’s 546-page book on the keyboard’s research and design — it’s a classic! The book was printed in 1936, and there will never be any more.
Learn MoreNow for the latest salvo in the wage gap myth, a report entitled "Graduating to a Pay Gap" from the American Association of University Women.
Authored by AAUW anthropologist Christianne Corbett and Director of Research Catherine Hill, the press release states that "just one year out of college, millennial women are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to their male peers. Women are paid less than men even when they do the same work and major in the same field."
The AAUW recommends passing more pay equity legislation, such as the failed Paycheck Fairness Act, to require firms to provide more information to the government about pay practices and increase penalties for discrimination.
Buried in the report is the finding that, accounting for college majors and occupations, women make 93 cents (not 82) on a man's dollar. The remaining seven cents, the authors contend, is likely due to discrimination, because they cannot explain it. So let me offer a possible explanation for them: The study's occupational categories are too broad. One cannot draw precise conclusions about pay equity when comparing workers within fields such as "Other White Collar," "Business and Management" and simply, "Other Occupations."
A footnote tells readers that "Other White Collar" includes "social scientists and related workers... ; lawyers, judges, and related workers; education, training, and library occupations... ; arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations; social science research assistants; and law clerks." So, the AAUW report compares the pay of male lawyers with that of female librarians; of male athletes with that of female communications assistants. That's not a comparison between people who do the same work.
"Other Occupations" includes jobs in construction and mining, a high-paying, male-dominated occupation, and also jobs in food preparation and serving occupations, a low-paying, female-dominated occupation. If a waitress is paid less than a miner, does it follow that it's because she's been discriminated against?
In order to show discrimination, the report should document differences in salaries of men and women in the same job with the same experience. If there's a big difference under those circumstances, then there may be discrimination, giving women grounds to sue. The AAUW study didn't even look at men and women in the same field, much less on the same job.
Why would the AAUW put out such shoddy material? Lisa Maatz, director of public policy and government relations at AAUW, answered this question at the AAUW media conference call when the study was released.
Maatz said that part of the reason the AAUW wants to do this work is that it has an extensive get-out-the-vote movement. In this sense, she continued, this report is very well-timed. The AAUW get-out-the-vote program has been targeting millennial women to get to the polls. This particular year, the AAUW has made a huge investment in trying to get millennials to vote.
It seems that the AAUW is twisting the data to get young women to feel that they are victims of discrimination and march out and vote for President Obama, who is promising pay equity.
But since Obama assumed office in January 2009, women have fared poorly. The percentage of employed women in the population has declined from 57 percent in January 2009 to 55 percent in September 2012. (Data for October are expected Friday.) Over the same period, the number of unemployed women increased from 4.4 million to 4.9 million.
President Obama says he's in favor of equal pay, but women staffers in his White House are paid 90 cents on a man's dollar -- if one calculates the figure incorrectly based on simple averages.
If women actually were paid 82 cents on the dollar for the exact same work as men, they could sue. They are too smart to believe the AAUW's political propaganda.
Examiner Columnist Diana Furchtgott-Roth ( dfr@manhattan-institute.org), former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.HOWTO: using gprof with multithreaded applications
What is gprof?
gprof is the GNU Profiler, a tool used when tracking which functions are eating CPU in your program. Anyway, you should already be familiar with it if you got interested in this page.
One problem with gprof under certain kernels (such as Linux) is that it doesn’t behave correctly with multithreaded applications. It actually only profiles the main thread, which is quite useless.
Workaround
There is an easy, but surprisingly not very widespread fix for this annoying gprof behaviour. Basically, gprof uses the internal ITIMER_PROF timer which makes the kernel deliver a signal to the application whenever it expires. So we just need to pass this timer data to all spawned threads.
Example
It wouldn’t be too hard to put a call to setitimer in each function spawned by a thread, but I thought it would be more elegant to implement a wrapper for pthread_create.
Daniel Jönsson enhanced my code so that it could be used in a preload library without having to modify the program. It can also be very useful for libraries that spawn threads without warning, such as libSDL. The result code is shown below and can be downloaded (gprof-helper.c):
/* gprof-helper.c -- preload library to profile pthread-enabled programs
*
* Authors: Sam Hocevar <sam at zoy dot org>
* Daniel Jönsson <danieljo at fagotten dot org>
*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
* modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want To
* Public License as published by Banlu Kemiyatorn. See
* http://sam.zoy.org/projects/COPYING.WTFPL for more details.
*
* Compilation example:
* gcc -shared -fPIC gprof-helper.c -o gprof-helper.so -lpthread -ldl
*
* Usage example:
* LD_PRELOAD=./gprof-helper.so your_program
*/
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <pthread.h>
static void * wrapper_routine(void *);
/* Original pthread function */
static int (*pthread_create_orig)(pthread_t *__restrict,
__const pthread_attr_t *__restrict,
void *(*)(void *),
void *__restrict) = NULL;
/* Library initialization function */
void wooinit(void) __attribute__((constructor));
void wooinit(void)
{
pthread_create_orig = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "pthread_create");
fprintf(stderr, "pthreads: using profiling hooks for gprof
");
if(pthread_create_orig == NULL)
{
char *error = dlerror();
if(error == NULL)
{
error = "pthread_create is NULL";
}
fprintf(stderr, "%s
", error);
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
}
/* Our data structure passed to the wrapper */
typedef struct wrapper_s
{
void * (*start_routine)(void *);
void * arg;
pthread_mutex_t lock;
pthread_cond_t wait;
struct itimerval itimer;
} wrapper_t;
/* The wrapper function in charge for setting the itimer value */
static void * wrapper_routine(void * data)
{
/* Put user data in thread-local variables */
void * (*start_routine)(void *) = ((wrapper_t*)data)->start_routine;
void * arg = ((wrapper_t*)data)->arg;
/* Set the profile timer value */
setitimer(ITIMER_PROF, &((wrapper_t*)data)->itimer, NULL);
/* Tell the calling thread that we don't need its data anymore */
pthread_mutex_lock(&((wrapper_t*)data)->lock);
pthread_cond_signal(&((wrapper_t*)data)->wait);
pthread_mutex_unlock(&((wrapper_t*)data)->lock);
/* Call the real function */
return start_routine(arg);
}
/* Our wrapper function for the real pthread_create() */
int pthread_create(pthread_t *__restrict thread,
__const pthread_attr_t *__restrict attr,
void * (*start_routine)(void *),
void *__restrict arg)
{
wrapper_t wrapper_data;
int i_return;
/* Initialize the wrapper structure */
wrapper_data.start_routine = start_routine;
wrapper_data.arg = arg;
getitimer(ITIMER_PROF, &wrapper_data.itimer);
pthread_cond_init(&wrapper_data.wait, NULL);
pthread_mutex_init(&wrapper_data.lock, NULL);
pthread_mutex_lock(&wrapper_data.lock);
/* The real pthread_create call */
i_return = pthread_create_orig(thread,
attr,
&wrapper_routine,
&wrapper_data);
/* If the thread was successfully spawned, wait for the data
* to be released */
if(i_return == 0)
{
pthread_cond_wait(&wrapper_data.wait, &wrapper_data.lock);
}
pthread_mutex_unlock(&wrapper_data.lock);
pthread_mutex_destroy(&wrapper_data.lock);
pthread_cond_destroy(&wrapper_data.wait);
return i_return;
}
History of this documentCustomized fixies may be all the rage in urban America nowadays, but even the simplest, cheapest bike is a rare sight in rural Africa. Fortunately, the bamboo from which to craft bikes grows on trees – or rather in groves. However, the labor and money to manufacture bicycles does not. That is where Zambikes comes in. In partnership with the non-profit Akerfa, this Zambian bike manufacturer sells hand-crafted bamboo bikes to the West and invests the profits back into its community.
Zambikes’ profits go toward making affordable bicycles to overcome local transportation problems. Although ordinary looking, the value of each bicycle cannot be understated. Zambikes has employed nearly 40 locals and trained them in management, bike assembly, fabrication, and construction.
More significantly, thousands of lives have been improved and even saved due to their bike products. Their Zambulance (bicycle ambulance trailer) and Zamcart (cargo trailer) have raised the bar for transportation solutions in rural areas where the sick or wounded are often brought to hospitals by wheelbarrow or ox-cart. Distributing hundreds of ambulance trailers each year, Zambikes estimates that it saved 50,000 lives in 2010 alone.
+ Zambikes
Via Fast CompanyStore Updating on December 27th By Vye
Hail and well met, Elyrians all,
Note: the release is coming out on the 28th instead due to an unforeseen issue.
The update to the store will be released on December 27th! This update brings two major changes:
Modern layout
New pledge packages
The layout is in-line with the Version 3 we are planning for the entire site next year. It has responsive design so it seamlessly works on mobile, tablet, desktop, or whatever bizarre device with a screen and internet access you find. As a side note, we officially support IE11 and up. If you are not using a modern browser, I don't know what to say...
Our goal with the layout is to help folks, both new and existing, navigate the packages to find the one that is right for your playstyle, access-level, and pocketbook. It is also exceedingly attractive now that we have a talented, full-time, 2D artist in Scarlet!
Let's go over the changes to the packages that you can expect next week. If you were on the fence about upgrading or laying something away, consider this your final warning!
Please note, the items listed below are just the top highlights, not the full package listing.
Adventurer Packages
Elyrian $40
This package is equivalent to the previous Elyrian package, but no longer on discount. Package highlights include:
Access to the game at Launch
1 Spark of Life & 3 Souls
Exclusive wallpaper
Elyrian forum badge
Pioneer $70
A combination of the previous Adventurer and Patron packages, this package includes:
Beta 2 Access
1 Spark of Life & 3 Souls
Pack Mule
Adventurer's Pack
Founder $100
This package is equivalent to the previous Founder package. We are removing the previous Beastmaster package, but the Founder package included all of that for the same price anyway. Highlights of this package are:
Beta 1 Access
2 Sparks of Life & 3 Souls
Horse & mule
Founder's & Adventurer's Packs
Gentry Packages
Bloodline $125
Also equivalent to the previous Bloodline package and is still a great deal. Notable highlights are:
Beta 1 & Exposition Access
2 Sparks of Life & 3 Souls
Custom Surname
Family Coat of Arms
Settler $175
The old package was called Merchant and had most of the same rewards as this package. However, this package will have more Exposition Points to better help settlers of Elyria shape the world in Exposition. Here are the highlights:
Beta 1 & Exposition Access
3 Sparks of Life & 3 Souls
Custom Surname & Coat of Arms with extra colors
Merchant's Pack
Proprietor $225
The Ursaphant Rider package is no more but you can still get one starting at this package. Like the Settler, we want to encourage more world building in Exposition so it will have increased amounts of Exposition Points rather than Merchandise Credit. Other highlights include:
Alpha 2 & Exposition Access
3 Sparks of Life & 3 Souls
Surname & Coat of Arms with extra colors & sigils
Ursaphant
Merchant's Pack
Aristocracy Packages
Mayor $250
Like Proprietor, the Merchandise Credit has been replaced with more Exposition Points. Other notable rewards are:
Alpha 2 & Exposition Access
Barony & Mayor Title (can become Baron or Baroness if pledged to a Duke or Duchess)
Family Name and Supporter heraldic achievements for your Coat of Arms
3 Sparks of Life & 3 Souls
Upgrade from an Ursaphant to a War Trison
Magistrate $500
This package does not include a County like the previous $500 package. It was a very popular package but the remaining County supply is low so we have moved that to the new Courtier package. There are also quite a lot of people who are intending to give away their Title so we decided to make a package that better reflected what people were after here - namely Alpha 1 access. It also includes:
Alpha 1 & Exposition Access
Barony & Mayor Title (can become Baron or Baroness if pledged to a Duke or Duchess)
Fully furnished Villa
6 Sparks of Life & 3 Souls
Name a constellation
Governor $750
Similar to previous package adjustments, this has Exposition Points instead of Merchandise Credit. There is also no longer a Design Experience at this price. Instead, we are including a fully-furnished Manor house for your settlement so that you may focus your Exposition Points on developing a great city. Here are the package highlights:
Alpha 1 & Exposition Access
Barony & Mayor Title (can become Baron or Baroness if pledged to a Duke or Duchess)
Fully furnished Manor
9 Sparks of Life & 3 Souls
Name an historical location
Nobility Packages
Courtier $1000
Most of the rewards that used to be in Count/Countess, Artisan, and Brew Master are now available in the Courtier package. Merchandise Credit has been changed to Exposition Points. You may still choose your Design Experience from the ones that were possible in the old packages. Other highlights are:
Alpha 1 & Exposition Access
County & Countess or Count Title
Helm and Mantle heraldic achievements for your Coat of Arms
11 Sparks of Life & 3 Souls
Design Experience: tattoo, hairstyle, or consumable
Royal $5000
What once was Weapon Master, Celebrity, Artificer, and Duke/Duchess is now rolled up into the Royal package. Like Courtier, there's more EP and your choice of Design Experiences. Here are the package highlights:
Alpha 1 & Exposition Access
Duchy & Duke or Duchess Title
Crest and Motto heraldic achievements for your Coat of Arms
16 Sparks of Life & 3 Souls
Design Experience: personal weapon, shield, armor, or relic
Studio Tour & Launch Party invite
Monarch $10000
Rewards from the old Chimera and King/Queen packages now live in this package with the same exceptions as Courtier and Royal. Package highlights include:
Alpha 1 & Exposition Access
Kingdom & Queen or King Title
A unique crown
Fully custom Coat of Arms
21 Sparks of Life & 3 |
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He served six years in Parliament, from 1998 until he was ejected in 2004. In 2001, with Ukrainian voters growing increasingly frustrated with the status quo, Svoboda made major gains in local and regional elections. Some voters who supported Svodboda said they believed that the party could present the strongest challenge to President Yanukovich. Many said they did not view the party as extreme.
“Those people who supported Svoboda in these elections, they don’t support racism, anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism,” said Vyacheslav Likhachev, who monitors extremism for the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. “They support Svoboda because every vote for Svoboda was a vote against the ruling government.”
Still, Mr. Likhachev said, Svoboda’s rise was not a positive development for Ukraine. “It is bad for society,” he said.
In the days before the vote, Mr. Tyagnibok signed an agreement to work with other opposition parties, including the Fatherland party of the jailed former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko. Ms. Tymoshenko, who was barred from the ballot this year, recently began a hunger strike to protest what she said was fraud in the elections.
Mr. Tyagnibok’s ties to Ms. Tymoshenko and former President Viktor Yushchenko date to before Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, which Mr. Tyagnibok and other nationalists supported. Critics of the alliance say that it will give Svoboda more power than it would have on its own, and grant it further legitimacy as a mainstream faction.
Although his occasional use of ethnic and religious epithets is well documented — there was the 2004 speech to supporters, and in 2005, his public signing of an open letter to President Yushchenko and others demanding an end to “criminal activities of organized Jewry in Ukraine” — Mr. Tyagnibok called the allegations of hate speech “a fantasy and a serious exaggeration.”
The general prosecutor charged him with inciting ethnic hatred, but the case was dropped after the Orange Revolution. “In 2004, I was accused of anti-Semitism, but I won in all the court cases,” Mr. Tyagnibok said.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Mr. Tyagnibok said nationalist parties were enjoying a renaissance in Europe because of the Continent’s financial problems, as well as conflicts with Muslim immigrants in countries like Italy, France and Spain. “Europe is change,” he said. “Economic failures make people look for reasons.”
But he said it was all for the best. “In our view the ideal is to see Europe as one big flower bed full of different flowers, with Ukraine as one of the most beautiful flowers in it,” Mr. Tyagnibok said. “It has its own scent, its own beauty. It is different from other flowers, but it is in the same flower bed.”
He waved away any thought of nationalist strife. “Just imagine one nationalist talking to another nationalist,” he said. “There should be no problems between them. Everybody respects their interests, and everybody understands we live in one big world.”MIAMI — The Spanish galleon San José was overloaded with 200 passengers and 700 tons of cargo on a summer night in 1631 when it smashed into a rock off the Pacific coast of Panama, spilling silver coins and bars into the Gulf of Panama. More than 400,000 coins and at least 1,417 bars were lost over a 40-mile trail.
Four hundred years later, that shipwreck has become one of the latest to land in a legal quagmire over who should have the rights to historic artifacts trapped under the sea. This one involves the United Nations, the United States Department of Homeland Security, the government of Panama and Americans accused of being pirates. At issue is whether private companies should be able to claim and profit from historic treasures.
Those questions are of particular interest to businesses in South Florida at a time when technology is making it easier to find and recover sunken loot. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that there are over 1,000 shipwrecks in the Florida Keys alone.
In the case of the San José booty, commercial treasure hunters, financed in part by an adventure entrepreneur who runs tours to the Titanic, spent over $2 million and 10 years recovering portions of the treasure, only to see their permits questioned and bounty confiscated.Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano addresses the American Hotel and Lodging Association’s 2013 Legislative Action Summit on Capitol Hill April 24, 2013 in Washington, D.C.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Here’s some news on a slow(ish) summer Friday that not many people saw coming, via the Los Angeles Times:
Janet Napolitano, the U.S. secretary of Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, is being named as the next president of the University of California system, in an unusual choice that brings a national-level politician to a position usually held by an academic. Her appointment also means the 10-campus system will be headed by a woman for the first time in its 145-year history.
Napolitano’s nomination by a committee of UC regents came after a secretive process that insiders said focused on her early as a high-profile, although untraditional, candidate who has led large public agencies and shown a strong interest in improving education.
UC officials believe that her Cabinet experiences –- which include helping to lead responses to hurricanes and tornadoes and overseeing some anti-terrorism measures – will help UC administer its federal energy and nuclear weapons labs and aid its federally funded research in medicine and other areas.
The Times is running its scoop under the headline of “Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security chief, to head UC,” but for those outside of the Golden State, the bigger news is probably less where she’s heading and more where she’s leaving: Homeland Security, an agency with an annual $60-billion budget and 240,000 employees, that she has led since 2009. As the National Journal is quick to point out, her departure will likely bring an end to wide-speculation that she was in line to replace Eric Holder as attorney general.
This post has been updated.Enceladus feeds
water to Saturn
by Amanda Doyle
for ASTRONOMY NOW
Posted: 28 July 2011
A 14 year old mystery has been solved as astronomers discover that plumes of water gushing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus are the source of water in the planet's upper atmosphere. Water vapour was detected in a massive torus surrounding Saturn by astronomers using ESA's Herschel Space Observatory. The torus has a thickness equivalent to Saturn's radius and it extends to a distance ten times wider. The torus remained invisible up until now as water vapour is translucent in visible light at such distances, however, infrared observations by Herschel easily revealed Saturn's secret water stash, which then rains down into the ringed planet's upper atmosphere.
Cassini image of the plumes of water vapour erupting from Enceladus' south pole. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Jets of water vapour spewing from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus at rates of around 250 kilograms every second are what feed this torus. The jets were first observed by the Cassini space probe in 2006, and originate from a region of winding fissures dubbed the Tiger Stripes. Water vapour was first discovered in Saturn’s upper atmosphere in 1997 using ESA’s Infrared Space Observatory, but until now astronomers have been baffled by how it got there. While water can exist in the lower atmosphere, the vapour pressure is too low higher in the atmosphere for it to occur naturally. “We have a similar situation on the Earth,” explains Paul Hartogh of the Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung and lead author of the Astronomy & Astrophysics paper. “The relative abundance of water in air on the ground can be as high as four percent. With increasing altitude the temperature in the atmosphere is decreasing and in the tropopause region (10-18 kilometres high) it reaches a relative minimum, as low as 190 Kelvin. The vapour pressure of water decreases dramatically at 190 Kelvin so that only about four parts per million of water vapour contributes to air. This is 10,000 times less than on the ground.” However there is even less water vapour on Saturn due to even lower temperatures in the gas giant’s tropopause. “On Saturn the tropopause temperature is around 85 - 90 Kelvin,” says Hartogh. “At these low temperatures the vapour pressure of water is even more than a billion times lower than in the Earth tropopause. Water vapour cannot exist there and therefore cannot be transported into Saturn's stratosphere from below.” This means that water vapour cannot exist on Saturn unless it comes from an external source. The amount of water detected in Saturn’s atmosphere by Herschel is equivalent to the amount that is being rained down on the planet from the surrounding torus. Enceladus is now unique as this precipitation makes it the only moon in the Solar System to affect its planet's composition.All college and university students should have an income of at least £8,100 a year, according to an independent review of student finance.
The report, commissioned by the Scottish government, also recommended changes to the student loan system.
The £8,100 figure would be a mix of loans and bursaries determined by personal circumstances.
Student leaders said "serious investment" was needed to change the "broken" support system.
The Scottish government said it would take time to consider the recommendations and set out its next steps "in due course".
The review looked at the financial support available to all students and considered whether it support met the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable.
It also examined the current repayment threshold and period for student loan debt.
The key recommendations of the review included:
A new social contract for students
Minimum student income entitlement in both further and higher education
Minimum student income of £8,100
Increased means-tested bursaries, and discretionary funds protected
Student loan terms enhanced, including an increased loan repayment threshold
Student loans available in further education
Debt write-off for students transitioning from further to higher education
Common systems of administration within further and higher education
A new approach for students on benefits
The review was chaired by Jayne-Anne Gadhia, the chief executive officer of Virgin Money.
Presenting the 84-page report of its findings, she said: "Our recommendations are based on a new social contract for students in Scotland.
"They would ensure that further and higher education are valued equally - with entitlement to support for students across both sectors.
"And in return, more students from diverse backgrounds will have the chance to become successful graduates, for the social and economic good of Scotland."
Ms Gadhia said every £1 of public investment in further and higher education led to almost £6 of economic impact.
She added: "The establishment of a minimum student income is an essential step forward in delivering fairness, and helping to ensure that money is no longer a reason for dropping out of courses.
"Non-repayable bursaries will continue to be focused on those from the lowest income backgrounds. And students can, if they so wish, access high quality student loans - on the best terms in the UK."
Analysis from BBC Scotland education correspondent Jamie McIvor:
The proposal for a "guaranteed income" for students would bring clarity and simplicity to the system.
While all Scottish students receive free tuition, arrangements for help towards living costs are more complicated.
For instance a university student from a family with an income of less than £19,000 is entitled to a bursary of £1,875 and a loan of £5,750 - a total of £7,625.
Someone from a family with an income of more than £34,000 gets no bursary while the loan they are entitled to is just £4,750.
There are different arrangements for college students.
Read more from Jamie here.
The chairwoman of the review group acknowledged constraints on public finances when it came to delivering the recommendations.
She said it would require additional funding of £16m a year but said the review had also set out other options, which would cost more, that the Scottish government could pursue if further public funding became available.
The review heard from more than 3,500 students and had almost 100 responses to its consultation from colleges, universities and student associations, as well as individuals. Focus groups were also carried out across Scotland.
Minister for Further Education, Higher Education and Science, Shirley-Anne Somerville, said: "The report sets out a number of recommendations that would fundamentally change the way students in Scotland are supported financially.
"It is only right that we now take the time to consider these recommendations in detail - and as part of current and future budget processes. We will set out our next steps in due course."
She said the Scottish government was investing a "record amount" in student support and wanted to ensure "all students, especially those in our most deprived communities, are provided with the financial support they need to succeed".
Reaction to New Social Contract for Students
Responding to the report, NUS Scotland president Luke Humberstone welcomed proposals to give the same level of support to further and higher education students.
He said: "Whether you're studying at college or university, the cost of living doesn't change and neither should the level of student support available.
"While this report presents a range of options for the future of student support to deliver the new social contract, Scotland's poorest students in further and higher education need to see serious new investment in bursary support - so that they are supported to succeed wherever they study.
"At present, those students taking out loans in Scotland get a raw deal. This report recommends the Scottish government fixes that, ensuring that graduates don't start repaying their student debt until they see the benefits of their degree in their payslip."
Informed decisions
Colleges Scotland, the body which represents Scotland's further education institutions, said it fully supported measures to improve student support funding to ensure that all students can attend college, regardless of their personal circumstances or background.
Chief executive Shona Struthers added: "As the recommendations from the review are considered, it will be vital to ensure that any changes to the student support review are carefully implemented and communicated with nuance to ensure that individuals are empowered and enabled to make informed decisions on funding their studies."
Scotland's largest teaching union, the EIS, urged the Scottish government to "take bold steps to ensure that student support is enhanced to promote equity of opportunity for all learners".
General secretary Larry Flanagan said: "The EIS believes that a return to a system of student grants and the removal of the prospect of debt from student loans would both widen access to education and provide a knock-on boost to Scotland's economy."Smooth Gaming Action
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President Barack Obama can’t seem to get any powerful member of his own party to support him on his trade initiative, complicating the chances for what he sees as a major late-term win for his legacy.
Clinton has backed off her support of the looming trade initiative on the campaign trail. Reid gave Obama a quick “hell no” when asked by reporters if he supported the deal. And Warren, the progressive favorite and senator from Massachusetts, has gone on the warpath, framing the issue in a larger fight over income inequality. The Democratic infighting has opened up comparisons to the Republican Party’s “civil war” over the past few years.
“Well I guess they don’t want it to happen,” Obama told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in an interview on Tuesday about the Democratic opposition, as he tried to assuage liberals’ concerns about the deal. “And I love Elizabeth. We’re allies on a whole host of issues. But she’s wrong on this.”
Warren fired back in a tweet Wednesday morning, hitting on a criticism of the negotiation’s transparency:
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Why’s this happening now?
At the heart of the issue are two acronyms: TPP and TPA. Both of these acronyms are coming to a head, which is why the fight is beginning to become so bitter. The issue could linger as a headache for Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary, as the pro-labor side of the party tries to push her to the left.
The first acronym, TPP, represents the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade agreement featuring 12 countries, including the United States, Mexico, Japan, Canada, and Australia. The deal, which would open the door to free trade among the countries, is in the final stages of negotiation.
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TPA stands for “Trade Promotion Authority,” which is legislation that would smooth the path for Obama to directly negotiate with his counterparts in other countries. The so-called “fast track” legislation would, in essence, allow the president to bring the trade agreement to Congress for an up-or-down vote. It wouldn’t allow Congress to amend the deal.
Obama and his unusual allies in the Republican Party have argued that “fast track” authority is necessary for the deal to be completed. After all, that would mean the 11 other countries privy to the deal would be, in essence, negotiating with not only the administration, but also with 535 members of Congress.
Republican members of Congress have argued that TPA is actually the best method for Congress to approve of any final trade deal.
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“It will ensure the timely and efficient implementation of trade agreements, and give our negotiators leverage to break down barriers to boost exports and wages,” House Speaker John Boehner said last week. “And, notably, TPA will strengthen Congress’s authority by clearly defining negotiating objectives and spelling out a detailed oversight and consultation process to achieve a final agreement.”
Who else supports TPP and TPA?
Obama has been one of the initiative’s biggest supporters. And as Ian Bremmer, the president of the global risk firm Eurasia Group, pointed out, his administration has lobbied Congress on the initiative harder than anything aside from perhaps the Affordable Care Act and the Iran nuclear negotiations.
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Obama argued last week that a vote against the TPP is essentially a vote for the status quo. He also said it would allow China to gain a competitive advantage in the Asian markets, which he said are the “fastest-growing” in the world.
“I will just repeat that 95 percent of the world’s markets are outside our borders,” Obama said in a press conference. “The fastest-growing markets, the most populous markets are going to be in Asia. And if we do not help to shape the rules so that our businesses and our workers can compete in those markets, then China will set up rules that advantage Chinese workers and Chinese businesses.”
Obama has some unusual de-facto allies in this fight: Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Paul Ryan, and even Texas Sen. and presidential candidate Ted Cruz.
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The most key Democrat to support the deal is Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee. It’s not clear yet if House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi or any of her top lieutenants will offer their support. So far, Pelosi has been cautious in her statements on the issue. There’s one key ally Obama can’t count on in this debate, however.
"I have never, ever supported a trade agreement, and I'm not going to start now," Reid, the Senate Minority Leader, told reporters on Tuesday. "So the answer is not only no, but hell no."
What’s it mean for 2016?
As the campaign starts heating up, the debate over the TPP and “fast track” authority will likely become heated in the Democratic primary.
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As secretary of state, Clinton called the TPP — as it was being negotiated then — the potential “gold standard” of trade agreements. But her campaign has shifted that stance in recent days, saying the deal will have to pass a number of tests before it can earn her support.
“Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security,” Clinton said of the negotiations during a campaign stop on Tuesday.
Liberals and pro-union groups are very much against the deal. And they have allies in potential candidates like former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who is considering a run as a Democrat.
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O’Malley seems to have found an opening to attack Clinton as he weighs a primary challenge to her. On Tuesday, he released a video on his opposition to the TPP. In a tweet, he also said opposing it shouldn’t be a “hard choice,” a not-so-subtle reference to the title of Clinton’s latest memoir.
Brett LoGiurato is the senior national political correspondent at Fusion, where he covers all things 2016. He'll give you everything you need to know about politics, with a healthy side of puns.The Obama administration announced plans to scale down NASA’s proposed mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa to pay for more global warming research, according to Universe Today.
President Barack Obama requested NASA’s mission to Europa receive only $49.6 million in 2017, far less than the $175 million the mission got from Congress in 2016. Much of the money not spent on the probe would go to global warming research. A rival proposal from the House of Representatives would allocate $260 million to fully fund the mission for the next year.
“It’s unfortunate that a few tens of million dollars here or there can hamper our search for life beyond Earth. But the USA is a democracy, so that’s the way it is,” Evan Gough wrote in University Today Friday.”These discrepancies and possible disputes between NASA and the different levels of government may seem disconcerting, but that’s the way these things get done. At least we hope it is.”
NASA’s probe, dubbed The Europa Clipper, would investigate the icy moon’s potential habitability for human colonization and alien life. Europa probably has watery oceans similar to those of Earth’s below the ice, which are likely kept warm by complex gravitational interactions and the planet’s core.
Scientists generally agree that Europa is one of the most likely places in our solar system for alien life to develop. Life could exist in its under-ice ocean, perhaps in an environment similar to deep-ocean hydrothermal vents where life on Earth may have emerged. NASA has even found clay-like minerals associated with organic matter on Earth on the icy crust of Europa.
Congress wants The Europa Clipper to expand the number of scientific instruments carried so that it can investigate plumes of water ice ejected from the moon’s surface, as well as several smaller satellites launched from the probe, which would orbit Europa.
NASA’s budget includes more than $2 billion for its Earth Science Mission Directorate for global warming science, which is specifically allocated to improve climate modeling, weather prediction and natural hazard mitigation. The directorate’s goal is to help NASA “meet the challenges of climate and environmental change.”
The organization is also responsible for global warming models proven to be inaccurate when checked against actual temperature observations.
Spending on NASA’s Earth Science Mission Directorate has increased by 63 percent over the last eight years, making it the largest and fastest growing budget of any NASA science program. In comparison, NASA’s other functions, such as astrophysics and space technology, are only getting a mere $781.5 and $826.7 million, respectively, in the budget proposal. Over the same time period, the general NASA budget grew only by 10.6 percent — just enough to account for inflation.
Obama and Democrats in Congress consider expanding the budget for global warming science to be a political imperative. Obama has repeatedly attempted to cut other NASA directorates, like space exploration, so money could be redirected to global warming science.
NASA said in its budget justification in February that the top scientific question the space agency wants to answer is “How are Earth’s climate and the environment changing?” The more typical space questions, such as “Are we alone?” and “How does the universe work?,” were at the very bottom of the list.
Even global warming alarmist Bill Nye the “Science Guy,” who’s also the CEO of the Planetary Society, has criticized Obama’s attempts to cut NASA’s space exploration and planetary science programs in favor of global warming. NASA’s planetary science program has previously held car washes and bake sales to gain political support to maintain funding.
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It’s refreshing to see the nation get over its fixation on pretty-boy (or -girl) candidates.
Christie doesn’t fall into that category, in case you haven’t noticed. He’s a bit... large. (Okay, I was trying to be tactful. He’s fat.)
Some people cite his largeness as proof of laziness, self-indulgence, lack of discipline and all other manner of moral failing.
To my mind, if the best argument you can muster against his policies is that he’s fat, you should pack it in. You’ve lost the debate.
Furthermore, I view it as a sign of mental toughness that he goes about his business knowing every time he stands next to a thin person, someone will make a crack about his weight. He’s had a few decades to get used to it, but still.
I’ve also admired his apparent resistance to drastic and/or crazy weight-loss schemes. Sure, Kirstie Alley just dropped 100 pounds — again — but she did it with the help of her new line of organic “appetite suppressants.” Do we really want a political leader who takes that kind of shortcut with his health?
Yet until fairly recently, being untelegenic has been a deal-breaker for aspiring presidential candidates. You’d probably have to go all the way back to the Nixon-McGovern face-off to find the last time the ugly guy won.
It wasn’t always that way, of course. From a standpoint of sheer physical attractiveness, the pool of political contenders used to be deeper. Throughout American history, we elected people who nowadays would be deemed unelectable on looks alone.
Imagine if television been around earlier in the nation’s history; we might have found an archive of dusty staff notes by the CNN makeup stylists:
“Washington — A fine figure of a man, but bad teeth. Urge him to smile with his mouth closed. Make sure to straighten his wig. He forgets.”
“Lincoln — Where do we start? There isn’t enough concealer in the whole studio to hide those under-eye shadows, but do the best you can. Try to get him to smile more; he actually does have a nice little twinkle when he tries.”
“Andrew Jackson — Oy, that hair!”
“Teddy Roosevelt — Steer him to dark suits to hide his girth. And get him new glasses.”
It has long bothered me that we choose our nation’s leaders from a group that has already been screened for good looks. Whatever combination of strong ideas, political insights, courage and leadership a candidate possessed, it had better be packaged in a form that was easy on the eyes. (Especially if you’re a woman: No battle-axes allowed.)
But all the buzz around Christie showed something has changed. Chalk it up to maturity, or more likely, desperation.
We’re in a world of hurt these days. Things are a mess. The body politic needs the brainpower of any smart person willing to help — skinny or overweight, tall or short, straight or gay, good-looking or mirrorshattering.
We don’t have the luxury of rejecting the insights of anyone who happens to be even moderately unattractive. So here’s a benchmark for how grim the national mood is these days: We may finally be willing to vote for the “large” guy.
Related coverage:
• Christie sounds like a candidate, but won't say whether he's running for president
• Editorial: Gov Chris Christie for president? We finally believe he won't runIn taking an initial look at the latest game I picked up, this Bally “Mystic”, as always my main concern is checking to make sure there’s no significant battery damage on the game. What’s interesting is when I looked at the game, there was no battery on the MPU board. The owners insisted the game saved the high scores, but I didn’t see how? Was there a battery on the underside of the board? I had to pull the MPU out to see.
What I saw was a board that someone had repaired, that had leaking batteries on it. They simply pulled the board and replaced a few damaged components and did not put a battery back in. But they created another issue by not fully-cleaning the board, and as a result, the damage from the leaking battery, even though it was long gone, continued…Can’t get enough of Frozen? You’re in luck: Disney is debuting a new story!
Frozen Northern Lights, which will be featured in a series of books and animated Lego shorts, follows Frozen favorites Anna, Elsa, Olaf, Kristoff and Sven as they embark on a new adventure to restore the glimmer of the Northern Lights.
The original Frozen voice cast, including Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff and Josh Gad, will reprise their roles for the four-part animated Lego shorts, which will air this fall on Disney Channel. The first novel in the book series will debut in July.
RELATED: 9 Things That Absolutely Need to Be in the 'Frozen' Sequel
Disney Channel
Gad shared the exciting news with a special video message and expressed enthusiasm over returning to the Frozen universe once again.
“I’m so unbelievably excited to be back as Olaf,” Gad said. “I think fans love Olaf because he’s funny, loyal and a great friend. And going on any adventure with him is always fun.”
He added: “I fell in love with Frozen because of the amazing story, characters, music, and I’m so honored to continue to be a part of it. My kids also happen to be huge fans and it’s really special to voice one of their favorite characters.”
RELATED: Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel and Josh Gad Have Adorable 'Frozen' Reunion
In March, Gad had a mini Frozen reunion with Bell and Menzel for A Broader Way Foundation, sharing an adorable photo with his co-stars.
“Team #Frozen back together again for #broaderway. Love these girls!” Gad captioned the snap on Instagram.Dr Luke Martinelli is Research Associate on the IPR's universal basic income project.
Is it time to move beyond the polarised views that characterise the basic income debate? Universal basic income (UBI) may be an attractive solution to a host of policy problems – but advocates must recognise that moving from abstract concept to reality will involve significant trade-offs and political barriers.
Gaining traction, growing support
In recent weeks, there have been a number of developments which appear to demonstrate the movement of UBI towards the political mainstream: in the UK, the influential Trades Union Congress (TUC) has endorsed social security reform that embodies the principles of basic income; in Canada, the Government is moving forward with concrete plans for a basic income pilot, adding to those upcoming in Finland and the Netherlands; the French region of Aquitaine is consulting on the idea; and in Germany, the single issue party Bündnis Grundeinkommen (Basic Income League) has just been established. These trends seem to suggest that UBI is gaining traction that will lead inexorably to widespread implementation.
After all, UBI is not just a good idea; it is an increasingly good idea in a world in which the nature of work, family and society is rapidly changing. Automation of production processes, both in manufacturing and, increasingly, services; large and growing wage gaps between ‘lousy’ and ‘lovely’ jobs (Goos and Manning, 2007); the growth of zero-hour and temporary contractual arrangements; and long-term unemployment among disadvantaged groups are all problems which urgently need addressing. Nuclear families have given way to the emergence of complex and unstable family structures, and the ‘new social risks’ of lone parenthood and gaps in the provision of care for children and the elderly threaten vulnerable sectors of society.
All of these factors are feeding into the widespread failure of existing social security systems to achieve equitable and efficient settlements for growing numbers of people – exactly what UBI claims to be able to provide.
Yet despite (or perhaps because of) intensified interest in basic income, the debate has become more polarised than ever. It is an elegant balance of justice and liberty; it is the worst of all possible worlds. It is the saviour of the welfare state; it will destroy it. It can be implemented tomorrow; it is a vague and distant utopia.
All things to all people
When considering these polarised views on basic income, it is worth noting that UBI is best considered as a family of proposals, rather than a specific policy per se.
The core characteristics of UBI as an idea are that payments should cover the entire population, and eligibility cannot be conditional on income, work history, or behavioural requirements. Beyond this, there is a great deal of variation between plans in terms of a number of important aspects – including, crucially, the level at which payments should be made, and how the basic income fits into the wider constellation of welfare and tax policies.
These design features vary in relation to the precise goals that basic income is intended to achieve, which themselves are contested. Although it can be seen as a prosaic way to simplify a complex welfare system, alleviating administrative costs and bureaucratic intrusion while reducing marginal tax rates – and thus eliminating the poverty and unemployment traps that pervade means-tested systems – it has also been touted as having the potential to fundamentally alter how we think about ‘work’. Releasing individuals from the compulsion to enter paid employment – and the exploitation and domination this entails – in order to survive, and liberating them to pursue a variety of socially valuable and creative activities, UBI has been mooted in radical terms as “a capitalist road to communism” (Van Der Veen and Van Parijs, 1986).
Multi-partisan support
The protean nature of basic income helps to ensure that the concept appeals across traditional party lines. One of the striking things about this idea is the wealth of favourable theoretical arguments which appeal across the political spectrum, leading to the popular description of UBI as 'not right or left, but forward'. In isolation, these arguments apply to other ways of organising social security – but few if any such systems so effectively marry the priorities of the social democratic left (equality, solidarity and redistribution) with those of the libertarian right (small government, freedom and efficiency). By both left- and right-wing proponents, UBI is viewed as the saviour of a broken welfare system which is stigmatising and intrusive yet unfit for purpose.
For basic income advocates on the left, the focus is on the failure of the system to provide security for all in an adequate and dignified fashion, as socio-economic conditions have made the Beveridgean system increasingly untenable. Gone are the days – if they ever existed – when male breadwinners provided for their families with stable, well-paid jobs. The Trente Glorieuses, that period of yet unmatched growth and prosperity following WWII, gave way to deindustrialisation, structural unemployment, rising wage inequality, and the increasing prevalence of precarious employment.
For the right, the welfare system is seen as the cause of dependency and societal breakdown, as the complex array of means-tested benefits reduces work incentives and discourages family formation. The bloated government bureaucracy which administers the intrusive work tests and financial conditions creates higher taxes, which act as a drag on the efficiency of the economy as a whole.
Basic income, perhaps miraculously, seeks to balance these competing goals and priorities. But does this congregation of political views mean that it is universally and normatively desirable? Clearly |
and why behind the neoliberal ideology. Once people begin to identify the core of the ideology and how it all works, then they can begin the necessary process of uprooting it and ultimately replacing it with something much better. The goal of this podcast is simply to aid in the process of understanding the problem, because here at The Last American Vagabond, we know that a better world is truly attainable if we continue to seek out the truth and build from that enhanced understanding.
Previous Episode: Cultural Marxism
Help Us Be The Change We Wish To See In The World.Asian football expert @JohnnyDuerden analyses the booming Chinese Super League and why big names globally - including an increasing number of Australians - are flocking to the Middle Kingdom.
The Australian Tennis Open is a long-standing sporting tradition in Melbourne and for the country at large, a chance in January to get right into the new year after the holidays.
It seems however that there may be a new habit developing in football and that is Australian players going to China during the January window.
In the past weeks, it seems that you hardly open a website without seeing the words "transfer news" and confirmation of another move north.
Tim Cahill has obviously been in Shanghai Shenhua for a full season and is in Spain preparing with his teammates for the 2016 Chinese Super League campaign.
Socceroo and Asian Cup hero Trent Sainsbury is now heading north to join ambitious Jiangsu Suning where he will line up with Ramires from Chelsea.
His partner in the centre of the Socceroo defence, the talented Matthew Spiranovic, is with Hangzhou Greentown, Ryan McGowan is with Henan and James Troisi now at Liaoning.
This can only be good thing for Australian football.
The level of Chinese football has been derided over the years but the league has usually been decent.
In recent years it has been improving thanks, in part to the increasingly expensive imports that have been heading the Middle Kingdom.
Cahill will be lining up alongside stars such as Fredy Guarin, just signed from Inter Milan, Mo Sissoko ex-Liverpool and Demba Ba.
The Socceroo star had a successful first season in Shanghai and is popular with the Shenhua fans.
Chinese supporters tend to love the Aussie spirit. Just as Sasa Ognenovski's performances with Seongnam in South Korea caused all manner of K-League teams to look to the A-League, then the qualities of Cahill have encouraged Chinese Super League teams to consider Aussie talent.
And at the moment, China is the place to be and not just in Asia. It's a win-win situation.
Chinese teams get what they want and Australian players get a chance to play with and against an increasing number of top-class stars.
Fans know all about Guangzhou Evergrande, its World Cup winning coach, stars such as Robinho, Paulinho and Ricardo Goulart and a fair proportion of the national team.
They know about how the Cantonese club's twin AFC Champions League successes sandwiched between the 2014 glory of Western Sydney Wanderers.
2015 runner-up Shanghai SIPG has also been spending big. Sven Goran Eriksson has signed Asamoah Gyan and Elkeson for over $50 million and more are set to come.
Newly promoted clubs like Hebei have bought Gervinho from Roma, mid-table teams such as Jiangsu have spent over $30 million on Ramires. I could go on.
Even South Korean fans that have traditionally looked down on Chinese football and not regarded it as a suitable place for top-class K-League talent to play, are having to change their minds.
If you go to China now, you are going to be facing some world-class players and, if you are lucky, playing with them.
Throw in coaches like Scolari, Eriksson, Alberto Zaccheroni, Mano Menezes and Dragan Stojkovic, then again there is a level of international coach seldom seen elsewhere.
For Australian players then, it is an increasingly attractive place to play and that is only going to improve.
Authorities are confident that the league will be the biggest outside Europe sooner rather than later.
The government, the public and private sector are behind it all and there is plenty of money in the world's second largest economy.
It's not going to stop anytime soon and the opportunities are going to grow.
It is like Japan in the mid-nineties. Australian players no longer have to travel halfway across the world to play in one of the most exciting and richest and increasingly significant leagues in the world.To provide impetus to domestic medical devices sector, the government has increased import duty on certain specified equipment to 7.5% from 5% earlier.
"Rate of basic customs duty on certain specified medical device increased from 5% to 7.5%," the Finance Ministry said in a statement. Simultaneously, the exemption from additional customs duty on these medical devices has also been withdrawn, and they will now attract 4% SAD.
"Further, to give fillip to domestic manufacturing, basic customs duty is being reduced to 2.5% along with full exemption from SAD on raw materials, parts and accessories for manufacture of medical devices (falling under headings 9018 to 9022)," the statement added.
The concessional basic customs duty on hospital equipment for use in hospitals run by government or registered societies, and certain assistive devices, rehabilitation aids and other goods for disabled will however continue.
In line with its 'Make in India' campaign, the government had constituted a Task Force to examine various issues concerning the domestic Medical Devices Sector.
The said Task Force had made certain recommendations regarding rationalisation of customs duty structure for the sector, so as to promote domestic manufacturing of medical devices.President Barack Obama was routinely critized during his two-terms for the luxurious — and EXPENSIVE — vacations he frequently billed to taxpayers.
With less than fifty days left in office, the final tally of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s jet-setting lifestyle is finally coming clear — and the sum they bilked American citizens for is staggering.
According to conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, after his December vacation to Hawaii was added to the total, the Obama and his cronies spent a staggering $85 million on vacations, golf trips, and beach house rentals throughout his presidency.
To date, Obama’s and his family’s travel expenses total at least $85,029,819. The records obtained by Judicial Watch for Obama’s Secret Service travel to Hawaii reveal the following expenses totaling $1,234,316.67: Hotel and lodging costs totaled $1,000,458.63
The Secret Service spent $165,893.88 on car rentals.
Air and rail expenses totaled $67,964.16.
“Although the [Hawaii] vacation officially lasted from December 18, 2015, to January 3, 2016, the Secret Service rented several Kailua homes for 19 nights, starting from December 16. The total for the rentals, located near the Marine Corps base at Kaneohe Bay was $245,993.12. According to bills obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Secret Service also paid for rooms at the Hawaii Prince Hotel Waikiki and Golf Club. The Secret Service also reserved rooms at the Moana Surfrider resort on Waikiki Beach, and the Ala Moana Hotel, which cost a total of $40,249.48 and $671,895.99, respectively,” Judicial Watch reported.
And that staggering total is only going to get higher. The total bill forced onto taxpayers for Obama’s summer vacation — a multi-million dollar return to luxurious Martha’s Vineyard — hasn’t been publicly released yet.
In fact, Obama’s dream vacations are so long and frequent that in March of last year, Investors.com calculated that the first family had “traveled more than any other first family, often with Mrs. Obama’s mother and her friends. By the summer of 2014 the Obamas had taken 31 international trips lasting 119 days. At the same point in his presidency, Ronald Reagan had taken 14 such trips over 73 days.”
— The Horn editorial teamWhile a large-scale soil amendment of biochars continues to receive interest for enhancing crop yields and to remediate contaminated sites, systematic study is lacking in how biochar properties translate into purported functions such as heavy metal sequestration. In this study, cottonseed hulls were pyrolyzed at five temperatures (200, 350, 500, 650, and 800 °C) and characterized for the yield, moisture, ash, volatile matter, and fixed carbon contents, elemental composition (CHNSO), BET surface area, pH, pH pzc, and by ATR-FTIR. The characterization results were compared with the literature values for additional source materials: grass, wood, pine needle, and broiler litter-derived biochars with and without post-treatments. At respective pyrolysis temperatures, cottonseed hull chars had ash content in between grass and wood chars, and significantly lower BET surface area in comparison to other plant source materials considered. The N:C ratio reached a maximum between 300 and 400 °C for all biomass sources considered, while the following trend in N:C ratio was maintained at each pyrolysis temperature: wood ≪ cottonseed hull ≈ grass ≈ pine needle ≪ broiler litter. To examine how biochar properties translate into its function as a heavy metal (NiII, CuII, PbII, and CdII) sorbent, a soil amendment study was conducted for acidic sandy loam Norfolk soil previously shown to have low heavy metal retention capacity. The results suggest that the properties attributable to the surface functional groups of biochars (volatile matter and oxygen contents and pH pzc ) control the heavy metal sequestration ability in Norfolk soil, and biochar selection for soil amendment must be made case-by-case based on the biochar characteristics, soil property, and the target function.Rite Aid Corp (NYSE:RAD) shares traded on -3.91% down secure line and closed at $2.95. The stock exchanged hands 19.04 Million shares versus average trading capacity of 20.4 Million shares. It has a market cap of $3.09 Billion.
Wall Street analysts are predicting that Rite Aid Corp (NYSE:RAD) will report earnings per share of $-0.01 in their quarterly report. For the current quarter Rite Aid Corp (NYSE:RAD) has high EPS estimates of $-0.01 in contradiction of low EPS estimates of $-0.02. However a year ago for the same quarter the company has reported $0.01 EPS. Average estimation for the current quarter has been provided by 5 analysts.
Investors as well as the sell-side will be paying close attention to how the actual numbers compare with the estimates. Earnings surprises can have a huge impact on a company’s stock price. Several studies suggest that positive earnings surprises not only lead to an immediate hike in a stock’s price, but also to a gradual increase over time. Hence, it’s not surprising that some companies are known for routinely beating earning projections. A negative earnings surprise will usually result in a decline in share price.
Rite Aid Corp (NYSE:RAD) has average revenue estimates of $8.17 Billion, compared to low analyst estimates of $8.01 Billion and high estimates of $8.25 Billion for the current quarter. A total number of 5 analysts provided estimations over revenues. For the current year the company’s revenue estimates are $32.83 Billion compared to low analyst estimates of $32.08 Billion and high estimates of $33.11 Billion according to the prediction of 7 analysts.
Taking a broader look at the analyst consensus, according to 5 analysts Rite Aid Corp (NYSE:RAD)’s price will reach at $6.19 during 52 weeks. Its minimum price target estimates has been figured out at $4.7 while the maximum price target forecast is established at $6.75.
On the other hand Rite Aid Corp (NYSE:RAD) has Relative Strength Index (RSI 14) of 32.34 along with Average True Range (ATR 14) of 0.23. Where the relative strength index (RSI) is a technical momentum indicator that compares the magnitude of recent gains to recent losses in an attempt to determine excess buying & selling conditions of an asset, it is one of the most popular technical indicators, computed on the basis of the speed and direction of a stock’s price movement. The RSI value will always move between 0 and 100; the value will be 0 if the stock falls on all 14 days, and 100, if the price moves up on all the days) as suggested by J Welles Wilder. In terms of market analysis and trading signals, RSI moving above the horizontal 30 reference level is viewed as a bullish indicator, while the RSI moving below the horizontal 70 reference level is seen to be a bearish indicator. The level of 50 represents neutral market momentum and corresponds with the center line in other oscillators such as MACD (Moving Average Convergence/Divergence). The average true range (ATR) is a measure of volatility introduced by Welles Wilder.
Consequently Rite Aid Corp (NYSE:RAD)’s weekly and monthly volatility is 8.46%, 6.92% respectively.A computer laptop is a very important necessity these days. Everyone needs a computer be it a desktop or laptop to do their work on. Since you cannot take your desktop computer everywhere you go, a laptop computer is a genuine alternative. Because of its portability, a laptop is prepared by people to work on. But a laptop does not come cheap, you have to spend at least $400 to get a brand new laptop. And once you have bought your laptop spending hundreds of dollars, you might want to buy a protection for it. You cannot move around holding a laptop in your hand. It not only looks weird, there is a good chance that it might slip off your hand and get broken.
To make the laptop safe and secure you might want to put the laptop inside a bag, or sleeve or some case. You can carry a laptop inside a standard attache case or your travel backpack along with your clothes but that is not very safe for a laptop. Also, you cannot take your travel bag or your big attache case to your office. So, you need a special laptop case or sleeve or a laptop backpack. There is a reason behind getting a special laptop case or laptop bag. Laptop cases or bags have special compartments for all the accessories that come with a laptop. For example, a good laptop case or laptop sleeve should a separate compartment for the laptop charger. It should have another compartment for an external hard drive that you might have. It should even have compartments for your mobile phone and a power bank that you might carry with you.
A standard laptop bag has a special compartment built to place the laptop in it. It is surrounded by soft foam from all side to provide the laptop with all the security it needs. Your laptop remains undamaged due to all this foam around it even if you drop it from a certain height. There are a wide variety of laptop cases, laptop bags and laptop sleeves available online ranging from low-cost affordable laptop bags, laptop cases and laptop sleeves to luxury laptop bags priced more than $200.
10 Best low-cost Laptop Bags, Laptop Sleeves or Laptop Cases
Here we have gathered for you a list of 10 affordable laptop cases or laptop bags for you that are durable yet low-cost. The first 5 are laptop cases and the last 5 are laptop sleeves.
Best Low-Cost Laptop Cases 15.6
Slim, compact case has separate, protective pockets for both a laptop up to 15.6” and an iPad/10.1″ tablet
Files remain crisp and unbent in their designated pocket, separated from your electronics, Front pocket stores bulky power cords neatly in the bottom and out of the way
Organizer panel in front pocket with dedicated storage for external hard drive, pens and other accessories, Zippered front pocket keeps your smartphone secure yet easily accessible
Comfortable, removable shoulder strap and padded handle for easy portability
Luggage strap securely attaches slim case to most rolling luggage, Fits devices 15.2 x 1.2 x 10.5 in
Padded compartment protects laptops up to 15.6″.
Front zippered organizer section.
Padded carry handles.
Removable/adjustable shoulder strap.
Rear Ride Along feature for consolidated travel.
12.5″H x 16″L x 2.5″W
5 Year Warranty
Huge Roomy: Integrated laptop compartment holds laptops with screens up to 15.6-inch laptop bag
Comfortable bag strap and handles. Very spacious with a front zipper area, a second main bag zipper area with many little pockets, and in the other section there are 3 separated areas
Beautiful appearance with robust metal zipper,won’t worry that it will break when you use it and the strap is very strong and sturdy and many pockets that included
Well made waterproof nylon material and Light Weight, it fits 15.6-inch laptop perfectly
Not only for the laptop but also fit iPad, Kindle, travel mouse, cords and chargers and still have room left over for more, Many small pockets inside and out for keys, pens, headphones, etc.It doesn’t look too bulky when filled or too empty when not as filled
Accommodates up to a15″ MacBook or MacBook Pro
Contoured neoprene pocket for iPad protection
Built-in GRID-IT!
Airport friendly
Shock absorbent molded EVA
Non-slip design keeps MacBook in place
Convenient padded handles and detachable/adjustable padded shoulder strap
Water resistant
Fits up to 16-Inch laptops, Fits devices 15.2 x 1.8 x 10.8 in
Professionally-oriented functionality and materials with contemporary styling
Roomy front compartment comfortably holds power brick and peripherals
Padded, non-scratch pockets protect up to three electronic devices or other personal items
Wireframe and EVA foam lamination provide integrity to structure and tailored aesthetic
Best Low-Cost 15.6 Laptop Sleeves
Designed to protect up to 15.6-Inch laptops
Helps protect against scuffs, dust, and water
Durable neoprene and industry-grade tarpaulin material are water-resistant
Limited Lifetime Warranty
Neoprene case compatible with your device with up to a 15 to 15.6-inch display.
Durable and lightweight
Zipper closure keeps your device secure, a seamless wrap of Impact foam padding adding extra protection
Diamond style padded foam protects your laptop against shock, scratches, dust, and damage.
Lacdo (TM) Designed Specifically for 15.4 inch Apple MacBook Pro and Dell HP Acer Laptop absolutely attract people attention.
Durable Waterproof Bag perfectly For your Laptop.
It comes with a side pocket that can store other accessories such as charger, cables, and memory cards.
Made of quality material comfortable handle feel time proof and durable Quick top-loading access through envelope-style design.
Internal Dimensions: 15″ (L) x 1.69″ (W) x 10.5″ (H) / 38cm (L) x 3cm (W) x 27cm (H)
Internal Dimensions: 15.55 x 0.79 x 10.82 inches (L x W x H); External Dimensions: 15.94 x 0.79 x 11.42 inches (L x W x H).
Features a polyester foam padding layer and neoprene fabric lining for bump and shock absorption and protection of your computer from accidental scratches.
Side pockets of the case are ideal for storage of small items such as power adapters, cables, pens, and notepads, offering added convenience.
Slim and lightweight; does not bulk your laptop up and can easily slide into your briefcase, backpack, or another bag.
The top-loading zipper on the bag glides smoothly and allows convenient access to your laptop computer.
Suitable for most popular 15-15.6 inch MacBooks / laptops/notebooks / Ultrabooks; may not snugly fit all computers due to variations in the sizes of different models.
Simple but meet your everyday needs. Slim, portable and lightweight to take alone, or slide it into your briefcase, backpack or any other bag, perfect for business, school or travel
Made of soft and environmentally friendly materials, this sleeve can protect your tablet/laptop against dust, dirt, scratches and bump/shock
Extra pocket in front, enough space to keep pens, mobile phone, cables, chargers, power bank etc.
sleeve bag can be fully opened at 180°, easily access your tablet/laptop
External dimensions: 16 x 11.5 x 1.5 inches, internal dimensions: 15.6 x 11 x 1.1 inches; compatible with 15″ MacBook Pro, Retina MacBook Pro 15″, 14-15.6″ most of all laptops
This concludes our list of the best laptop sleeves and cases, for now, we will add more cool laptop sleeves and laptop cases in the future inshallahGo at Sourcegraph - Serving Terabytes of Git Data, Tracing App Performance, and Caching HTTP Resources
Sourcegraph is a code search and review application that supports and analyzes code in multiple languages: Go, Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, and soon more. Even though we have experts in each language on our team, Sourcegraph’s core has been written in Go since day one, and we’ve chosen Go for each new project and system we’ve built. We’ll run through all of the major open-source systems and projects we’ve built within Sourcegraph in Go.
At a high level, Sourcegraph has 2 parts. The first is Sourcegraph.com, the application that users see, whose architecture and code patterns we presented at Google I/O 2014. The second is srclib, our multi-language source code analysis engine, which is completely open source. Both of these parts are built using a number of libraries and systems that we’ve also released as open source, but we’re just going to cover those that Sourcegraph.com uses, since those are the most broadly useful.
Sourcegraph.com, our main application, manages fetching and updating several terabytes of VCS (git/hg) data, scheduling builds of projects, integrating with external APIs, storing user data, and serving the web app. Here’s what we’ve built with Go to make this possible.
Storing and serving VCS (git/hg) data: go-vcs and vcsstore
To access and fetch git and hg repositories in Go, we wrote go-vcs. It provides a common Repository interface that has 4 implementations: git using git2go (a native Go git library that uses libgit2), git by shelling out to the “git” command, hg using hgo (a native Go hg library), and hg by shelling out to the “hg” command. There’s an extensive test suite (using Go’s testing package) that tests that the behavior of each implementation is identical.
In addition to providing VCS-specific methods such as GetCommit, ResolveBranch, Diff, and Commits (to get a list), the vcs.Repository interface can return a virtual FileSystem that can access files and directories as of a given revision. This FileSystem has the standard Open, Stat, ReadDir, etc., methods, which means it works with other libraries that expect this standard interface. It also lets us use mapfs to test it.
Here’s an example of using it to show a file at a specific revision:
To scale go-vcs to work on hundreds of thousands of repositories and terabytes of data, we builtvcsstore. It has an HTTP server, which provides HTTP handlers and an HTTP API to access data from any stored repository (at URL paths like /git/https/github.com/user/repo/.branches/mybranch ), and an API client, which implements the same vcs.Repository interface interface with methods that issue HTTP requests to the vcsstore server. This means our code can access remote repositories over HTTP as though they were local repositories. By setting HTTP cache headers on the server and using a caching HTTP transport, we get nearly automatic caching of VCS data, which makes our app fast.
Web application integration testing using Selenium via go-selenium
As a large application with a lot of separate services, Sourcegraph can fail in a lot of ways. To let us sleep a bit more easily at night, we have a large suite of Selenium browser integration tests (among other tests). We adapted an existing library to build go-selenium, a Go library that makes it easy to drive a Web browser and programmatically perform front-end actions. Before building go-selenium, we considered using Ruby, Python, or JavaScript Selenium libraries, but we chose go-selenium so that our integration tests can use other logic we’ve written in Go to trigger backend user actions.
While Go’s explicit error return values are nice in most cases, they can lead to verbose test code (if you check every error, even ones unrelated to the test at hand) or flaky test code (if you ignore error returns). To solve this problem, go-selenium provides wrapper types WebDriverT and WebElementT intended for use by test code, which combine a web driver or element and a *testing.T and call t.Fatal if a method from the underlying driver or element returns an error. This lets test authors omit error checks but still report granular test errors.
Here’s what a test case looks like:
Test helpers in Go present another problem, though: if a helper function calls t.Log (or anything that calls it, such as t.Fatal, t.Error, etc.), the message is associated with the file and line in the helper function, not in the test case that called the helper. We made a quick hack to show the test case’s file and line, which helps us identify the source of test failures better:
Fast HTTP caching with httpcache, multicache, and s3cache
Our front-end app hits our HTTP API to fetch all the data it needs, so we can use standard HTTP caching techniques to cache data. (We’ve found this to be far simpler than if we had an application-specific cache, in Redis for example, and had to reinvent caching and eviction semantics and behavior.) At first our app just used Greg Jones’ httpcache, which provides a caching HTTP transport that writes to memory and a local disk. The beauty of net/http and Go’s trust in interfaces shines here; it was super easy to drop in this caching transport, and the rest of our application logic didn’t need to change.
But as we grew to multiple app servers and performed frequent redeploys, the hit rate of our servers’ memory and disk caches declined because each server’s cache was separate and was purged on each deploy.
Thankfully, it was easy to extend the httpcache.Cache interface:
We first built s3cache, which implements the same Cache interface that httpcache expects and accesses Amazon S3. This meant our servers all shared the same cache.
However, the HTTPS latency to/from S3 was a significant overhead, so we built multicache, which let us specify cache policies such as “when reading, try the in-memory cache first, then disk, then S3” and “when writing, return after the item has been written to memory, but continue writing to disk and S3 asynchronously.” This gives us near-RAM speeds for most frequently used cache entries but with the high hit rates of using a remote persisted cache.
Distributed application tracing with apptrace
To improve performance in a web app that hits multiple services to serve each request, it’s useful to see the timings for each action, no matter which host it occurred on or how deep in the call stack it is. Just looking at the top-level page generation time isn’t enough. It’s also important to see metadata like HTTP cache headers to see what’s actually occurring and why things are slow.
We took ideas from Google’s Dapper paper, implementation tips from Twitter’s Zipkin, and code from Coda Hale’s lunk to create a distributed application tracing system in Go called apptrace. In keeping with the principles of simple distributed tracing in the Dapper paper, we get near-total visibility into the performance of our distributed services by instrumenting two external call points: external HTTP API calls by using an HTTP transport that records to apptrace, and SQL queries by wrapping modl.SqlExecutor.
Why Go?
We’ve been able to release these projects as open source in part because of Go’s easy composition. Interfaces make it easy to improve our app by providing better, faster implementations of an interface, without affecting the interface’s contract. We often develop these improved implementations in separate repositories so they can’t introduce complex interdependencies into our app. This is what occurred with our VCS data storage and our HTTP cache: we started out with a simple concrete implementation in our app’s main codebase and then developed improved implementations of the same interface in external repositories. Once done, open-sourcing these repositories is a no-brainer because they’re already standalone projects.
Also, Go makes it far easier to create separate projects than any other language we’re familiar with. All it takes is a.go file in a directory. Other languages require package description files, complex directory structures, install/setup scripts, etc.
We think all of this means that Go’s open-source ecosystem is far more mature than languages of comparable age and popularity. That, combined with a beautifully designed and implemented standard library, makes Go a joy to work with.
From all of us at Sourcegraph, we wish Go a very happy birthday![ In Washington a State Department spokeswoman, Sharon Bowman, said, "Our understanding is that they have been released, but we don't have any details on it." She was quoted by The Associated Press as saying she assumed the attaches would be freed in Hong Kong. A severe rainstorm in Hong Kong on Thursday may have delayed their arrival. ]
A principal part of the officers' duties in Hong Kong, Pentagon officials said, was monitoring foreign military activity. The consulate in Hong Kong is known to be the base for the largest United States operation monitoring the Chinese military.
The Pentagon officials said the officers were known to Chinese officials, who had approved their visas and itinerary. What is unclear is exactly what they were doing when they were detained.
"Did the officers get too clever? Maybe," said a senior Pentagon official. "Were the Chinese angry and decided to make an issue out of this? Maybe."
In Washington, Michael D. McCurry, the White House spokesman, and other Administration officials seemed to take pains to avoid criticizing Beijing for ordering the expulsions. Mr. McCurry said he doubted there would be "negative repercussions" from the incident.
The Pentagon official was more cautious, saying: "We're trying to be non-inflammatory about this until they are safe. We won't know for sure until they're out."
Richard Baum, professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles, said today that the recent worsening of tension between China and Taiwan undoubtedly put a premium on information about how China is mobilizing its forces in the southeast, across the straits from Taiwan.
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China is conducting a broad three-month military exercise in its southeast region, and only 12 days ago launched four test missiles aimed at a target 80 miles north of Taiwan.
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"With the missile tests, the threat of reaction if Taiwan pursues the nuclear option, it's not surprising that there is increased interest in what is going on in places like Fujian and Guangdong," said Mr. Baum. Last week Taiwan's President, Lee Teng-hui, said Taiwan might consider the possibility of developing nuclear weapons.
The two officers were carrying their personal cameras, which is normal for defense liaison officers, the Pentagon officials said, and they may have been taking pictures of exercises when they were detained.
It was not immediately clear why China publicly announced apprehending American military officers, rather than expelling them quietly. Nor was it clear whether the decision to announce the incident reflected irritation among some Chinese leaders at the presence of American military officers in China.
American officials said the embassy staff became concerned when the officers failed to call their families or their office in Hong Kong. American embassy workers in Beijing made inquiries, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher was apparently informed about the detention a few hours before meeting Tuesday with the Chinese Foreign Minister, Qian Qichen, in Brunei. Mr. Christopher did not raise the issue in the meeting because United States diplomats in China were already in contact with Beijing officials, Mr. McCurry said.
American officials traveling with Mr. Christopher in Asia also seemed eager to play down the significance of the incident, saying it was a good sign the officers were being expelled rather than being detained indefinitely.
Yet military officers and others carrying diplomatic passports are routinely expelled, rather than tried and jailed, when accused of espionage in China. Harry Wu, the human rights activist who has been held in China since he was caught trying to enter the country on June 19 and was also accused of spying, was carrying an ordinary American passport.
Shen Guofang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the officers entered China on July 23, and were caught "on the spot" at 10 A.M. Saturday "by Chinese soldiers on duty."
"The facts are clear and evidence is irrefutable," said Mr. Shen, according to the New China News Agency report.
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Mr. Christopher, while refusing to discuss the expulsions, said tonight that he and Mr. Qian agreed that "the relationship was too important not to deal with problems we have effectively."
In that meeting, Mr. Christopher was trying to turn a corner in relations between the two countries, which have deteriorated since the United States allowed Taiwan's President to visit Cornell University in June, and have been aggravated by the detention of Mr. Wu, who has documented conditions in Chinese prisons.
No significant progress appears to have been made at the meeting. Although Mr. Christopher carried a letter from President Clinton expressly reaffirming a commitment to Beijing's "one China" policy, Mr. Qian was disappointed that his American counterpart would not promise to bar Taiwan's President from visiting the United States. Mr. Christopher's request that Mr. Wu be freed was also rejected.
It is not clear whether or how the American officers' expulsions will ultimately affect relations.Members of the rebranded San Jose Clash weren't fond of the name or hideous jerseys.
Saturday night, the San Jose Earthquakes game against D.C. United will officially commemorate the 20th anniversary of Major League Soccer's inaugural match, which erupted April 6, 1996 in San Jose. In that first game 20 years ago, San Jose defeated D.C. in front of 31,683 fans at Spartan Stadium. At the time, it was the largest attendance for any sporting event in San Jose history.
With that match, the San Jose soccer bloodline began its MLS era as the San Jose Clash, thanks to the marketing bozos at Nike, who also inflicted upon the team hideously embarrassing jerseys and a nonsensical logo, which had nothing to do with San Jose and made no sense to any soccer-minded person anywhere in the world. A shoe company tried to market the team to '90s emo mall rats rather than soccer fans, so the entire brand was widely ridiculed by everyone, especially folks who grew up with the original San Jose Earthquakes in the '70s. But for whatever reason, we still went to the games.
As soon as MLS began, the Clash carried on the lineage from the old days. Original Earthquakes player Laurie Calloway became San Jose's first MLS coach. Peter Bridgwater, who formerly ran the San Jose Earthquakes, became the president and general manager. John Doyle, who'd briefly played with the Quakes during their bardo state of transition between the NASL and MLS, was the first player signed. On the local television broadcasts, fans got to watch former San Jose Earthquakes Chris Dangerfield and Mark Demling. All together they comprised four different levels of the new MLS organization carrying over from the San Jose Earthquakes. At the time, any intelligent person could see the Clash as a natural progression from everything that started in 1974 in San Jose. Unfortunately, confused MLS executives held an absolutist view of the world in their thinking that God created everything in 1996 and nothing existed before that time.
In retrospect, it's easy to contemplate what would have transpired had MLS launched with a team called the San Jose Earthquakes instead of the ridiculous Clash. If Nike had any knowledge of the sport, they would have retained the original name and colors like many of us wanted. Had that occurred, thousands more fans would have immediately identified with the whole package. The Earthquakes notoriety and brand would have grown faster and more players would have expressed interest in playing and/or staying here. A stable ownership group and stadium would have emerged much earlier and the mainstream press might have even understood the culture a tiny bit more. All the success one now sees in Seattle and Portland, for example, would have happened here first.
On the flipside, in 1996, maybe the fans were simply too willing to accept the Clash name and didn't care enough to duke it out with a shoe company and fight to retain the original moniker. San Jose can be like that. If you want anything authentic or interesting to happen around here, you usually have to fight for it, and many times people just don't care enough. As a result, we are left with another curious "what if" scenario. Those often make the best stories anyway.
This is not to diminish the Clash players or their accomplishments. Many stayed around and contributed in various ways, if not moved on to other successful pursuits, on and off the pitch. But one can only imagine the "what if."
When it comes to the botched emo-mall-rat-branding fiasco, Dangerfield told me a few years ago that it represents an era that should be erased from our memories. Many teams go through forgettable periods in their history, just as an English team might get relegated from the Premiership all the way down to the third division. "In the case of the Earthquakes," Dangerfield said, "it wasn't so much going down to a lower league per se; it was just a change of name that did that. It would have been a lot easier, I think, if we'd have just kept it as the Earthquakes all the way through."
The lesson here? Don't let a shoe company decide anything.Originally published Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 1:48 PM
Mitt Romney’s son Tagg has been gathering some of his father’s richest friends into a private-equity fund called Solamere, writes Froma |
atches.
– 2 damage for 0 mana? One of the best tempo cards in the game and tempo is exactly what you need against fast decks. You can also kill 3 health minions on turn 1 (like ) if you draw a Pirate and get Patches. Swashburglar & Southsea Deckhand – Turn 1 Pirates are good, because you want to get Patches out of your deck as soon as possible so you won’t draw it.
& – Turn 1 Pirates are good, because you want to get Patches out of your deck as soon as possible so you won’t draw it. Argent Squire – Another 1-drop, it’s best to have a 1-drop against fast decks, so you generally want to keep it. Divine Shield might come handy when it comes to early game trading – it’s great against other 1 health minions.
– Another 1-drop, it’s best to have a 1-drop against fast decks, so you generally want to keep it. Divine Shield might come handy when it comes to early game trading – it’s great against other 1 health minions. Bluegill Warrior – Even though you don’t mind using your Hero Power on turn 2, having Bluegill is also good – this way you can often trade into something your opponent has played.
– Even though you don’t mind using your Hero Power on turn 2, having Bluegill is also good – this way you can often trade into something your opponent has played. Finja, the Flying Star – I know that keeping it looks weird, but you want to keep Finja every time. It’s a little bit slow, but it provides an insane tempo swing. After all, you play your other Murlocs to “activate” Finja and drawing her increases your odds to win heavily.
Lower Priority (keep only if certain conditions are met):
SI:7 Agent & Edwin VanCleef – With an activator – Coin or Backstab (or even better both when it comes to VanCleef). Great when you activate combo, bad if you don’t.
& – With an activator – Coin or Backstab (or even better both when it comes to VanCleef). Great when you activate combo, bad if you don’t. Other 3-drops: Shaku, the Collector, Jungle Panther or Argent Horserider – If you already have a 1-drop. Having a 1-drop or at least a Backstab. Since you often skip t2, you can’t really afford to skip t1 against fast decks. Having a 3-drop is good, but getting a 1-drop has a higher priority.
Vs Slow Decks
Higher Priority (keep every time):
1-drops – Similarly to Mulligan vs Aggro, you want to open up with a 1-drop. I’d say that the priority goes like this: Swashburglar > Southsea Deckhand > Argent Squire.
> >. Edwin VanCleef – Unlike the matchup against Aggro, you should always keep Edwin vs Control. You don’t necessarily aim to drop him right away on turn 2/3 – you can quite consistently make him a 6/6 in the mid game even without Coin and that’s a great tempo push.
– Unlike the matchup against Aggro, you should always keep Edwin vs Control. You don’t necessarily aim to drop him right away on turn 2/3 – you can quite consistently make him a 6/6 in the mid game even without Coin and that’s a great tempo push. Shaku, the Collector – Early Shaku is great against slow decks, because it gives you a very needed 3-drop + extra value once you attack + it might disrupt whatever your opponent wants to do, because he will just need to answer the Shaku.
– Early Shaku is great against slow decks, because it gives you a very needed 3-drop + extra value once you attack + it might disrupt whatever your opponent wants to do, because he will just need to answer the Shaku. Jungle Panther – Even though you lose some The Curator value by keeping it, it’s still a good 3-drop to have. Your opponent can’t really answer it on turn 3 and guaranteed 4 damage (to trade or to hit face) is really great.
– Even though you lose some value by keeping it, it’s still a good 3-drop to have. Your opponent can’t really answer it on turn 3 and guaranteed 4 damage (to trade or to hit face) is really great. Finja, the Flying Star – Absolutely the highest mulligan priority. Finja swing is often the way you win games vs Control, the card can win the game by itself.
Lower Priority (keep only if certain conditions are met):
Backstab – If you have a 1-drop already or if you have a combo card (e.g. SI:7) to play with it. You don’t need it that much vs Control, because they often don’t drop early minions, but it’s worth it as a combo activator.
– If you have a 1-drop already or if you have a combo card (e.g. SI:7) to play with it. You don’t need it that much vs Control, because they often don’t drop early minions, but it’s worth it as a combo activator. Cold Blood – With Argent Squire. Playing Cold Blood on some 1 health 1-drop is not great, because it will usually just be pinged and killed. However, playing it on Argent Squire is much safer – you will most likely get 2 hits value, as the opponent would need to ping the Divine Shield first.
– With. Playing Cold Blood on some 1 health 1-drop is not great, because it will usually just be pinged and killed. However, playing it on Argent Squire is much safer – you will most likely get 2 hits value, as the opponent would need to ping the Divine Shield first. Naga Corsair – With a smooth curve. 1-drop into Hero Power into 3-drop into Naga Corsair is one of the best curves you can have – especially if you didn’t attack with your dagger before (you end up getting full Naga Corsair value then).
Aggro Rogue Play Strategy
Even though it’s an Aggro deck, it’s really tricky to play as compared to the other Aggro decks. It’s not a classic “face rush” deck where your main goal is to kill your opponent as fast as possible. The deck has quite low early game tempo, besides some rare cases you can’t really drop the enemy down to 10 health on turn 4. The deck’s main strength are big tempo swings on certain turns. Combo cards are generally weak if you play them without combo, but they can be incredibly powerful in certain cases. Same goes for Finja – a turn after playing Finja is an insane swing. You can turn the whole game around with just that one card. Other “tempo swings” include a big Edwin VanCleef or Dark Iron Skulker.
The deck is slower, which means that it doesn’t run out of steam that quickly. You have multiple cards generating extra value – 2x Swashburglar, Shaku, the Collector and The Curator. Sometimes you can afford to play a slower game and still win with the right tempo swing. I had games vs Dragon Priest which I took past turn 10 and still won after getting the Finja value.
Vs Aggro
Your strategy against other Aggro decks is rather simple. First of all, you try to answer everything they play. Don’t try to engage in a face rush (unless you have extremely aggressive hand with let’s say 2x Cold Blood) because most of the time you’re going to lose. You have multiple tools to kill opponent’s minions without taking damage yourself – Backstab, Eviscerate, Charge minions (Deckhand, Bluegill Warrior, Argent Horserider). You want to utilize them if possible. Your Hero Power is also great in those matchups. Even though you take extra damage, with one activation you can often take two small minions. Taking some damage early to establish the board control is fine. But later, if you can, try to not use your face to tank more damage.
At one point, you want to make a tempo swing and start being the aggressor yourself. It really depends on the game. It can happen when your opponent had a slower turn (e.g. he didn’t develop any minions) while you have some board presence, after a big Edwin or especially after the Finja turn. With your usual post-Finja board you can usually threaten 2 turns lethal, so you want to do exactly that – put your opponent on the clock. You generally want to keep your Cold Bloods for those tempo swings – you want to put your opponent in an awkward spot. Using it early to go face will just make him trade his minion and get 2 for 1. But if you use your Cold Blood when you have board control already, he will often have to a) face tank it with his weapon b) use some burn spell to kill it or c) he won’t even have a way to deal with it.
Try to make your “tempo swing” as fast as possible. If your opponent gets a, for example, slow turn 4, try to get advantage and develop as much stuff as possible. You should win the late game against Aggro, but the problem is getting there. This deck is amazing at pushing an advantage, so once you get even a slight opening, try to use it.
Vs Control
In games vs Control, you’re the aggressor 100% of time. But it doesn’t mean that you have to hurry up. Against Control, you might take a slightly slower game and still win. Games vs Aggro are pretty straightforward, but those vs Control can be incredibly difficult. Most important thing is resource management. Most of the Aggro decks run tons of burn damage/weapons that make killing opponent after early aggression much easier. In case of this deck, it’s a little bit harder. It’s much more board-centric than other Aggro decks, you really need your board to deal the damage. So you want to use your minions as efficiently as possible and try to protect them.
First of all, let’s forget about “taking it slow” for a bit. There are some matches, some opening hands where you really want to rush things down. One of those cases is getting an early Argent Squire + Cold Blood. It’s an amazing combination, because it allows you to start pushing some serious damage as soon as turn 2. And before your opponent will deal with the Squire, it’s pretty likely that you will have more minions to attack with. If you get a really aggressive opening hand, you can try to push it and win the game fast. If that’s the case, you can go for the highest tempo moves – e.g. dropping turn 4 Naga Corsair without a weapon equipped at all, just for the 5/4 body. However, don’t try to go for this plan with a slower hand, because most of the time it will fail. Slower decks are well-equipped to fight against the early aggression and if you’re not aggressive enough, they will first stabilize and then win, because you were using your cards inefficiently to get the highest early tempo.
So, let’s assume that you’re not going for the face rush plan (if you do, there is not much more I can really tell you – just hit face and pray that your opponent won’t have the right answers). Overall, taking face damage is not a problem when playing this deck. Until you’re really low, you can easily swing your dagger at minions. That is going to help you with building a tempo advantage, 2 pings per 2 mana is quite nice for the Hero Power if you don’t count the extra damage.
The “big tempo swings” are even more important against Control. You want to try to put your opponent in an awkward situation if possible. For example, if you put a Cold Blood on a small minion and play a big Edwin VanCleef on the same turn. Those actions alone might have been countered quite easily, but when combined, your opponent might not have a way to both clear a buffed minion and big VanCleef. If he can’t, now you have an amazing tempo advantage – you can develop next minion and once again he won’t likely be able to clear both. This way you push for some serious damage each turn while your opponent tries to deal with whatever you play.
One of the absolutely best cards against Control is, obviously, Finja, the Flying Star. While it makes the turn you play it really slow, you get everything back next turn. I just love pulling out 2x Murloc Warleader, because it gives you most stats on the board. And that’s amazing about Finja turns is that you also have full mana to develop more. If your Finja survives, you pull out 2 Murlocs, you play the 3rd one, drop the Cold Blood on something and play let’s say SI:7, now you have a huge board and your opponent needs a big AoE or he loses. You really want to put him in those difficult situations. Removing everything one by one is not an option, because there is just too much. He either plays something like Flamestrike or Twisting Nether or he loses.
Of course, you try to play around the AoEs a bit. Knowing exactly what kind of AoEs are available to your opponents each turn is important. So if you already have 3 minions on the board on turn 6, against Mage, you don’t play another one to not play into Flamestrike. Or you can play one, if it’s let’s say Argent Horserider, The Curator or big Edwin that will survive AoE.
When you have The Curator in your hand, you try to play it as fast as possible. Drop him right away on turn 7 if you can. The longer you wait, the higher the chance is that you will draw all the cards you can pull out from him. With only 1 Beast and 2 Dragons, it’s quite likely that you do, so the earlier you play it, the more value you guarantee. The Curator is one of the ways to keep up with the slower decks. Around turn 7 you should be completely out of steam, and Curator can give you plays for 2 or 3 more turns. It can also potentially give you Finja if you didn’t draw it already.
So, the strategy against Control is to either rush them down (rarely works) or wait for a big tempo swing turn and then try to finish the game in 2-3 turns by having more tempo than they can handle.
General Tips
If you kill something with your Finja, the Flying Star which pulls out Murloc Warleader, the extra health will be added before the death of Finja resolves. It means that if you attack a 5 attack minion with a 4 health Finja, it Finja pulls out 2x Warleader, it will actually survive at 1 health.
which pulls out, the extra health will be added before the death of Finja resolves. It means that if you attack a 5 attack minion with a 4 health Finja, it Finja pulls out 2x Warleader, it will actually survive at 1 health. Shadowstep is an interesting tech. It doesn’t have a single usage, you can use it in multiple different ways. It can be used to get a big VanCleef (Shadowstepping it and replaying for 1 mana is basically +4/+4 for 1), it can be used to deal 2 extra damage with SI:7 Agent or Argent Horserider (also the other small chargers, but only face, because they die after the first trade unless the minion has 0 Attack). You can use it on The Curator in a really slow game, in order to get more value. Playing Curator one turn, killing something next + replaying it can even lead to outvaluing a slow deck (if you have 2nd Azure Drake and some Murloc left in your deck, of course). A lower value gain, but still a value gain if you really need to is playing it on the Swashburglar and replaying it. Then Shadowstep basically turns into a random card from the opponent’s class – which is not always great, but can be lifesaving when you’re looking for something specific (e.g. health gain or burn to finish the game). Shadowstepping Dark Iron Skulker can give you a second AoE. And there is always a burst finisher of Leeroy + Shadowstep – it’s 12 damage for 8 mana. The card is very flexible and you will most likely find another use for it each game. In most of the games, it should give you decent value and its flexibility makes it a solid include.
is an interesting tech. It doesn’t have a single usage, you can use it in multiple different ways. It can be used to get a big VanCleef (Shadowstepping it and replaying for 1 mana is basically +4/+4 for 1), it can be used to deal 2 extra damage with or (also the other small chargers, but only face, because they die after the first trade unless the minion has 0 Attack). You can use it on in a really slow game, in order to get more value. Playing Curator one turn, killing something next + replaying it can even lead to outvaluing a slow deck (if you have 2nd Azure Drake and some Murloc left in your deck, of course). A lower value gain, but still a value gain if you really need to is playing it on the Swashburglar and replaying it. Then Shadowstep basically turns into a random card from the opponent’s class – which is not always great, but can be lifesaving when you’re looking for something specific (e.g. health gain or burn to finish the game). Shadowstepping can give you a second AoE. And there is always a burst finisher of Leeroy + Shadowstep – it’s 12 damage for 8 mana. The card is very flexible and you will most likely find another use for it each game. In most of the games, it should give you decent value and its flexibility makes it a solid include. If you happen to draw Patches the Pirate instead of getting it for free, it’s not always worth it to just play it immediately. It’s just 1 damage and it can get killed really easily. As a 1 mana Charge minion, it can be used to make your trades better (e.g. “ping off” a 1 health minion) or activate combos.
instead of getting it for free, it’s not always worth it to just play it immediately. It’s just 1 damage and it can get killed really easily. As a 1 mana Charge minion, it can be used to make your trades better (e.g. “ping off” a 1 health minion) or activate combos. Similarly, Southsea Deckhand is not always a great thing to drop on the board. For example, against Pirate Warrior you might want to keep it for turn 3 to Charge it into something. When you play it on turn 1, it can easily get killed by N'Zoth's First Mate and you won’t really gain anything from it. On turn 3, after daggering up on turn 2, you can let’s say clear a Bloodsail Corsair or kill one of the 3-drops when combined with Backstab or another Charger. Same goes for playing it e.g. against Mage on turn 1 – Reno Mage will often want to ping on t2 anyway and you just give him one of the best Hero Power targets. Instead, you can keep it for a later turn when pinging will be awkward (e.g. before a 4-drop turn) or to immediately charge into something and get the value.
Aggro Rogue Card Substitutions
The list is pretty expensive for an Aggro deck. It runs multiple Legendaries and honestly, most of them are pretty crucial to the deck. I will list all the non-adventure Legendaries and give you possible replacements:
Patches the Pirate – It’s one of the reasons why you run the early Pirate package. While you can play the deck without Patches, it will be significantly weaker. You’d probably want to run an extra 1-drop like a second Argent Squire to help against faster decks (losing Patches hurts those matchups most).
– It’s one of the reasons why you run the early Pirate package. While you can play the deck without Patches, it will be significantly weaker. You’d probably want to run an extra 1-drop like a second to help against faster decks (losing Patches hurts those matchups most). Edwin VanCleef – Edwin is consistently proving to be one of the best Legendaries in the game, as it gets into every Rogue list. The deck can definitely be played without it, but it would be significantly weaker, as there would be less tempo swing potential. I’d say that you should go for the Tomb Pillager if you don’t have Edwin.
– Edwin is consistently proving to be one of the best Legendaries in the game, as it gets into every Rogue list. The deck can definitely be played without it, but it would be significantly weaker, as there would be less tempo swing potential. I’d say that you should go for the if you don’t have Edwin. Shaku, the Collector – Rogue always had problems with filling the early drops slots. While 2-drop is not that problematic, because Hero Power is good enough, 3-drop slot is harder. Cards like SI:7 or Edwin require combo to work and Shaku is great, because you can drop it on t3 no matter what the board state is and what cards you have in your hand – no need for combos or anything. However, it’s a pretty niche Legendary and it’s not 100% necessary. I’d replace it with a second Jungle Panther. It’s another proactive 3-drop and while you don’t get the extra card, the +2 damage might matter. Plus it makes your Curator more consistent by reducing the chance of drawing every Beast (which is currently exactly 1) before dropping it.
– Rogue always had problems with filling the early drops slots. While 2-drop is not that problematic, because Hero Power is good enough, 3-drop slot is harder. Cards like SI:7 or Edwin require combo to work and Shaku is great, because you can drop it on t3 no matter what the board state is and what cards you have in your hand – no need for combos or anything. However, it’s a pretty niche Legendary and it’s not 100% necessary. I’d replace it with a second. It’s another proactive 3-drop and while you don’t get the extra card, the +2 damage might matter. Plus it makes your Curator more consistent by reducing the chance of drawing every Beast (which is currently exactly 1) before dropping it. Finja, the Flying Star – Absolutely necessary. It’s the reason why you even run the Murloc package and The Curator in the first place. If you want to play this deck, you need Finja. If you don’t have and don’t want to craft Finja, you should try to look for some other list instead (there are Aggro Rogue lists without Murloc package, but they’re weaker).
– Absolutely necessary. It’s the reason why you even run the Murloc package and The Curator in the first place. If you want to play this deck, you need Finja. If you don’t have and don’t want to craft Finja, you should try to look for some other list instead (there are Aggro Rogue lists without Murloc package, but they’re weaker). Leeroy Jenkins – One of your main finishers. Burst from Leeroy is very valuable and the fact that you can Cold Blood or Shadowstep it for an even bigger burst turn makes it a great card in the list. However, if you don’t own it, I’d probably play Tomb Pillager to make your turn 4 more consistent (right now you often end up playing a 3-drop or 2-drop + Hero Power on turn 4).
I would like to remind you, however, that Legendaries are pretty important in most of the decks and replacing them might reduce the given deck’s quality/performance significantly.
Closing
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. If you want to be up to date with my articles, you can follow me on Twitter.
Good luck on the ladder and until next time!"It is one very tough league. It is almost the survival of the fittest."
Those were the words of Harry Redknapp after watching his play-off-winning Queens Park Rangers side wheeze over the Championship finishing line last May.
This weekend, the nine-month marathon starts again. Twenty-four teams, 46 matches, three prized places in the Premier League.
The Championship meets the World Cup Twelve men played in this summer's World Cup after appearing in the Championship last season: Gonzalo Jara, Kenneth Omeruo, Lee Chung-Yong, Roger Espinoza, Reza Ghoochannejhad, Yun Suk-Young, Essaid Belkalem, Jean Beausejour, Benoit Assou-Ekotto, Park Chu-Young, Albert Adomah, Riayd Mahrez.
The three relegated clubs - Fulham, Cardiff and Norwich - have ambitions of bouncing straight back. Brentford, Rotherham and Wolves move up from League One believing they can earn back-to-back promotions. Everyone else in between fancies their chances of reaching the promised land of the Premier League.
"It's a league like no other," says former Burnley, Bolton and Wigan boss Owen Coyle. "It's such an open league and all the clubs think they have a case for finishing in the top six."
Been sidetracked by the World Cup this summer? Here are 10 Championship stories you might have missed - and need to know - ahead of the new season.
The £11m man trusted to fire Fulham back up
Ross McCormack's reported fee makes him the third most expensive Scottish-born footballer of all time after Everton's James McCarthy and Sunderland's Steven Fletcher
Players with proven Championship experience can be a useful asset for those relegated clubs preparing to tackle the second tier.
Fulham decided to go down this road and signed Leeds United captain Ross McCormack, the league's top scorer last season with 29 goals. For a reported £11m.
Laying out a record fee for a Championship player raised more than a few eyebrows. However, the Cottagers will consider the money well spent if the Scotland international helps them improve the current tally of seven teams - out of 30 since the Championship was created in 2004 - to bounce straight back to the Premier League.
"If he scores 20 or 25 goals and Fulham get promoted then no-one will be talking anymore about the price tag," Nottingham Forest midfielder Andy Reid told BBC Radio 5 live's Football League season preview programme.
Instant promotions back to Premier League Season Team Finish * Since the Championship was created in 2004 2006/07 Birmingham City 2nd 2006/07 Sunderland 1st 2008/09 Birmingham City 2nd 2009/10 Newcastle United 1st 2009/10 West Bromwich Albion 2nd 2011/12 West Ham United 3rd (through play-offs) 2013/14 Queens Park Rangers 4th (through play-offs)
The team built in just two weeks
Blackpool fans disagree with chairman Karl Oyston's claim that having eight players at the end of July was "not unacceptable"
Preparation has long been considered the key to success. No wonder then that Blackpool are the bookies' favourite for relegation.
Thirteen days before their opening game of the season, the Tangerines had a sparse squad of just eight players.
The club's two boardroom powers - chairman Karl Oyston and Latvian shareholder Valeri Belokon - have barely uttered a word in anger to each other in the last three years, instead preferring to form dialogue through 'open' messages on the club website.
Supporters are disillusioned after seeing no investment - in playing staff or infrastructure - since returning from the Premier League with £80m extra in the bank account. Players are bemused by dilapidated training facilities.
"Some fans always cry for change and I think they should be careful what they cry for," says Oyston. "The alternative is not always as attractive as what they think."
The Conference coach hired by Leeds
Don Revie, Brian Clough, Jock Stein, Howard Wilkinson, George Graham, Terry Venables. Some of Britain's greatest football managers have led the three-time champions of England.
Media playback is not supported on this device Hockaday aims to 'blaze a trail' for English coaches
Following in their footsteps is ex-Forest Green Rovers coach David Hockaday. "David Who?" was the response of underwhelmed Leeds fans when the 56-year-old was appointed by the Yorkshire club's new owner Massimo Cellino.
So how did this unlikely appointment happen?
"I got a phone call from an Italian man who said he had been asked to source a coach and wanted to know if I was interested in having a conversation in London," reveals Hockaday.
"I did a bit of homework about possible Italians coming into English football, went into the hotel and the president walked in. We talked football for about five hours and he said 'I like you. Do you want to be my head coach?'"
Now Hockaday, who describes himself as "Mr Nobody", is tasked with leading the Whites back into the Premier League for the first time since 2004.
The Champions League winner hired by Brighton
Sami Hyypia spent nine years playing for Liverpool, making 464 appearances between 1999 and 2008
Nine months ago, Sami Hyypia was being talked about as a boss who could be managing in the Champions League this season. Instead he finds himself in the Championship.
The 40-year-old Finn - who played in Liverpool's 2005 Champions League-winning side - was flying high in the German Bundesliga with Bayer Leverkusen, having seen his team make a blistering start to find themselves as Bayern Munich's nearest challengers.
But he was sacked in April after a barren run of just one win in 12 matches.
"You wonder how much knowledge he has of the Championship," says Andy Reid. "I'm sure he's been studying the league over the summer but he didn't play there - it's a different league to any other.
"The Championship is a challenge - wherever you've been before."
The ex-City trader leading the debutants
Which is a more stressful job - a City trader or a football manager? Ask Brentford boss Mark Warburton.
Media playback is not supported on this device Warburton backs Brentford to step up
About a decade ago, the 51-year-old ex-Enfield player swapped stocks and shares for socks and shinpads, leaving the City of London to join Watford as a youth coach.
Warburton became the Hornets' academy manager before moving to Brentford, where he replaced Wigan-bound boss Uwe Rosler in December 2013 - via previous roles as first-team coach and sporting director.
Now he is a Championship manager after guiding the Bees to the second-tier for the first time since it was rebranded in 2004. But he is still drawing experience from the City by dangling the carrot of profit in front of his players.
"Our players are financially incentivised to go and score more goals to earn points," he told the Daily Express. "It's just like the City, the more you earn, the more you make."
Instant relegations from the Championship Southend United (2006-07) Scunthorpe United (2007-08) Peterborough United (2009-10) Doncaster Rovers (2013-14) Yeovil Town (2013-14)
The favourites for automatic promotion
Steve McClaren replaced Nigel Clough last September and signed a new three-year deal with the Rams on Thursday
In a division notoriously known for being hard to call, most of the bookmakers are offering the shortest odds on Derby County.
Why? Largely because ex-England boss Steve McClaren - infamously dubbed as the 'Wally with the Brolly' - is enjoying a managerial renaissance, via the Netherlands and Germany, since that wet Wembley night.
Media playback is not supported on this device McClaren praises Derby coaching set-up
McClaren has won 24 of his 41 matches since taking over at the Rams last September, albeit failing in the one which mattered most - May's play-off final against QPR.
But they managed to keep the bulk of their squad, including teenage midfielder Will Hughes, plus the eye-catching addition of Real Madrid midfielder Omar Mascarell, 21, on a season-long loan.
"The future is exciting for Derby County," predicts McClaren.
The fallen giants riding the crest of a wave
Wolves set a new all-time third-tier points record of 103 on their way to winning League One last season
Last year Wolverhampton Wanderers suffered the indignity of becoming the first team since Swindon, 18 years earlier, to suffer back-to-back relegations from the top flight.
Out went highly-paid senior players such as Roger Johnson, Karl Henry and Stephen Hunt.
In, along with ex-Millwall manager Kenny Jackett, came a number of young, hungry players with a point to prove.
And the result was instant promotion back to the Championship.
"They're coming up with momentum, like Norwich and Southampton have done before, and will feel they have a real chance of making the top six. I wouldn't rule it out," says Owen Coyle.
Back to back promotions Two teams have enjoyed successive promotions from League One to the Premier League via the Championship: Norwich City in 2010-11 and Southampton in 2011-12.
The returning hero already at odds with his boss
Former skipper Stuart Pearce made over 400 league appearances for Forest between 1985 and 1997
Stuart Pearce was a cult figure at Nottingham Forest for his no-nonsense playing style. Now, 17 years later, he has returned as manager. And it appears he has brought that abrasive approach back with him.
The former England Under-21 coach has already clashed with his bosses - less than 40 days since officially taking charge - after claiming defender Jamaal Lascelles and goalkeeper Karl Darlow were sold to Newcastle United against his wishes.
"The players were sold without my sanction," he said. "I can't defend the decision to sell them because it wasn't my decision."
But midfielder Andy Reid insists there is no problem between the straight-talking Pearce and the Forest hierarchy, who pacified the manager by splashing out a combined £7m for Peterborough striker Britt Assombalonga and Sheffield Wednesday winger Michail Antonio this week.
"The manager coming in, with his history here, has galvanised the club. I'm backing us to win the league," boldly predicts the former Republic of Ireland international.
The Mourinho man stepping out on his own
Aitor Karanka played over 100 games for Real Madrid between 1997 and 2002, winning three Champions Leagues and one La Liga
Brendan Rodgers did it. Andre Villas-Boas did it. Now Aitor Karanka is the latest Jose Mourinho protege trying to prove he can stand on his own two feet.
The Spaniard, 40, spent three years as Mourinho's right-hand man at Real Madrid, before finding himself top of Middlesbrough's wish-list to replace Tony Mowbray last November.
Two-thirds of a Championship season should serve as a settling-in period for the once-capped Spain defender, with many pundits believing he will now hit the ground running in his first full season.
"I think Middlesbrough are going to have a great season," says Owen Coyle when pushed to predict a Championship winner. "They've got a team that has improved from last season."
The Man Utd legend targeting managerial glory
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was nicknamed the 'Baby Faced Assassin' during his goal-laden spell at Manchester United in the 1990s. But the Norwegian is yet to fire on all cylinders at Cardiff City.
After replacing Malky Mackay in a controversial move last January, Solskjaer managed just three wins in 17 league matches as the Welsh club finished bottom in their debut Premier League season.
Losing a host of your better players is usually one of the consequences of losing your top-flight status - and it has been no different for Solskjaer. Gone is one-time England defender Steven Caulker. Gone is promising playmaker Jordon Mutch. Going is Chilean World Cup star Gary Medel.
Not that Solskjaer is fazed - in fact, he sees the overhaul as a chance to imprint his own style on the Bluebirds' squad.
"I expect high standards and I expect to win every game of football I play," he warns.
Listen again to BBC Radio 5 live's Football League season preview programmeNSA leaker, Edward Snowden, has directly communicated with his father for the first time since fleeing the US. The relatives talked on an encrypted Internet chat on Wednesday, ignoring warnings from lawyers of possible interception by US intelligence.
The move was criticized by Edward Snowden’s legal representative in Russia, Anatoly Kucherena, who urged the family to refrain from such forms of communications until father Lon Snowden arrives in Moscow.
"I understand the feelings of Edward and his father. It appears that they have turned out to be more powerful than the concern for safety,” Kucherena told Interfax news agency. “But I would recommend that they won’t get in touch via the Internet anymore and wait until meeting in person."
The decision to use the web to get in touch with his son was made by Lon Snowden “independently, in spite of legal advice from his attorneys,” an unnamed source with knowledge of the issue told ITAR-TASS news agency.
The source added that besides fears of interception by US security services such form of communication makes it problematic to verify if Lon Snowden was actually talking to his son or somebody else.
The American lawyers insist that all communications within the Snowden family should happen through Kucherena’s mediation as it was done previously.
“We must understand that security is the No.1 issue in his [Snowden’s] case” as the whistleblower has the world’s largest state after him, the lawyer stated previously.
Snowden Sr. has already received a Russian visa, saying that he’s planning to come to Moscow this week, without naming the exact date.
Kucherena, previously, stated the NSA leaker will make the important decision on his future only after a family council with his father.
Edward Snowden has received a one-year asylum in Russia on August 1 after spending over a month in |
in the patent, "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles" issued November 8, 1898. He also developed receivers incorporating two tuned circuits. Between 1898 and 1903 Tesla received 10 U.S. patents covering his work in this area.
In 1904 Marconi got his own patent, declaring principles that Tesla had developed. The issue of patent infringement by Marconi was addressed in a lawsuit brought by Tesla in 1915. Nothing significant resulted from this litigation and shortly thereafter the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America itself sued the United States for alleged damages resulting from the use of wireless during WWI. In response, a 1935 ruling by the United States Court of Claims essentially invalidated the fundamental Marconi patent. It was decided that the basic apparatus associated with radio communications had, in fact, been anticipated by Tesla. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this finding on June 21, 1943. The following definition of radio emerged as a result of this case:
A radio communication system requires two tuned circuits each at the transmitter and receiver, all four tuned to the same frequency. [Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company vs. United States]
Additional reading:
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Investigation of Tesla-Type Wireless Propagation [mathematical modeling and physical validation]
After all this there is still the unanswered question, exactly how does the Tesla system work? It appears that early on Tesla himself was somewhat unsure. This especially seems to be the case when construction of the Wardenclyffe facility began. If the laws of physics, and operational parameters of his apparatus were known with mathematical certainty he would not have made the critical design errors alluded to in a 1903 letter to J.P. Morgan. [Wardenclyffe and the World System : The history and design of Nikola Tesla’s wireless telecommunications facility on Eastern Long Island]
He made observations and collected data, but given the primitive state of plasma physics at the time, it would have been difficult if not impossible for him to properly explain what was actually taking place. [See The Generation of Plasma Waves at the Earth's Surface for Telecommunications Purposes.]
Employ mathematical analysis.
Know the difference between facts and assumptions.
Exhibit a balance between theory and experiment.
Validate the technology through testing.
Present day electromagnetic theory based upon Maxwell’s Equations. Undamped wave equation, Laplace-Operator can be decomposed into two parts, scalar and vector. [“Electric Scalar Waves – Review to Meyl’s Experiment,” “Elektrische Skalarwellen” - Review zum Meyl'schen Experiment, André Waser. See also Nikola Tesla’s Wireless Systems.]
Negative solution to Maxwell’s Equations allows creation of a magnetic field without current flow in wire. [Maurice Hately & Fathl Kabbary, 1995
Longitudinal Waves Waves where the variation of the field is partially or totally in the direction of propagation (parallel to wavennumber, k [a vector]. Examples include sound waves and Langmuir waves. Contrasted with transverse waves, where the variation is perpendicular to the direction of propagation, such as light waves.
Plasma Known as the "Fourth State of Matter", a plasma is a substance in which many of the atoms or molecules are effectively ionized, allowing charges to flow freely. Since some 99% of the known universe is in the plasma state and has been since the Big Bang, plasmas might be considered the First State of Matter. Plasmas have unique physics compared to solids, liquids, and gases; although plasmas are often treated as extremely hot gases, this is often incorrect. Examples of plasmas include the sun, fluorescent light bulbs and other gas-discharge tubes, very hot flames, much of interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space, the earth's ionosphere, parts of the atmosphere around lightning discharges, laser-produced plasmas and plasmas produced for magnetic confinement fusion. Types of plasmas include - Astrophysical, Collisionless, Cylindrical, Electrostatically Neutral, Inhomogeneous, Intergalactic, Interstellar, Magnetized, Nonneutral, Nonthermal, Partially Ionized, Relativistic, Solid State, Strongly Coupled, Thermal, Unmagnetized, Vlasov and more.
Plasma Wave A disturbance of a plasma away from equilibrium, involving oscillations of the plasma's constituent particles and/or the electromagnetic field. Plasma waves can propagate from one point in the plasma to another without net motion of the plasma. Terms used to describe the many kinds of waves in plasmas include: Alfven, Circularly Polarized, Cold Plasma, Drift, Electromagnetic, Electron-Cyclotron, Electron Plasma, Electrostatic, Electrostatic Ion, Electrostatic Ion Cyclotron, Evanescent Extraordinary, Ion-Acoustic, Ion Cyclotron, Ion Plasma, Ion Sound, Langmuir, Left Circularly Polarized, Light, Longitudinal, Lower Hybrid, Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD), Magnetosonic, Negative Energy, Nonlinear, Ordinary, Parallel, Perpendicular, Plane, Radio, Right Circularly Polarized, Shock, Space-Charge, Transverse Travelling, Unmagnetized, Upper-Hybrid, Vlasov, Whistler.
Plasma Oscillations Class of electrostatic oscillations which occur at/near the plasma frequency (see entry) and involve oscillations in the plasma charge densities. These modes are also known as Langmuir oscillations or Langmuir waves; in Stix's _Waves in Plasmas_ they are more properly called Langmuir-Tonks Plasma Oscillations.
Ion acoustic wave A longitudinal compression wave in the ion density of a plasma. For more information see (e.g.) Stix, Thomas Howard. _Waves in Plasmas_, American Institute of Physics, New York, 1992.
Soliton Solitons, or solitary waves, are stable, shape-preserving and localized solutions of nonlinear classical field equations, where the nonlinearity opposes the natural tendency of the solution to disperse. They were first discovered in water waves, and there are several hydrodynamic examples, including tidal waves. Solitons also occur in plasmas. One example is the ion-acoustic soliton, which is like a plasma ``sound'' wave; another is the Langmuir soliton, describing a type of large amplitude (nonlinear) electron oscillations. Solitons are of interest for optical fiber communications, where it has been proposed to use optical envelope solitons as information carriers in fiber optic networks, since the natural nonlinearity of the optical fiber may balance the dispersion and enable the soliton to maintain its shape over large distances.]
Note: The C/S structure resembles a “conventional” antenna, with a subsequent shift to the prototypical launching structure at Wardenclyffe.
Possible side effects related to system operation:
Ozone production
Static electricity effects
Electrostatic induction is a better term than dielectric displacement current.
Oscillating dipoles in dielectric medium
What dipoles in the classical vacuum?
Phase conjugation
Phase velocity
Spread spectrum frequency division multiplexing
Channels at 7.8 Hz increments [Corum & Corum]
Top-turn primary of large C/S oscillator pulse-driven by alternator to produce ELF component. (Corum & Corum)
While at C/S Tesla considered or investigated at least 125 different variations of receiver design. [Tesla's Synchronized Receiving Apparatus]
N.T. Museum for information on patents-not-granted application filings, ca. 1900-1902
High-speed break or circuit controller
RF alternator
High-voltage mechanical rectifier
High power solid-state switch and a signal generator
More on Tesla coils...
Master oscillator tuning corresponds with resonant frequency of the top loaded resonator.
The secondary winding length should be approximately ____% of the operating frequency wavelength.
Analyze C/S data for secondary length / resonator frequency relationship
Tesla said the transformer should be tuned to avoid the beat.
Transformer increases voltage, and introduces series inductance. Does this relate to the development of a wave complex?
Is this for an isotropic capacitance, i.e., the smaller of two concentric conducting spheres with larger sphere taken out to infinity?
Is this an accurate statement for real-world conditions?
Influence of elevation upon capacity?
Influence of environment in general upon capacity?
Attempt to mathematically describe what Tesla was claiming about his system.
Precise performance data would be useful in formulating a solution.
Formulate a boundary-value solution for the helical resonator.
Helical resonator is not an antenna loading coil.
The earth as a transmission line
Validate antenna theory, i.e. real-world model of the production of electromagnetic radiation, without speaking of the isotropic radiator as if it actually exists in the real world. Or does it exist?
Electrostatic induction between elevated capacitance and Earth’s surface. [Wasser]
Electrostatic induction between elevated capacitances.
Magnetic coupling or mutual induction between distant helical resonators.
Capture area exceeds physical dimensions of receiving structure & reciprocity with launching structure.
Near field or quasi-near field conditions throughout global network.
Mathematical description of vertical dipole antenna in free space?
Mathematical description of Marconi antenna?
Mathematical description of type-one Tesla antenna?
Mathematical description of type-two Tesla antenna?
Are all four electrically equivalent?
Follow the energy: If the Marconi antenna differs from the Tesla antenna in the production of electromagnetic radiation, were does the energy go in the latter case, i.e., how is the energy dissipated in the Tesla systems?
Incorporate multiple single terminal vacuum tubes in construction of the elevated terminals, as disclosed in teleforce disclosure.
Derive some impressions from the “Oscillator Shuttle Circuit” patent disclosure.
Treating the Marconi antenna as the equivalent of a half-wave dipole, the electric field energy and the magnetic field energy are introduced into the field medium in time-phase with each other. The excitation of the medium by the antenna develops a “forced propagation mode,” degenerating into “natural mode propagation” with energy dissipation taking place over an initial range of transmission. In contrast, the Tesla launching structure is so configured that... the electric and magnetic fields are set up in quadrature phase, i.e., a 90deg phase shift as compared to dipole, corresponding to the natural propagation mode of the field medium. [Gieskieng Antenna, An Antenna With Anomalous Radiation Properties, Harold Aspden, 1987, 1998]
“Slaby improved the equipment, as transmitter served now a spark coil, whose spark gap did not lie in the transmitting antenna - as with Marconi -, but in a circle coupled inductively with the circuit of antennas. Independently of Slaby the physicist Ferdinand Braun in Strasbourg worked on radio systems. It was first, that had really understood, what with Marconi‘s devices electrically took place. From theoretical considerations Braun came to the conclusion to couple the spark gap with the transmitter inductively (resonant circuit, 1898) and also the coherer inductively to the antenna to couple. For this basic concept Braun received the Nobel Prize, together with Marconi.”
Search phrases:
dipole antenna "antenna theory" physics
model
“NEC software”
"EH Antenna"
Search results:
NEC software is based on a solution of Maxwell's Equations. For wire types of structures, it solves Maxwell's Equations using the Electric Field Integral Equation. For surface types of structures, it solves them using the Magnetic Field Integral Equation. The program is capable of solving complicated structures. Its accuracy and limitations are well documented in the scientific literature, and it can easily solve a fairly simple antenna structure.
“Maxwell's Equations are considered an exact solution for electromagnetic radiation.” (?)
"The phasing network aligns the relative phase between the current and the voltage of the radio frequency power signal so that the H-field component of the corresponding electromagnetic signal is nominally in time phase with the E-field component".
This is exactly what happens in every antenna and is called the Poynting vector.
If the E and H fields are not in time alignment, the antenna will not radiate.” (?)
The power feeding your antenna is going to one or more of the following places:
- Radiation from the antenna
- Power dissipation in the antenna
- Power dissipation in the matching network
- Radiation from the coax
- Power dissipation in the coax
- Power dissipation in the transmitter (most people don't realize that transmitters can dissipate power that is not radiated by the antenna)
You will need to do a carefully controlled set of experiments to determine where the power is going in your setup. E-H Antenna Simulation in NEC
End Notes
1. Norton surface wave The ground-wave component of a space wave resulting from refraction of a portion of the reflected-wave component at the Earth-atmosphere interface and induction of electrical currents in the ground. Upon reflection from the Earth's surface the reflected wave undergoes a 180deg phase reversal. When both transmitting and receiving antennas are on, or close to, the ground, and the distance between them becomes great, the direct and reflected components tend to cancel out, and the resulting field intensity is principally that of the surface wave. Because part of its energy is absorbed by the ground, the electrical intensity of the surface wave is attenuated at a much greater rate than inversely as the distance. It is the conductivity of the underlying terrain that determines the attenuation of the surface-wave field intensity as a function of distance. The ground currents of a vertically polarized surface wave do not short-circuit a given electric field but rather serve to restore part of the used energy to the following field. The better the conducting surface layer, the more energy returned and the less energy absorbed.
2. Zenneck surface wave A low frequency transverse magnetic surface wave that travels along the interface between the ground and the air, in which the propagating energy does not radiate into space but is concentrated near the guiding surface. These waves do not contribute significantly to the field produced by a conventional dipole or quarter-wave radiator, however they can be strongly excited by a grounded quarter-wave helical resonator. See slow-wave helical resonator and magnifying transmitter.
Geometry for Zenneck wave propagation.
The complex longitudinal propagation phase constant along the Earth's surface.
Zenneck wave field strength decrease for around-the-world propagation as a function of frequency in kHz. [*]
· Corum, K. L. and J. F. Corum, "The Zenneck Surface Wave," Appendix II of "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves," 1994.
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Kirchoff's Laws and their application to direct current (DC) circuits
Kirchoff's Laws describe the behavior of electrical currents flowing in direct current (DC) electrical circuits. DC circuits consist of one or more voltage sources connected to one or more of the following: resistors, capacitors and inductors.
A simple DC circuit consisting of a DC source and a single resistor
Kirchoff's 1st Law states that the current flowing into a junction in a circuit (or node) must equal the current flowing out of the junction. This law is a direct consequence of the conservation of charge. Since no charge can be lost in the junction, any charge that flows in must ultimately flow out. Kirchoff's 1st Law can be remembered as the rule that uses nodes to study the flow of current around a circuit.
Kirchoff's 2nd Law This law states that for any closed loop path around a circuit the sum of the voltage gains and voltage drops equals zero. In the circuit shown, there is a voltage gain for each electron traveling through the voltage source (symbolized by ) and a voltage drop across the resistor ( iR). Applying Kirchoff's law:
Note that this result has the same form as Ohm's law:
Kirchoff's 2nd Law is based on the principle of conservation of energy. No energy can be lost from or gained by the circuit, so the net voltage change must be 0. Kirchoff's 2nd Law can be remembered as the rule that uses loops to study the flow of current around a circuit. [Source: http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/circuits/kirchoff.ASP, see also http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/circuits/home.ASP.]
A simple RC circuit consisting of a DC source, a resistor and a capacitor
To solve the circuit when it is charging, Kirchoff's second law is applied:
Both i and q are time dependent, so another linearly independent equation is needed to solve the circuit. This equation shows the relation between i and q :
A way to understand this equation is to consider a plot of q(t) vs. t. The slope of the curve at the point [t,q(t)] equals the current i(t) at time t.
Solving (1) and (2) requires an understanding of differential and integral calculus, so only the solutions are given:
Plots of these functions are shown. Note that the charge of the capacitor increases from an initial value of 0 to a maximum value of C. This increase is the reason why the RC circuit is said to be charging. Simultaneously, the current flow decreases from an initial value of - /R to a minimum value of 0. Current ceases to flow when the capacitor is fully charged.
The RC circuit can be discharged only after it has been charged. In the following example, it is assumed that the capacitor is fully charged. Therefore, just before the switch is thrown to disconnect the power supply,
From Kirchoff's second rule,
Again, the relation between i and q is necessary to solve,
Working through the calculus,
Plots of these functions are shown. Note that the charge of the capacitor decreases from an initial value of - /R to a minimum value of 0. This decrease is the reason the RC circuit is said to be discharging. Simultaneously, the current flows with maximum magnitude initially C (but in the opposite direction as in the charging circuit) to a final value of 0. Current ceases to flow when the capacitor has been fully discharged.
[See also:
http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/circuits/branch.ASP
http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/circuits/loop.ASP
http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/electrostatics/fields.ASP
http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/electrostatics/potential.ASP
http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/electrostatics/dipole.ASP
http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/electromagnet/fields.ASP
http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/electromagnet/biot.ASP
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Kirchoff's Laws and their application to alternating current (AC) circuits
Alternating currents or AC currents regularly change their direction of flow. The current and voltage obey equations that involve the sine function and that are derived through the use of calculus:
The term I max refers to the maximum amplitude of the sine wave.
Since sine waves are symmetrical, calculating the average current or voltage over one complete cycle yields an answer of 0. Since this quantity is meaningless, when considering the current of an AC circuit, a quantity known the root-mean-square (rms) current is used. This quantity is calculated to be
A similar quantity is used for voltage:
[Source: http://www.scientia.org/cadonline/Physics/capacitors/ac.asp]
Jan. 13, 2004
Greetings Gary:
I hope that some of the e-mail addresses on this old list are still valid. A retired radio man in Oregon recently asked me about Tesla's proposed system for wireless transmission of power. As you know, there is no easy answer to this question because there is so little clear information about what Tesla was doing in this regard. The following is my reply. I am passing it along to you because I thought it might be of general interest. Perhaps someone would forward it to Margaret Cheney.
I have not attached the material referred to, but I think you can follow the arguments without it. Most of the diagrams referred to are in my article about Tesla in the February and May 1999 issues of the Old Timer's Bulletin (OTB), published by the Antique Wireless Association. I hope that no one will take offence at some of my criticism of other people's interpretations of Tesla's wireless work, and I will not take offence at criticism of my views....
... Since the mathematics would be very difficult, I believe that the best approach would be a numerical computer analysis, tracing the signal from the transmitter terminal and ground to the opposite end of the Earth, and done from a few Hertz to about a megahertz. Since a good mathematical model of the ionosphere and upper layers of the earth or ocean would be required, the same analysis could be done for conventional LF and VLF radio transmitters for comparison.
... My own rough analysis above leads me to believe that the Tesla system would be hopelessly ineffective for wireless transmission of power at the ultra-low Schumann resonance frequencies. If my numbers are correct, I cannot imagine what Tesla was thinking of. Tesla was no fool, but he may have been wrong about harnessing whole Earth resonance, if in fact that was what he planned to do.
... I believe that radio waves and Tesla earth currents would diminish with distance from their respective transmitters at roughly similar rates.
Cheers, HenryEditor's note: By John Kodumal, CTO, LaunchDarkly
Background
Feature flagging (wrapping a feature in a flag that’s controlled outside of deployment) is a technique for effective continuous delivery. For example, you can wrap a new signup form in a feature flag and then control which users see that form, all without having to redeploy code or modify a database. Engineering-driven companies (think Google, Facebook, Twitter) invest heavily in custom-built feature flag management systems to roll features out to whom they want, when they want. Smaller companies build and maintain their own feature flagging infrastructure or using simple open source projects that often don't even have a UI. I was previously an engineering manager at Atlassian, where I’d seen a team work on an internal feature flagging system, so I was aware of the complexity of the problem and the investment required to build a product that addressed the needs of larger development teams and enterprises. That’s where we saw an opportunity to start LaunchDarkly.
We're currently serving over 4 billion feature flag requests per day for companies like Microsoft, Atlassian, Ten-X, and CircleCI. Many of our customers report that we’ve changed the way they do development-- we de-risk new feature launches, eliminate the need for painful long-lived branches, and empower product managers, QA, and others to use feature flags to improve their users’ experience.
General Architecture
You can think of LaunchDarkly as being split up into three pieces: a monolithic web application, a streaming API that serves feature flags, and an analytics processing pipeline that's structured as a set of microservices. We've written almost all of this in Go.
Go has really worked well for us. We love that our services compile from scratch in seconds, and produce small statically linked binaries that can be deployed easily and run in a small footprint. I'd done a lot with Scala at Atlassian, but I'd grown frustrated with the slow compilation times and overhead of the JVM. Our monolith has about a 6MB memory footprint— try that on the JVM!
I'm generally not a fan of large web frameworks like Django or Rails. Too much "magic" for me. I prefer to build on top of smaller libraries that serve specific needs. To that end, both our monolith and our microservices rely heavily on a home-built framework layer that uses libraries like Gorilla Mux.
Our framework makes it trivial to add a new resource to our REST API and get a ton of essential functionality out of the box-- with a few lines of code, you get authentication, APM with New Relic, metrics pumped to Graphite, CORS support, and more.
The web application monolith has a pretty standard architecture. Some of the technologies we use include:
MongoDB -- as our core application data store. It's popular to make fun of Mongo these days, but we've found it to be a great database technology as long as you don't store too many things in it. Anything you can count on your fingers and toes should be fine.
ElasticSearch -- handles user search and segmentation.
Redis -- caching, of course.
HAProxy -- as a load balancer.
Serving feature flags, fast
One of the cool and novel parts of LaunchDarkly is our streaming architecture, which allows us to serve feature flag changes instantly. Think of it like a real-time, in-memory database containing feature flag settings. The closest comparison would be something like Firebase, except Firebase is really more focused on the client-side web and mobile, whereas we do that and the server-side.
We use several technologies to drive our streaming API. The most important is Pushpin / Fanout. These technologies abstract us away from managing these long-lived streaming connections and focus on building simple REST APIs.
We also use Fastly as a CDN. Fastly is perfect for us-- we can use VCL to write custom caching rules, and can purge content in milliseconds. If you're caching dynamic content (as opposed to say cat GIFs), or you find yourself needing to purge content programmatically, or you want the flexibility of Varnish in addition to the global network of POPs a CDN can provide, Fastly is the best choice out there. Their support team is also fantastic.
When assembled together, these technologies allow our customers to change their feature flag settings on our dashboard and have their new rollout settings streamed to thousands of servers in a hundred milliseconds or less.
Analytics at scale
The other huge component of LaunchDarkly is our analytics processing pipeline. Our customers request over 4 billion feature flags per day, and we use analytics data from these requests to power a lot of the features in our product. A/B testing is an obvious example, but we also do things like determine when a feature flag has stopped being requested, so that you can manage technical debt and clean up old flags.
Our current pipeline involves an HTTP microservice that writes analytics data to DynamoDB. If we need to do any further processing (say, for A/B testing), then we enqueue another job into SQS. Another microservice reads jobs off of the SQS queue and processes them. Right now, we're actively evolving this pipeline. We've found that when we're under heavy load, we need to buffer calls to DynamoDB while we expand capacity instead of trying to process them immediately. Kafka is perfect for this-- so we're splitting that HTTP microservice into a smaller HTTP service that simply queues events to Kafka, and another service that processes Kafka queues.
We actually use LaunchDarkly to control this evolution. We have a feature flag that controls whether a request goes through our old analytics pipeline, or the new Kafka-based pipeline we're rolling out. Once the new pipeline is enabled for all customers, we can clean up the code and switch over completely to the Kafka pipeline. This is a use case that surprises a lot of customers-- they think of feature flags in terms of controlling user-visible features (release toggles), but they are extremely valuable for other use cases like ops toggles, experiments, and permission management.
As we scaled this service out to handle tens of thousands of request per second, we learned an important lesson about microservice construction. When we first built many of these services, we thought in terms of building a separate service per concern. For example, we’d build a service that would read in analytics events and serve the autocomplete functionality on the site. The web application would make a sub-request to this service when it had an autocomplete request from the site.
We quickly learned that the need for fault tolerance and isolation trumps the conceptual neatness of having a service per concern. With fault tolerance in mind, we sliced our services along a different axis-- separating high-throughput analytics writes from the lower-volume read requests coming from the site. This shift dramatically improved the performance of our site, as well as our ability to evolve and scale the huge write load we see on the analytics side.
Infrastructure
As you might have inferred, we use AWS as our hosting provider. We’re fairly conservative when it comes to adopting new technologies-- deployment for us consists of a set of Ansible scripts that spin up EC2 boxes for our various services. We don’t yet use ECS or Docker containers-- which by extension means we don’t use anything for container orchestration. A long while back, we spiked a migration to Mesosphere but we ran into enough issues that we didn’t proceed forward. We do think that these technologies are the future, but that future is not now, at least for us.
So maturity is one issue that prevents us from adopting some of the latest whiz-bang ops technology. There are other technologies that we find interesting, like Amazon’s API Gateway but the pricing models just don’t work for us-- at tens of thousands of requests per second, they’re non-starters.
Other services
For customer communications and support, we use Intercom, Slack, and GrooveHQ. We also recently started using elevio, and we've found it's a great way to turn Intercom questions into trackable support tickets.
We use ReadMe.io for our product and developer API documentation, GitHub holds all our code hostage, and CircleCI helps us integrate continuously.
What’s next?
We’re constantly evolving our service to improve efficiency and scale. Besides the Kafka switchover, we’re looking at using Cassandra for some of the work that DynamoDB is doing right now. We also are keenly interested in Disque as a queuing solution, especially because we’ve had so much positive experience with Redis.
More aspirationally, we might try spiking some of our new services in Rust. I’m a functional programmer at heart, and while I am appreciative of the speed and tooling around Go, it would be nice to regain some of the expressiveness and elegance of a functional language while retaining what we like about Go (the fast compilation times, ease of deployment). If we do try it out, we’ll do so in a cautious manner, and isolate the trial to a new microservice somewhere.CHICAGO—Suicide attempts by gay teens -- and even straight kids -- are more common in politically conservative areas where schools don't have programs supporting gay rights, a study involving nearly 32,000 high school students found.
Those factors raised the odds and were a substantial influence on suicide attempts even when known risk contributors like depression and being bullied were considered, said study author Mark Hatzenbuehler, a Columbia University psychologist and researcher.
His study found a higher rate of suicide attempts even among kids who weren't bullied or depressed when they lived in counties less supportive of gays and with relatively few Democrats. A high proportion of Democrats was a measure used as a proxy for a more liberal environment.
The research focused only on the state of Oregon and created a social index to assess which outside factors might contribute to suicidal tendencies. Other teen health experts called it a powerful, novel way to evaluate a tragic social problem.
"Is it surprising? No. Is it important? Yes," said Dr. Robert Blum of Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The study "takes our relatively superficial knowledge and provides a bit more depth. Clearly, we need lots more understanding, but this is very much a step in the right direction," he said.
Blum serves on an Institute of Medicine committee that recently released a report urging more research on gay health issues. Blum said the new study is the kind of research the institute believes has been lacking. The independent group advises the government on health matters.
The new study was published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
Previous research has found disproportionately high suicide rates in gay teens. One highly publicized case involved a Rutgers University freshman who jumped off a bridge last year after classmates recorded and broadcast the 18-year-old having sex with a man.
The study relied on teens' self-reporting suicide attempts within the previous year. Roughly 20 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens said they had made an attempt, versus 4 percent of straight kids.
The study's social index rated counties on five measures: prevalence of same-sex couples; registered Democratic voters; liberal views; schools with gay-straight alliances; schools with policies against bullying gay students; and schools with antidiscrimination policies that included sexual orientation.
Gay, lesbian and bisexual teens living in counties with the lowest social index scores were 20 percent more likely to have attempted suicide than gays in counties with the highest index scores. Overall, about 25 percent of gay teens in low-scoring counties had attempted suicide, versus 20 percent of gay teens in high-scoring counties.
Among straight teens, suicide attempts were 9 percent more common in low-scoring counties. There were 1,584 total suicide attempts -- 304 of those among gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
Hatzenbuehler said the results show that "environments that are good for gay youth are also healthy for heterosexual youth."
The study is based on 2006-08 surveys of 11th-graders that state health officials conducted in Oregon classrooms; Oregon voter registration statistics; Census data on same-sex couples; and public school policies on gays and bullying.
The researchers assessed proportions of Democrats versus Republicans; there were relatively few Independents. Information on non-voters wasn't examined.
Zachary Toomay, a high school senior from Arroyo Grande, Calif., said the study "seems not only plausible, but it's true."
The star swimmer, 18, lives in a conservative, mostly Republican county. He's active in his school's gay-straight alliance, and said he'd never been depressed until last year when classmates "ostracized" him for being vocal about gay rights.
Toomay said signs of community intolerance, including bumper stickers opposing same-sex marriage, also made him feel down, and he sought guidance from a school counselor after contemplating suicide.
Funding for the study came from the National Institutes for Health and a center for gay research at the Fenway Institute, an independent Harvard-affiliated health care and research center.
Michael Resnick, a professor of adolescent mental health at the University of Minnesota's medical school, said the study "certainly affirms what we've come to understand about children and youth in general.
"They are both subtly and profoundly affected by what goes around them," he said, including the social climate and perceived support.
------
Online:
© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.Samsung loves "big." Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you'll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. We dug through everyone's 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this:
At 275,000 employees, Samsung (just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung's machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones and 27 tablets just in 2014.
If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple's headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The "Sony" on this chart only means "Sony Electronics," the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony Financial Services.
Samsung Electronics and Sony Electronics are pretty comparable in terms of product range. They both make at least one of everything you would find in a Best Buy (though Samsung has no game console) along with big component divisions, and Samsung still dwarfs Sony with a two-and-a-half times bigger employee count.
What is Samsung doing with all those people? Well, for starters, the company has a shocking number of software engineers: 40,506 as of 2013. That's almost an entire Google's-worth of people making software. Actually, consider that Google's employee breakdown only lists 18,593 people in "research and development" (read: making software), and it seems Samsung has twice as many software engineers as Google. This army of software engineers is a fairly recent development for Samsung. The software headcount has grown 45 percent since 2011.
Everyone can name notable pieces of Google software, but Samsung's "2x Google" software engineer headcount hasn't created the same level of impact. There is, of course, Touchwiz and Samsung's range of redundant Android ecosystem apps. The company has to port Android and Touchwiz to every new handset it makes, and when you release 70-ish devices every year and have to support everything for around two years, that's a very big project.
Samsung Electronics also includes the display and SoC portions of Samsung, so there is a lot of firmware and driver writing going on. All of those TVs, cameras, and other small electronics also need some kind of software, and the company is exploring writing its own OS with Tizen
As for the non-software side, production makes up the bulk of Samsung jobs, with 159,488 involved in mass production efforts. It should also be no surprise that the majority of jobs are in Korea (33.5%), followed by China (21%), and Southeast Asia (20%). Only 3.9% of Samsung's jobs are located in North America.
While Samsung Electronics is a huge company, it's part of an even bigger conglomerate called "Samsung Group." Whenever we say "Samsung" we're almost always referring to "Samsung Electronics," but Samsung Group is made up of about 80 companies most of which are named "Samsung [thing]," Samsung Electronics being one of them.
Besides the usual Samsung Electronics product roster of phones, tablets, wearables, semiconductors, display panels, TVs, laptops, printers, cameras, home theaters, and home appliances, Samsung Group makes gigantic container ships, arctic ice breakers, self-propelled howitzers, credit cards, oil-refining plants, power plants, wind turbines, water treatment facilities, steel mills, life insurance, theme parks, ultrasound machines, X-ray scanners, Aperture Science-style robotic machine-gun sentries, and the world's tallest skyscrapers (like the Burj Khalifa).
Samsung's setup of companies within companies can lead to crazy situations like one part of Samsung Group buying another part of Samsung Group for billions of dollars.
Samsung likes to cast a very wide net. You can see that in the company's smartphone lineup, the makeup of Samsung Electronics lineup in general, and in Samsung Group. The hunt to offer every product in every category has created a sprawling company, while Apple and Google seem to want to pick and choose their hardware |
of contention between Georgia and the Byzantine Empire, the Byzantine withdrawal from Anatolia brought them in more direct contact with the Seljuqs. Following the 1073 devastation of Kartli by the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan, George IIsuccessfully repelled an invasion. In 1076, the Seljuk sultan Malik Shah I surged into Georgia and reduced many settlements to ruins. Harassed by the massive Turkic influx, known in Georgian history as the Great Turkish Invasion, from 1079/80 onward, George was pressured into submitting to Malik-Shah to ensure a precious degree of peace at the price of an annual tribute.
King David IV the Builder and Georgian Reconquista [ edit ]
The struggle against the Seljuq invaders in Georgia was led by the young King David IV of the Bagrationi royal family, who inherited the throne in 1089 at the age of 16 after the abdication of his father George II Bagrationi. Soon after coming to power, David created the regular army and peasant militia in order to be able to resist Seljuq colonization of his country. The First Crusade (1096–1099) and the Crusaders' offensive against the Seljuq Turks in Anatolia and Syria favored David's successful campaigns in Georgia. By the end of 1099 David had stopped paying tribute to the Seljuqs and had liberated most of the Georgian lands, with the exception of Tbilisi and Hereti. In 1103 he reorganized the Georgian Orthodox Church and closely linked it with the state by appointing as Catholicos (Archbishop) a Crown Chancellor (Mtsihnobart Ukhutsesi) of Georgia. In 1103–1105 the Georgian army took over Hereti and made successful raids into still Seljuq-controlled Shirvan. Between 1110 and 1118 David took Lori, Samshvilde, Rustavi and other fortresses of lower Kartli and Tashiri, thus turning Tbilisi into an isolated Seljuq enclave.
Flag of Georgia during the reign of David the Builder
In 1118–1119, having considerable amounts of free, unsettled land as a result of the withdrawal of Turkish nomads, and desperately needing qualified manpower for the army, King David invited some 40,000 Kipchak warriors from North Caucasus to settle in Georgia with their families. In 1120 the ruler of Alania recognized himself as King David's vassal and afterwards sent thousands of Alans to cross the main Caucasus range into Georgia, where they settled in Kartli. The Georgian Royal army also welcomed mercenaries from Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia (all those westerners were defined in Georgia as "the Franks") as well as from Kievan Rus.
In 1121, the Seljuq Sultan Mahmud declared Jihad on Georgia and sent a strong army under one of his famous generals Ilghazi to fight the Georgians. Although significantly outnumbered by the Turks, the Georgians managed to defeat the invaders at the Battle of Didgori, and in 1122 they took over Tbilisi, making it Georgia's capital. Three years later the Georgians conquered Shirvan. As a result, the mostly Christian-populated Ghishi-Kabala area in western Shirvan (a relic of the once prosperous Albanian Kingdom) was annexed by Georgia while the rest of already Islamicized Shirvan became Georgia's client-state. In the same year a large portion of Armenia was liberated by David's troops and fell into Georgian hands as well. Thus in 1124 David also became the King of Armenians, incorporating Northern Armenia into the lands of the Georgian Crown. In 1125 King David died, leaving Georgia with the status of a strong regional power. In Georgia, King David is called Agmashenebeli (English: the builder).
David Agmashenebeli's successors (Kings Demeter I, David V and George III) continued the policy of Georgia's expansion by subordinating most of the mountain clans and tribes of North Caucasia and further securing Georgian positions in Shirvan. However, the most glorious sovereign of Georgia of that period was Queen Tamar (David's great-granddaughter).
Queen Tamar the Great and the Golden Age (1184–1213) [ edit ]
The reign of Queen Tamar represented the peak of Georgia's might in the whole history of the nation. In 1194–1204, Tamar's armies crushed new Turkish invasions from the south-east and south and launched several successful campaigns into Turkish-controlled Southern Armenia. As a result, most of Southern Armenia, including the cities of Karin, Erzinjan, Khelat, Muş and Van, came under Georgian control. Although it was not included in the lands of the Georgian Crown, and was left under the nominal rule of local Turkish Emirs and Sultans, Southern Armenia became a protectorate of the Kingdom of Georgia.
Georgian Empire
The temporary fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1204 to the Crusaders left Georgia and Bulgarian Empire as the strongest Christian states in the whole East Mediterranean area. The same year Queen Tamar sent her troops to take over the former Byzantine Lazona and Paryadria with the cities of Atina, Riza, Trebizond, Kerasunt, Amysos, Cotyora, Heraclea and Sinopa. In 1205, the occupied territory was transformed into the Empire of Trebizond, which was dependent on Georgia. Tamar's relative Prince Alexios Komnenos was crowned as its Emperor. In the immediate years after, Georgian armies invaded northern Persia (modern day Iranian Azerbaijan) and took the cities of Marand, Tabriz (1208), Ardabil (1208), Zanjan, Khoy (1210), and Qazvin (1210), placing part of the conquered territory under a Georgian protectorate.[45][46][47][48] This was the maximum territorial extent of Georgia throughout her history.[49] Queen Tamar was addressed as "The Queen of Abkhazians, Kartvels, Rans, Kakhs and Armenians, Shirvan-Shakhine and Shakh-in-Shakhine, The Sovereign of the East and West". Georgian historians often refer to her as "Queen Tamar the Great".
The period between the early 12th and the early 13th centuries, and especially the era of Tamar the Great, can truly be considered as the golden age of Georgia. Besides the political and military achievements, it was marked by the development of Georgian culture, including architecture, literature, philosophy and sciences.
Mongol invasion and decline of the Georgian Kingdom [ edit ]
In the 1220s, the South Caucasus and Asia Minor faced the invasion of the Mongols. In spite of fierce resistance by Georgian-Armenian forces and their allies, the whole area including most of Georgia, all Armenian lands and Central Anatolia eventually fell to the Mongols.
In 1243, Queen Rusudan of Georgia signed a peace treaty with the Mongols in accordance with which Georgia lost her client-states, ceded western Shirvan, Nakhichevan and some other territories and agreed to pay tribute to the Mongols as well as to let them occupy and de facto rule more than half of the remaining territory. Although Mongol-occupied Tbilisi remained an official capital of the kingdom, the Queen refused to return there and stayed in Kutaisi until her death in 1245. In addition to all the above hardships, even the part of the kingdom that remained free of the Mongols started disintegrating: The Crown started losing control over the warlords of Samtskhe (southern provinces of Georgia) who established their own relations with the Mongols and by the year 1266 practically seceded from Georgia.
The period between 1259 and 1330 was marked by the struggle of the Georgians against the Mongol Ilkhanate for full independence. The first anti-Mongol uprising started in 1259 under the leadership of King David Narin who in fact waged his war for almost thirty years. The Anti-Mongol strife went on under the Kings Demeter II (1270–1289) and David VIII (1293–1311). Finally, it was King George the Brilliant (1314–1346) who managed to play on the decline of the Ilkhanate, stopped paying tribute to the Mongols, restored the pre-1220 state borders of Georgia, and returned the Empire of Trebizond into Georgia's sphere of influence.
In 1386–1403, the Kingdom of Georgia faced eight Turco-Mongolic invasions under the leadership of Tamerlane. Except in Abkhazia and Svaneti, the invasions devastated Georgia's economy, population, and urban centers.
Early modern period [ edit ]
Ottoman and Iranian domination [ edit ]
In the 15th century the whole area changed dramatically in all possible aspects: linguistic, cultural, political, etc. During that period the Kingdom of Georgia turned into an isolated, fractured Christian enclave, a relic of the faded East Roman epoch surrounded by a Muslim, predominantly Turco-Iranian world. During the three subsequent centuries, the Georgian rulers maintained their perilous autonomy as subjects under the Turkish Ottoman and Iranian Safavid, Afsharid, and Qajar domination, although sometimes serving as little more than puppets in the hands of their powerful suzerains.
By the middle of the 15th century, most of Georgia's old neighbor-states disappeared from the map within less than a hundred years. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 sealed the Black Sea and cut the remnants of Christian states of the area from Europe and the rest of the Christian world. Georgia remained connected to the West through contact with the Genoese colonies of the Crimea.
As a result of these changes, the Georgian Kingdom suffered economic and political decline and in the 1460s the kingdom fractured into several kingdoms and principalities:[50]
3 Kingdoms of Kartli, Kakheti and Imereti.
5 Principalities of Guria, Svaneti, Meskheti, Abkhazeti and Samegrelo.
Georgia after the dissolution of the unified state, 1490
By the late 15th century the Ottoman Empire was encroaching on the Georgian states from the west and in 1501 a new Muslim power, Safavid Iran, arose to the east. For the next few centuries, Georgia would become a battleground between these two great rival powers and the Georgian states would struggle to maintain their independence by various means. Ottoman and Safavid Iranian encroachments started for the Ottomans in the late 15th century, and for the Safavids in the earliest 16th century in which the latter managed to make eastern Georgia a vassal in 1500.[51] In 1555, the Ottomans and the Safavids signed the Peace of Amasya following the Ottoman–Safavid War (1532–55), defining spheres of influence in Georgia, assigning Imereti in the west to the Turks and Kartli-Kakheti in the east to the Persians. The treaty however, was not in force for long as the Ottomans gained the upper hand and launched campaigns during the next Ottoman-Safavid war threatening to end the Persian domination in the region. The Safavid Persians reestablished their hegemony over all lost regions some two decades later including full hegemony over most of Georgia in the Ottoman–Safavid War (1603–18).[52]
After the Ottomans utter failure to gain permanent foothold in the eastern Caucasus,[52] Iranians immediately sought to strengthen their position and finally subject the rebellious Kingdoms of Eastern Georgia and making them integral parts of the empire.[53][54][55] During the next 150 years as Persian subjects, various Georgian kings and nobles rose into rebellion, while at many other times political activity was nothing but dormant, and many kings and aristocrats fully accepted Persian overlordship and converted to Islam as well,[56] for greater boons from their Iranian Shahs. On the maternal side of the Safavid (also Qajar)[57] and the Ottoman Turkish dynasty, many members were from Georgian aristocratic or different lines.[58][59] In the early 17th century Shah Abbas I made a punitive campaign into his Georgian territories after being informed that Teimuraz I of Kakheti with a couple of Christian citizens assaulted the Karabakh governor and killed him. Shah Abbas decided to confront him but Teimuraz I fled to Georgia towards Ahmed I, in order to shelter from Safavid forces. This event brought an end to the Treaty of Nasuh Pasha signed between the Ottomans and the Safavids. In 1616, Abbas I dispatched his troops to Georgia. He aimed to suppress the Georgian revolt in Tbilisi, however the Safavid soldiers met heavy resistance by the citizens of Tbilisi. Enraged, Shah Abbas ordered a massacre of the public. A large number of Georgian soldiers and people were killed and as many as between 130,000[60] and 200,000[61] Georgians from Kakheti were deported to Persia.[62][63] During the same conflict, Teimuraz sent the Queen mother, Ketevan, as a negotiator to Abbas, but in an act of revenge for the recalcitrance of Teimuraz, he ordered the queen to renounce Christianity, and upon her refusal, had her tortured to death.[64] By the 17th century, both eastern and western Georgia had sunk into poverty as the result of the constant warfare. The economy was so bad that barter replaced the use of money and the populations of the cities declined markedly. The French traveller Jean Chardin, who visited the region of Mingrelia in 1671, noted the wretchedness of the peasants, the arrogance of the nobles and the ignorance of the clergy.[65] The various rulers in Georgia were thus often split between acknowledging Ottoman or Iranian overlordship (which often entailed nominal conversion to Islam) or making a bid for independence. The emergence of a third imperial power to the north, Christian Russia, made the latter an increasingly tempting choice.
The 18th and 19th century: from a mainly Iranian-centred theatre to Russian annexation [ edit ]
In the early 18th century, Kartli, the most politically dominant region of all Georgian areas, saw a partial recovery under Vakhtang VI, who instituted a new law code and tried to improve the economy. His reign saw the establishment of the first Georgian-language printing press in 1709.[66]
Following a civil war and the resulting chaos that happened in the whole Safavid Empire after its disintegration and overthrow, the Ottomans and Russians decided to divide large parts of Persia in the Treaty of Constantinople (1724).[67] Georgia got divided by the two. Following Persia's quick resurgence under Nader Shah of Iran, the Ottomans were ousted from Kakheti and the rest of Georgia in 1735 by Nader after two years of rule, which resulted in the quick reestablishment of Persian rule over this time almost all of Georgia.[68] Teimuraz sided with the Persians and was installed as a Persian wali (governor) in neighboring Kartli. However, many Georgian nobles refused to accept the new regime and rose in rebellion in response to heavy tribute levied by Nadir upon the Georgian provinces. Nonetheless, Teimuraz and Heraclius remained loyal to the shah, partly in order to prevent the comeback of the rival Mukhrani branch, whose fall early in the 1720s had opened the way to Teimuraz’s accession in Kartli. He then served as a lieutenant to his father and assumed the regency when Teimuraz was briefly summoned for consultations in the Persian capital of Isfahan in 1744. In the meantime, Heraclius defeated a coup attempt by the rival Georgian prince Abdullah Beg of the Mukhrani dynasty, and helped Teimuraz suppress the aristocratic opposition to the Persian hegemony led by Givi Amilakhvari. As a reward, Nadir granted the kingship of Kartli to Teimuraz and of Kakheti to Heraclius, and also arranged the marriage of his nephew Ali-Qoli Khan, who eventually would succeed him as Adil Shah, to Teimuraz’s daughter Kethevan.[55]
Yet, both Georgian kingdoms remained under heavy Persian tribute until Nadir was assassinated in 1747. Teimuraz and Heraclius took advantage of the ensuing political instability in Persia to assert their independence and expelled Persian garrisons from all key positions in Georgia, including Tbilisi. In close cooperation with each other, they managed to prevent a new revolt by the Mukhranian supporters fomented by Ebrahim Khan, brother of Adel Shah, in 1748. They concluded an anti-Persian alliance with the khans of Azerbaijan who were particularly vulnerable to the aggression from Persian warlords and agreed to recognize Heraclius’s supremacy in eastern Transcaucasia. In 1752, the Georgian kings sent a mission to Russia to request 3,000 Russian troops or a subsidy to enable them to hire Circassian mercenaries in order to invade Persia and install a pro-Russian government there. The embassy failed to yield any results, however, for the Russian court was preoccupied with European affairs.[55]
In 1762, Teimuraz II died while on a diplomatic mission to the court of St. Petersburg, and Heraclius succeeded him as King of Kartli, thus uniting eastern Georgia politically for the first time in three centuries. Erekle II, king of unified Kartli-Kakheti from 1762 to 1798, managed to unify east Georgia politically for the first time in three centuries. He turned towards Russia for protection against Ottoman and most notably Persian attacks. The Russian empress Catherine the Great was keen to have the Georgians as allies in her wars against the Turks, but sent only meagre forces to help them.[69] In 1769–1772, a handful of Russian troops under General Gottlieb Heinrich Totleben fought against Turks in Imereti. The Russian troops retreated before a clash against the Turks. In 1783 Erekle signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with Russia, according to which Kartli-Kakheti got established as a protectorate of Russia, which guaranteed Georgia's territorial integrity and the continuation of its reigning Bagrationi dynasty in return for prerogatives in the conduct of Georgian foreign affairs.[70] The treaty therefore confirmed that Georgia abjured any form of dependence on Persia (who had been the suzerains of most of Georgia for centuries) or another power, and every new Georgian monarch would require the confirmation and investiture of the Russian tsar, and have no diplomatic communications with other nations without Russia's prior consent. But when another Russo-Turkish War broke out in 1787, Erekle maintained diplomatic contacts with Ottoman liege Suleiman pasha from Akhaltsikhe and signed a separate treaty with him. This treaty was ratified by the sultan in the summer of 1787. Therefore, the Russians withdrew their troops from the region for use elsewhere, leaving Erekle's kingdom unprotected. In 1795, the new Persian shah, Agha Mohammed Khan, infuriated with the Treaty of Georgievsk which he saw as an act of treason, invaded the country and captured and burnt the capital, Tbilisi, to the ground,[71] reestablishing Persian rule over Georgia.[72]
In spite of failure to honour the terms of the Treaty of Georgievsk, Georgian rulers felt they had nobody else to turn to. After Erekle's death, a civil war broke out over the succession to the throne of Kartli-Kakheti and one of the rival candidates called on Russia to intervene and decide matters. On January 8, 1801, Tsar Paul I of Russia signed a decree on the incorporation of Georgia (Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti) within the Russian Empire,[73][74] which was confirmed by Tsar Alexander I on September 12, 1801.[75][76] The Georgian envoy in Saint Petersburg, Garsevan Chavchavadze, reacted with a note of protest that was presented to the Russian vice-chancellor Alexander Kurakin.[77] In May 1801 Russian General Carl Heinrich Knorring dethroned the Georgian heir to the throne David Batonishvili and deployed a government headed by General Ivan Petrovich Lasarev.[78] By this, Persia officially lost control over the city and the wider Georgian lands it had been ruling for centuries.[79]
A part of the Georgian nobility did not accept the decree until April 1802 when General Knorring compassed the nobility in Tbilisi's Sioni Cathedral and forced them to take an oath on the imperial crown of Russia. Those who disagreed were arrested temporarily.[80]
In the summer of 1805 Russian troops on the river Askerani and near Zagam defeated the Qajar Persian army during the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813) led by Fath-Ali Shah Qajar who sought to regain full control over Georgia and Dagestan, saving Tbilisi from its attack. Russian suzerainty over Persia's traditionally eastern and southern Georgian ruled territories were nominally finalized in 1813 in the Treaty of Gulistan. In 1810, the kingdom of Imereti (Western Georgia) was annexed by the Russian Empire after the suppression of King Solomon II's resistance.[81] From 1803 to 1878, as a result of numerous Russian wars against Turkey and Persia, several formerly Georgian territories were annexed to the Russian Empire. These areas (Batumi, Artvin, Akhaltsikhe, Poti, and Abkhazia) now represent the majority of the territory of the present state of Georgia. Georgia was reunified for the first time in centuries but had lost its independence.
Modern history [ edit ]
Russian Empire [ edit ]
19th century Georgian noble family
The Russian and Georgian societies had much in common: the main religion was Orthodox Christianity and in both countries a land-owning aristocracy ruled over a population of serfs. The Russian authorities aimed to integrate Georgia into the rest of their empire, but at first Russian rule proved high-handed, arbitrary and insensitive to local law and customs, leading to a conspiracy by Georgian nobles in 1832 and a revolt by peasants and nobles in Guria in 1841.[82] Things changed with the appointment of Mikhail Vorontsov as Viceroy of the Caucasus in 1845. Count Vorontsov's new policies, alleged by himself, won over the Georgian nobility, who became increasingly eager to abandon Islamic influences that had been forced upon Georgia in the preceding centuries and pursued, after the example of Russian nobility, a long-sought process of Europeanisation. Life for Georgian serfs was very different, however, since the rural economy remained seriously depressed. Georgian serfs lived in dire poverty, subject to the frequent threat of starvation. Few of them lived in the towns, where what little trade and industry there was, was in the hands of Armenians, whose ancestors had migrated to Georgia in the Middle Ages.
Serfdom was abolished in Russian lands in 1861. The tsar also wanted to emancipate the serfs of Georgia, but without losing the loyalty of the nobility whose revenues depended on peasant labour. This called for delicate negotiations before serfdom was gradually phased out in the Georgian provinces from 1864 onwards.
Growth of the national movement [ edit ]
Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, leader of the Georgian national revival in the 1860s.
The emancipation of the serfs pleased neither the serfs nor the nobles. The poverty of the serfs had not been alleviated while the nobles had lost some of their privileges. The nobles in particular also felt threatened by the growing power of the urban, Armenian middle class in Georgia, who prospered as capitalism came to the region. Georgian dissatisfaction with Tsarist autocracy and Armenian economic domination [83] led to the development of a national liberation movement in the second half of the 19th century.
A large-scale peasant revolt occurred in 1905, which led to political reforms that eased the tensions for a period. During this time, the Marxist Social Democratic Party became the dominant political movement in Georgia, being elected to all the Georgian seats in the Russian State Duma established after 1905. Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili (more famously known as Joseph Stalin), a Georgian Bolshevik, became a leader of the revolutionary (and anti-Menshevik) movement in Georgia. He went on to control the Soviet Union.
Prince Akaki Tsereteli, prominent Georgian poet and national liberation movement figure.
Many Georgians were upset by the loss of independence of the Georgian Orthodox Church. The Russian clergy took control of Georgian churches and monasteries, prohibiting use of the Georgian liturgy and desecrating medieval Georgian frescos on various churches all across Georgia.[84]
Between the years of 1855 to 1907, the Georgian patriotic movement was launched under the leadership of Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, world-renowned poet, novelist and orator. Chavchavadze financed new Georgian schools and supported the Georgian national theatre. In 1877 he launched the newspaper Iveria, which played an important part in reviving Georgian national consciousness. His struggle for national awakening was welcomed by the leading Georgian intellectuals of that time such as Giorgi Tsereteli, Ivane Machabeli, Akaki Tsereteli, Niko Nikoladze, Alexander Kazbegi and Iakob Gogebashvili.
The Georgian intelligentsia's support for Prince Chavchavadze and Georgian independence is shown in this declaration:
“ Our patriotism is of course of an entire different kind: it consists solely in a sacred feeling towards our mother land:... in it there is no hate for other nations, no desire to enslave anybody, no urge to impoverish anybody. Out patriots' desire to restore Georgia's right to self-government and their own civic rights, to preserve their national characteristics and culture, without which no people can exist as a society of human beings.[85] ”
The last decades of the 19th century witnessed a Georgian literary revival in which writers emerged of a stature unequalled since the Golden Age of Rustaveli seven hundred years before. Ilia Chavchavadze himself excelled alike in lyric and ballad poetry, in the novel, the short story and the essay. Apart from Chavchavadze, the most universal literary genius of the age was Akaki Tsereteli, known as "the immortal nightingale of the Georgian people." Along with Niko Nikoladze and Iakob Gogebashvili, these literary figures contributed significantly to the national cultural revival and were therefore known as the founding fathers of modern Georgia.
Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918–1921) [ edit ]
The Russian Revolution of October 1917 plunged Russia into a bloody civil war during which several outlying Russian territories declared independence. Georgia was one of them, proclaiming the establishment of the independent Democratic Republic of Georgia (DRG) on May 26, 1918. The new country was ruled by the Menshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party, which established a multi-party system in sharp contrast with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" established by the Bolsheviks in Russia. It was recognised by Soviet Russia (Treaty of Moscow (1920)) and the major Western powers in 1921
Georgian–Armenian War (1918) [ edit ]
During the final stages of World War I, the Armenians and Georgians had been defending against the advance of the Ottoman Empire. In June 1918, in order to forestall an Ottoman advance on Tiflis, the Georgian troops controlled the Lori Province, which at the time had a 75% Armenian majority. After the Armistice of Mudros and the withdrawal of the Ottomans, the Georgian forces remained. Georgian Menshevik parliamentarian Irakli Tsereteli offered that the Armenians would be safer from the Turks as Georgian citizens. The Georgians offered a quadripartite conference including Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus in order to resolve the issue, which the Armenians rejected. In December 1918, the Georgians were confronting a rebellion chiefly in the village of Uzunlar in the Lori region. Within days, hostilities commenced between the two republics.[86]
The Georgian–Armenian War was a border war fought in 1918 between the Democratic Republic of Georgia and the Democratic Republic of Armenia over the parts of then disputed provinces of Lori, Javakheti, which had been historically bicultural Armenian-Georgian territories, but were largely populated by Armenians in the 19th century.
Red Army invasion (1921) [ edit ]
In February 1921, the Red Army invaded Georgia and after a short war occupied the country. The Georgian government was forced to flee. Guerrilla resistance in 1921–1924 was followed by a large-scale patriotic uprising in August 1924. Colonel Kakutsa Cholokashvili was one of the most prominent guerrilla leaders in this phase.
Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (1921–1990) [ edit ]
During the Georgian Affair of 1922, Georgia was forcibly incorporated into the Transcaucasian SFSR comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (including Abkhazia and South Ossetia). The Soviet Government forced Georgia to cede several areas to Turkey (the province of Tao-Klarjeti and part of Batumi province), Azerbaijan (the province of Hereti/Saingilo), Armenia (the Lore region) and Russia (northeastern corner of Khevi, eastern Georgia). Soviet rule was harsh: about 50,000 people were executed and killed in 1921–1924, more than 150,000 were purged under Stalin and his secret police chief, the Georgian Lavrenty Beria in 1935–1938, 1942 and 1945–1951. In 1936, the TFSSR was dissolved and Georgia became the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Reaching the Caucasus oilfields was one of the main objectives of Adolf Hitler's invasion of the USSR in June 1941, but the armies of the Axis powers did not get as far as Georgia. The country contributed almost 700,000 fighters (350,000 were killed) to the Red Army, and was a vital source of textiles and munitions. However, a number of Georgians fought on the side of the German armed forces, forming the Georgian Legion.
During this period Stalin ordered the deportation of the Chechen, Ingush, Karachay and the Balkarian peoples from the Northern Caucasus; they were transported to Siberia and Central Asia for alleged collaboration with the Nazis. He abolished their respective autonomous republics. The Georgian SSR was briefly granted some of their territory until 1957.[87]
Stalin's successful appeal for patriotic unity eclipsed Georgian nationalism during the war and diffused it in the years following. On March 9, 1956, about a hundred Georgian students were killed when they demonstrated against Nikita Khrushchev's policy of de-Stalinization.[citation needed]
The decentralisation program introduced by Khrushchev in the mid-1950s was soon exploited by Georgian Communist Party officials to build their own regional power base. A thriving pseudo-capitalist shadow economy emerged alongside the official state-owned economy. While the official growth rate of the economy of the Georgia was among the lowest in the USSR, such indicators as savings level, rates of car and house ownership were the highest in the Union,[88] making Georgia one of the most economically successful Soviet republics. Corruption was at a high level. Among all the union republics, Georgia had the highest number of residents with high or special secondary education.[89]
Although corruption was hardly unknown in the Soviet Union, it became so widespread and blatant in Georgia that it came to be an embarrassment to the authorities in Moscow. Eduard Shevardnadze, the country's interior minister between 1964 and 1972, gained a reputation as a fighter of corruption and engineered the removal of Vasil Mzhavanadze, the corrupt First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party. Shevardnadze ascended to the post of First Secretary with the blessings of Moscow. He was an effective and able ruler of Georgia from 1972 to 1985, improving the official economy and dismissing hundreds of corrupt officials.
Photos of the April 9, 1989 Massacre victims (mostly young women) on billboard in Tbilisi
Soviet power and Georgian nationalism clashed in 1978 when Moscow ordered revision of the constitutional status of the Georgian language as Georgia's official state language. Bowing to pressure from mass street demonstrations on April 14, 1978, Moscow approved Shevardnadze's reinstatement of the constitutional guarantee the same year. April 14 was established as a Day of the Georgian Language.
Shevardnadze's appointment as Soviet Foreign Minister in 1985 brought his replacement in Georgia by Jumber Patiashvili, a conservative and generally ineffective Communist who coped poorly with the challenges of perestroika. Towards the end of the late 1980s, increasingly violent clashes occurred between the Communist authorities, the resurgent Georgian nationalist movement and nationalist movements in Georgia's minority-populated regions (notably South Ossetia). On April 9, 1989, Soviet troops were used to break up a peaceful demonstration at the government building in Tbilisi. Twenty Georgians were killed and hundreds wounded and poisoned. The event radicalised Georgian politics, prompting many—even some Georgian communists—to conclude that independence was preferable to continued Soviet rule.
Independent Georgia [ edit ]
Gamsakhurdia presidency (1991–1992) [ edit ]
Opposition pressure on the communist government was manifested in popular demonstrations and strikes, which ultimately resulted in an open, multiparty and democratic parliamentary election being held on 28 October 1990 in which the Round Table/Free Georgia bloc captured 54 percent of the proportional vote to gain 155 seats out of the 250 up for election, while the communists gained 64 seats and 30 percent of the proportional vote.[90] The leading dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia became the head of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Georgia. On March 31, 1991, Gamsakhurdia wasted no time in organising a referendum on independence, which was approved by 98.9% of the votes. Formal independence from the Soviet Union was declared on April 9, 1991, although it took some time before it was widely recognised by outside powers such as the United States and European countries. Gamsakhurdia's government strongly opposed any vestiges of Russian dominance, such as the remaining Soviet military bases in the republic, and (after the dissolution of the Soviet Union) his government declined to join the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Gamsakhurdia was elected president on May 26, 1991, with 86% of the vote. He was subsequently widely criticised for what was perceived to be an erratic and authoritarian style of government, with nationalists and reformists joining forces in an uneasy anti-Gamsakhurdia coalition. A tense situation was worsened by the large amount of ex-Soviet weaponry available to the quarreling parties and by the growing power of paramilitary groups. The situation came to a head on December 22, 1991, when armed opposition groups launched a violent military coup d'état, besieging Gamsakhurdia and his supporters in government buildings in central Tbilisi. Gamsakhurdia managed to evade his enemies and fled to the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya in January 1992.
Shevardnadze presidency (1992–2003) [ edit ]
The new government invited Eduard Shevardnadze to become the head of a State Council—in effect, president—in March 1992, putting a moderate face on the somewhat unsavoury regime that had been established following Gamsakhurdia's ouster. In August 1992, a separatist dispute in the Georgian autonomous republic of Abkhazia escalated when government forces and paramilitaries were sent into the area to quell separatist activities. The Abkhaz fought back with help from paramilitaries from Russia's North Caucasus regions and alleged covert support from Russian military stationed in a base in Gudauta, Abkhazia and in September 1993 the government forces suffered a catastrophic defeat, which led to them being driven out and the entire Georgian population of the region being expelled. Around 14,000 people died and another 300,000 were forced to flee.
Ethnic violence also flared in South Ossetia but was eventually quelled, although at the cost of several hundred casualties and 100,000 refugees fleeing into Russian North Ossetia. In south-western Georgia, the autonomous republic of Ajaria came under the control of Aslan Abashidze, who managed to rule his republic from 1991 to 2004 as a personal fiefdom in which the Tbilisi government had little influence.
On September 24, 1993, in the wake of the Abkhaz disaster, Zviad Gamsakhurdia returned from exile to organise an uprising against the government. His supporters were able to capitalise on the disarray of the government forces and quickly overran much of western Georgia. This alarmed Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and units of the Russian Army were sent into Georgia to assist the government. Gamsakhurdia's rebellion quickly collapsed and he died on December 31, 1993, apparently after being cornered by his enemies. In a highly controversial agreement, Shevardnadze's government agreed that it would join the CIS as part of the price for military and political support.
Shevardnadze narrowly survived a bomb attack in August 1995 that he blamed on his erstwhile paramilitary allies. He took the opportunity to imprison the paramilitary leader Jaba Ioseliani and ban his Mkhedrioni militia in what was proclaimed as a strike against "mafia forces". However, his government—and his own family—became increasingly associated with pervasive corruption that hampered Georgia's economic growth. He won presidential elections in November 1995 and April 2000 with large majorities, but there were persistent allegations of vote-rigging.
The war in Chechnya caused considerable friction with Russia, which accused Georgia of harbouring Chechen guerrillas. Further friction was caused by Shevardnadze's close relationship with the United States, which saw him as a counterbalance to Russian influence in the strategic Transcaucasus region. Georgia became a major recipient of US foreign and military aid, signed a strategic partnership with NATO and declared |
he wasn’t about to haul a two-year-old mountain of cheese with him when he left office. So he decided to make the famed fromage a featured player at his last public reception at the White House. It was an astute move; there’s nothing people love more than free food. The reception’s 10,000 visitors attacked the wheel of cheese with such fervor that the entire thing was gone within two hours.
The reception took care of the cheese-disposal problem, but the cheddar certainly wasn’t forgotten. There are certain downsides to sending a big honking block of cheese to a warm climate like Washington and having it sit around for a couple of years. Namely, the cheese starts to get a bit fragrant, and a block that massive can give off some serious cheese-stink. Washingtonians could allegedly smell the cheese, which one dubbed “an evil-smelling horror,” for several blocks around the White House before the big party.
Of course, if a cheese has sat in a room long enough, its aroma can permeate into the fixtures. Jackson’s successor, Van Buren, apparently found this out the hard way. The Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume 13 from 1912 reprinted a letter written by former Senator John Davis’ wife, Eliza, in 1838. Mrs. Davis wrote:
The White House has been put in order by its present occupant, and is vastly improved – (Van Buren) says he had a hard task to get rid of the smell of cheese, and in the room where it was cut, he had to air the carpet for many days; to take away the curtains and to paint and white-wash before he could get the victory over it. He has another cheese like that which General Jackson had cut, and says he knows not what to do with it. What a foolish thing for a man to have made such a present to him or anyone else.
While Jackson’s reception cleared the White House of one smelly wheel of cheese, there’s some evidence to suggest that he left at least one other hulking block around as a housewarming gift for Van Buren. According to Gilson Willets’ 1908 book The Inside History of the White House, Van Buren eventually held a charity auction in 1839 to get rid of the last remnants of Jackson’s old dairy holdings, a 700-pound wheel of cheddar that also came from Meacham’s New York farm.
Bonus Fact
In that West Wing episode, a young Nick Offerman ("Ron Swanson") played a man lobbying the White House to build a $900 million wolves-only roadway. Work that into conversation at your next cheese party.
This post originally appeared in 2011.(Newser) – First came the advice that we should all pee in the shower to save the water it takes to flush the toilet. Now, apparently, we should pee in the dark. Researchers in the UK and Israel have found that turning on the light in the middle of the night triggers an "over-expression" of cells linked to the formation of cancer, in the part of the brain linked to the circadian clock.
Okay, the findings are based on subjecting mice to an hour of light every night. But the researchers are quick to conclude that if you're making a middle-of-the-night bathroom run you should avoid flipping on the light, reports the Daily Mail. 'We believe that any turning on of artificial light in the night has an impact on the body clock. It's a very sensitive mechanism." (Read more circadian clock stories.)They’ve signed themselves up for two weeks of treacherous, torturous trudging across 5,661 miles of South America. It's a loop that incorporates the most inhospitable parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, where man and motorised machine will be doing battle with nature in the most extreme Cub Scout Orienteering Badge on the planet.
So if you’re unfamiliar with the Dakar Rally – to give it its full name – relax and take notes as we quickly breeze through its history.
It began in 1977 when a French bloke called Thierry Sabine got lost on his motorbike in the Libyan desert during the Abidjan-Nice rally. Stumped for a way home, he waited to be rescued. Something that turned out to be an enlightening event, as he then dreamt of coming back again – this time getting less lost – and venturing through on a 5,500-mile trek across Africa in a quest for human discovery. Sounds a bit late ‘70s hippie fantasy, doesn’t it? But the next year, he and a few mates did indeed compete in the first event, and from then on it has been an annual celebration that has grown in scale, ambition and worldwide viewership.
In 2015, confusingly, the Dakar Rally doesn't actually take place anywhere near Dakar. Racing cars off-road around that part of the world got a little bit sketchy post-millennia. So, six years ago, the Dakar packed its bags and migrated to South America in order to continue.
This year, the epic two-week cross-country endurance race started in Buenos Aires. Over the next 14 days, competitors will complete 13 stages that will take them west across Argentina – and the mighty Andes – into Chile, then north into Bolivia. They’ll then cross the Andes again from west to east and head back to Buenos Aires on a different route that includes pretty much every kind of inhospitable terrain you can imagine. A mighty Argentinean and Chilean road trip is always a good thing for us at Top Gear...
From the Atacama Desert (the world's driest desert and the closest thing to Mars on Earth), to snow-capped tracks at a head-lightening 13,650 feet, to long road sections and wheel-swallowing sand dunes with gradients that Chemmy Alcott would claim to be too steep, it’s basically a WRC route book dreamed up by a virulent sadist.
It’s also incredibly hard to navigate, as sat navs are banned. Being old school, a route book is the only means of guidance, and even that’s only handed out the night before a stage. If a driver mishears a mumbled note from his co-driver in the barren desert, they can miss a checkpoint by miles – losing monstrous amounts of time and leaving a lot of awkward silences in camp that night.
This year there are 665 competitors aged between 18-73 having a crack at the epic adventure. They’re split among 138 cars, 164 bikes, 48 quads and 64 trucks. The scale of the operation is truly massive, and TG.com has come along to join the ride.
We’re riding on the nomex coattails of the Peugeot Sport team for the first couple of days. No bones about it, this is officially a Big Deal for them. Why? Because it’s the French firm's first rally raid car since the legendary 205 T16 GR and the equally iconic 405 T16 GR, two cars that handed Peugeot outright Dakar wins four years on the bounce from 1987 to 1990. And considering it’s a French event, they’re effectively playing for the home team. No pressure then, chaps.
We’ll try our best to keep you updated with what’s going on over the first few stages, but bear with us, as the desert isn’t known for its 4G signal strength and things are known to get a bit crazy out here.
But to whet your appetite, check out the video below and hit these blue words to see a gallery from scrutineering.
A version of this story originally appeared on TopGear.com.The Chicago Bears informed veteran Anthony Adams on Sunday of the club's intentions to release him, according to the defensive tackle.
The release of Adams will be the first personnel transaction completed under the new front-office regime headed up by new general manager Phil Emery.
A ninth-year veteran, Adams played the first seven games of the 2011 season -- starting two -- but was inactive for five of the team's next eight outings. Adams hadn't been inactive in that many contests since the 2008 season.
Nagging injuries, including a strained calf during training camp, contributed to Adams' struggles. Bears coach Lovie Smith also cited mediocre practice performances as one of the reasons for the veteran's drastically reduced playing time. The emergence of Matt Toeaina and Henry Melton also likely contributed to Adams' release.
Adams registered 17 tackles and eight quarterback pressures in 2011, finishing the season without a sack for the first time since 2008.
Adams was set to enter the final year of a two-year deal signed just before the start of training camp, and was scheduled to receive $1.9 million in base salary while counting $2.65 million against the team's salary cap.
Jeff Dickerson and Michael C. Wright cover the Chicago Bears for ESPNChicago.com and ESPN 1000.The Nuremberg Laws -- a set of Nazi documents from 1935 that bears the signature of Adolf Hitler -- is moving to a new home.
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens said Wednesday that the papers are being transferred to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where they will permanently reside. The Huntington has housed the documents since 1945, when Gen. George S. Patton Jr. gave them to the San Marino museum, which happened to be near the Army leader's own residence.
Consisting of four typewritten pages -- and signed by Hitler and dated Sept. 15, 1935 -- the papers are the only Nuremberg Laws thought to exist in the United States, the Huntington said. The transfer of the documents, of which there are two copies, is effective immediately.
The Nuremberg Laws codified a set of anti-Semitic policies in Nazi-era Germany. The laws classified people of Jewish heritage and stripped them of German citizenship. Historians view the laws as a key step in the Nazi Party's efforts to exterminate the Jewish race.
The decision to transfer the documents came following conversations between the archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero, and the director of the Huntington Library, David Zeidberg. Both parties have agreed that the papers should reside at the National Archives.
"The National Archives is the appropriate permanent home for this material,” Steven Koblik, the president of the Huntington, said in a statement.The U.S.S. Mariner is in no way affiliated with, condoned or given any notice by the Seattle Mariners baseball team, who have their own website. Similarly, we have no association with the ownership group or any businesses related to the Mariners. All article text is written by the authors, all pictures are taken by the authors, who retain copyright to their works. No copying or reproduction of any content here, photographic or otherwise, is authorized. Please email us if you wish to reproduce our work.
So You Want To Celebrate The Mariners, Responsibly
First of all, why? Go nuts. One doesn’t get to feel this feeling very often, so why not choose to believe in the Mariners for as long as you can? Don’t worry about embarrassing yourself. The Mariners have already embarrassed you enough times before. Appreciate what there is to be appreciated. Last year’s team won its first two games, and then it won just 69 of its remaining games. If you made a point of staying responsible early, did it really make the season any better? You don’t win points for staying grounded as a sports fan, and if you don’t have fun when fun is being handed to you, you’re going to hate this, because shit’s probably a’brewin’. Things are going to get worse.
But, all right, I’ll grant that it’s possible to go too far, even with early good feelings. You might consider that, while the Mariners are undefeated and have looked great, the Astros, too, are undefeated. The White Sox are undefeated. The calendar’s going to turn as I’m writing this, but right now in the corner of my monitor it says 11:54 PM, 4/2/2014, which means it’s April 2 and the season lasts after April for kind of a long time. There is so, so much unpredictable baseball coming our way, and odds are at some point the Mariners will even lose a game.
What just happened was that the Mariners finished off a dominant three-game sweep on the road against a division rival. A division rival who might have been projected as the best team in the AL West as recently as the weekend. The Mariners were firing on just about every cylinder, while the Angels’ cylinders, I don’t know, exploded, I don’t know very much about cylinders. The Mariners both walked and hit the crap out of the ball. They struck out Angels hitters and they didn’t walk them much. Not many ways that series could’ve gone better, as it’s a special kind of something to make the other team’s fans boo their own favorites. Angels fans are hating baseball right now, and the Angels have only played the Mariners.
Here’s how I’m choosing to be both excited and reasonable. It’s all about the playoff odds. Even this early, it’s all about the playoff odds. That’s kind of the point, right? I mean, in reality it isn’t — the point is the journey — but we have to lie to ourselves and believe the playoffs are the point. The Mariners, now, are 3-0, and those games can’t be taken away. The Angels are 0-3, and those games also can’t be taken away. Let’s pull some numbers out of thin air. If you thought the Angels were an 86-win team, now they’re an 84.4-win team. If you thought the Mariners were an 81-win team, now they’re an 82.5-win team. Whatever gap there was has been shrunk, and, hey, the A’s are 1-2. It’s never too early for the wins to start counting, and look right now at the FanGraphs playoff odds page.
The numbers aren’t perfect — they’ll never be perfect, until the playoff picture is clinched — but at the moment the Mariners have the sixth-best odds in the American League. They’re right between the A’s and the Indians, and I should note that the Rangers’ projection includes some mistakenly productive numbers for a couple starting pitchers who are transitioning from the bullpen. Of course, five teams make the playoffs, and one of those teams is done in a day, but before it didn’t look like the Mariners were the sixth-best team in the AL, so they’ve gained some ground. Their playoff odds are already up nearly ten percentage points. That is an incredible lift, even if they still aren’t at or over 50%.
43.9%. That’s what FanGraphs says right now. It’s going to change, and eventually that number’s going to be either 0% or 100%. But I’ll take my chances with that number tonight, because that number’s a lot higher than it recently was, and there’s no going backwards since the sweep in Anaheim is already in the books. 43.9%. You know Edgar Martinez’s career OBP? 41.8%. How good did you feel when Edgar would come up to the plate? He made a lot of outs. He reached base a lot too.
The Astros haven’t lost, and the 1985 Mariners were the first Mariners team to open 3-0. They actually opened 6-0. Shortly thereafter they were 7-12. They finished 74-88 and the team kept sucking for years. There are so many ways we know this could go wrong, and this could also go wrong in ways we couldn’t possibly imagine. If the Mariners have done anything, it’s explore the very frontiers of losing baseball. But it’s okay to feel good. It’s okay to feel even better than you did a few days ago. A few days ago, the Mariners were in considerably worse shape. They still had to face a good team in its own ballpark. Now that team’s been obliterated. By this team!
Felix was great, Erasmo Ramirez was great, James Paxton was great, and some of the hitters were great. Some good performances have been in line with expectations, and other good performances have suggested we might want to raise expectations. Everything is going to even out, but it was possible before to envision this Mariners team getting to October. It was clear what would have to happen. Those things have happened so far, and then some. The Mariners can make the playoffs without outscoring the opposition by six runs a game.
Let the Mariners make you feel good. You never know how long that’s going to last. Maybe this year it’ll last a long, long time. No reason not to believe that, yet.
CommentsHassan Rouhani and Vladimir Putin’s view puts them miles apart from UK and US on ending conflict, prime minister tells CBS
Britain and the US are miles apart from Iran and Russia on how to stop the bloodshed in Syria because Tehran and Moscow will not contemplate the end of the Assad regime, David Cameron has said.
The prime minister said working to end the four-year Syrian civil war was the “most difficult, intractable problem” that he and the US president, Barack Obama, had faced, as he gave the clearest explanation yet of the differences between the world leaders.
In an interview on US television on Tuesday, Cameron set out details of the intractable differences after his 45-minute meeting with Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, and Obama’s 90-minute meeting with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, at the UN general assembly in New York on Monday.
Putin says he can work with Obama despite trading barbs on Syria and Isis Read more
He told CBS: “So far, the problem has been that Russia and Iran have not been able to contemplate the end state of Syria without Assad.”
Cameron confirmed for the first time that he agreed with the US that Bashar al-Assad could be part of a transitional government. But he said an explicit deal to work with the Syrian president to take on Islamic State would be “phoney” and self-defeating.
The prime minister said: “I know there are people who think IS [Isis] is even worse than Assad, so shouldn’t we somehow cut a deal with Assad to team up and tackle IS. It sounds enticing, but even if it were the right thing to do, which it isn’t, it wouldn’t work. We need a Syria free from IS and Assad.
“What America said, which I agree with, is that you need a transition. But what is clear is that at the end of that, Assad cannot be the head of Syria. It wouldn’t work.”
Cameron said he would engage in further diplomatic efforts to persuade Russia and Iran that Assad was fuelling terrorism and the rise of Isis with his actions.
He said: “In the end, however far apart we may be with Russia and Iran, those two countries have an influence in what happens in Syria and we need to convince them that a new Syria with a different leader would not necessarily be against their interests, but it would help to get rid of IS.”
Syria crisis: where do the major countries stand? Read more
Russia had sent troops into Syria to bolster Assad because the president was on the brink of falling, Cameron suggested. He acknowledged that it was a fair criticism to say the efforts of Britain, the US and other countries to train moderate rebels had been a military failure.
The prime minister said: “We did work to train moderate opposition forces. We haven’t trained enough, they haven’t been successful enough and they haven’t been a big enough presence.”
Cameron later repeated his earlier contention that Assad should ultimately face international justice for war crimes. He said: “He has done appalling things, massacred hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, millions have fled. In my view, he has broken international law and he has to go.”
The prime minister gave the lengthy CBS interview before heading to a UN event about the coalition against Isis, where he told world leaders that the key to defeating the group was to tackle extremist ideology at its roots.
Echoing his previous speeches on extremism, he said freedom of speech did not mean “freedom to hate” and the world needed to deal with the “poisonous” ideology of Islamist extremism in schools, prisons and universities.
Cameron is now heading to Jamaica and Grenada on a trade trip, leaving the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, to give the UK’s main address to the UN general assembly in his place.
Putin has already gone home after attending the assembly for the first time in a decade.HOUSTON – Royal Dutch Shell will end its title sponsorship of the Houston Open golf tournament after more than a quarter century, the oil company said Wednesday, blaming the energy-market crash that is forcing drillers to tighten their belts.
Each year, the weeklong Houston Open draws thousands of golf enthusiasts, professional golfers and oil executives trying to spend time with clients. Shell’s arrangement with the Houston Golf Association and the PGA Tour, which will end after next April’s tournament, helped contribute more than $60 million to local charities and youth organizations, the company said.
“These programs have had a significant and lasting impact on our community,” the company said. “We could not be more proud of what we have accomplished together, and we wish the HGA, the PGA TOUR and the many charitable organizations they support the greatest success in the future.”
Shell declined to comment beyond a press release.
This story was first reported by the Houston Business Journal.Spread the love
With protesters thronging the streets of Chicago demanding police accountability and clamoring for the resignation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city’s police union is frantically trying to destroy decades of records documenting police misconduct. As is always the case, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) sees “officer safety” as the highest priority – including protection from legal accountability.
“I protect all my members, and I will continue to do that,” Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago FOP, explained to CNN.
An injunction filed by the FOP insists that preserving those records violates Section 8.4 of its bargaining agreement with the City of Chicago. That provision specifies that all files of misconduct investigations and officer disciplinary histories “will be destroyed five (5) years after the date of the incident or the date upon which the violation is discovered, whichever is longer, except that not sustained files alleging criminal conduct or excessive force shall be retained for a period of seven (7) years after the date of the incident or the date upon which the violation is discovered, whichever is longer….”
Once that deadline passes, the episode of excessive force or other misconduct “cannot be used against the Officer in any future proceedings in any other forum” unless it deals with a matter subject to litigation during the five year period or “unless a pattern of sustained infractions exists.” This element of the bargaining agreement creates an incentive for the police department to delay, obstruct, and obfuscate investigations of misconduct and abuse complaints until the deadline expires – and to keep the process opaque to the public.
“Basically, they bargained away transparency and accountability,” points out Chicago University Law Professor Craig Futterman, who is fighting in court to prevent the destruction of the officer misconduct records. “In a world where an incident like [the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald] happens and the public statements are `Deny, deny, deny,’ and then close off and circle the wagons, and then a code of silence and an exoneration at the end of the day – in that system, you cannot create public trust,” Futterman explained to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.
Futterman, who founded Chicago University’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, has spent fifteen years trying to end the official impunity of police officers. Chicago, Futterman told the Sun-Times, “is the capital of the code of silence.”
Working with independent journalist Jamie Kalven, Futterman was able to exhume the video of the McDonald shooting and the autopsy report showing that he had been shot sixteen times – evidence that completely contradicted the official account that described the shooting as “self-defense.” Jason Van Dyke, the officer who shot McDonald, has been charged with first-degree murder, an all but unprecedented development involving an on-duty police shooting in Chicago.
Through freedom of information requests, Futterman has also pried loose a small portion of the disciplinary files, which are available in an online database. The records Futterman seeks to preserve date back to 1967, and cover decades of corruption and abuse, including the now-notorious Jon Burge torture scandal and the unlawful detentions, interrogations, and abuse of citizens at the Homan Square “black site.” The FOP-negotiated contract requiring the destruction of records after five years went into effect on July 1, 2012 – and it is by no means clear that it applies retroactively to misconduct cases that occurred prior to that agreement. The FOP is essentially seeking to re-litigate the agreement for the purpose of obstructing an ongoing Justice Department investigation into the Chicago PD.
Although FOP President Angelo pouts that “I don’t understand why a 77-year-old retirees’ complaint in 1967 needs to be on a database,” the records his union seeks to destroy include disciplinary histories directly relevant to very recent incidents of excessive force.
According to CNN, “a search for Jason Van Dyke, the officer charged with the first-degree murder in the killing of Laquan McDonald, shows that he had 19 complaints before he fatally shot the teen, including 10 for use of force. The officer who shot and killed Cedrick Chatman has 30 complaints in the system, including 10 for use of force. None of the complaints, for either officer, resulted in disciplinary action. Van Dyke’s attorney says his client feared for his life in his encounter with McDonald. The Chatman shooting was ruled justified.”
Preserving the records, and making them publicly accessible, could help identify officers who pose potential threats to the public they supposedly serve. The FOP, in keeping with its long-established priorities, is more concerned about preserving blue privilege.
One measure of the depth and extent of the official privilege enjoyed by Chicago police officers is offered by the case of former CPD Command Jon Burge, who tortured and otherwise abused more than 100 Chicago residents over the course of three decades. Several innocent people were imprisoned on the basis of confessions extracted by Burge through torture – including the use of electric shocks, beatings, and suffocation with plastic bags. Last April, Mayor Emanuel approved a $5.5 million dollar reparations package for Burge’s victims. Even as city taxpayers absorbed the cost of Burge’s crimes, they continued to pay his pension: Despite being convicted in federal court for perjury and imprisoned in 2010, Burge continued to receive his $4,000-a-month pension.
Some of Burge’s erstwhile comrades in torture are still under investigation – and the documents necessary to continue that probe would be fed into a shredder if the FOP prevails in court. Those records most likely would also contain information about the Chicago PD’s off-the-records interrogation facility at Homan Square, a CIA-style “black site” where thousands of people were detained without cause and interrogated without constitutionally mandated access to an attorney, reports the Guardian of London.
An estimated 82 percent of the 7,000 people who were arrested and illegally held at Homan Square are black. Angel Perez, who was chained to a metal bar in a second-floor interrogation room at the facility in October 2012, alleges that he was sodomized with a metallic object by officers who taunted him with threats of prison rape if he didn’t cooperate. During a December 15 hearing before the Cook County Commission, several other detainees described being denied access to lawyers and being pressured to become police informants.
“There they interrogated me, asking me things that I had no idea about, for murder and things of that nature,” testified Kory Wright. “And I sat in that room, and they turned the temperature up and I was zip-tied to a bench.”
This Gitmo-style “rendition” site operated under Rahm Emanuel’s tenure, and it features very prominently in the accumulating demands for his resignation. With protests growing in intensity, the Mayor under political siege, and the police department desperately seeking to destroy evidence of long-festering corruption and misconduct, Chicago’s municipal government is beginning to look like an authoritarian dictatorship in the throes of a terminal crisis – Tehran circa 1978, perhaps, or Romania in December 1989.This already has the feel of a game that will set the tone for both clubs’ fortunes. Burnley should give a debut to Johann Berg Gudmundsson but he is their only outfield signing so far – Aston Villa’s Ashley Westwood may follow – and there are concerns that last season’s Championship winners are thin on numbers and quality. Swansea must adjust to losing Ashley Williams and André Ayew in quick succession and the match comes too soon for record signing Borja Bastón. Both squads should look stronger at the month’s end but a negative start could be hard to claw back. Nick Ames
Kick-off Saturday 3pm
Venue Turf Moor
Last season n/a
Referee Jon Moss
Last season G25, Y71, R5, 3.24 cards per game
Odds H 6-4 A 2-1 D 9-4
Burnley
Subs from Pope, Robinson, Lafferty, Flanagan, Kightly, Hennings, Ulvestad, Jutkiewicz, C Long, K Long, Tarkowski, Darikwa, Anderson, Dumigan
Doubtful Flanagan (match fitness), Ward (hamstring)
Injured Barnes (hamstring, 20 Aug)
Suspended None
Form n/a
Discipline (last season) Y50 R0
Top scorer (last season) Gray 25
Swansea City
Subs from Birighitti, Nordfelt, Tremmel, Tabanou, Fulton, McBurnie, Van der Hoorn, Rangel, Ki, Sigurdsson, Emnes, Montero, Barrow
Doubtful Fernández (groin), Ki (match fitness)
Injured Bastón (match fitness, 20 Aug), Taylor (match fitness, 20 Aug)
Suspended None
Form n/a
Discipline (last season) Y60 R1
Top scorer (last season) Ayew 12TV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place.
“Dark Money” is a perfectly fine episode of television. As an episode of The Good Wife, it’s pretty mediocre. It isn’t tone deaf like the last episode before its winter break. As I figured, “The Debate” was really a one-off endeavor, a chance for the show to try—and fail, spectacularly—to comment on the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Except for a quick mention of skipping out on the debate from Prady, most of last episode’s drama seems forgotten.
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After a several-week break, I guess I was just expecting The Good Wife to snap back with one of its distinctly brilliant episodes. But “Dark Money” sort of just eases us back into things with a business-as-usual feeling. Again, it’s fine. There’s some good stuff here. But it’s also kind of boring, and The Good Wife is hardly ever that.
Part of the problem with this episode is the main problem of this whole sixth season: All the major story arcs are just so disconnected. Thematically, they mostly contain a lot of the same major throughlines that The Good Wife has explored since the beginning: desire, the convergence of personal and professional lives, the murkiness of justice. But in a very literal sense, the show’s main characters all exist in completely different worlds right now. That’s certainly true of this episode, which places Cary and Diane in another Colin Sweeney case, Alicia in her campaign, and Kalinda and Bishop in some strange subplot that doesn’t really go anywhere. Cary, Diane, and Alicia are barely in the same room at the same time tonight, and it’s a weird choice, because this is one of the best ensembles on television, but they seem weaker when divided.
Maybe if Alicia’s campaign were a more compelling arc, it would work. In terms of character growth, the campaign has been great for Alicia. We’ve seen her slipping into her darker side, and cutthroat Alicia can be super fun. But the campaign just doesn’t have the juice it needs to be an exciting part of the show right now. This week, Prady and Alicia both attempt to court Guy Redmayne, a rich but homophobic and sexist asshole. In her meeting with him, Alicia pushes back against his physical and verbal sexual harassment, but when he tells her he’s supporting her campaign and gives his reason—“I don’t like fags”—Alicia doesn’t turn the dark money down. Prady, on the other hand, openly rejects Redmayne in their meeting when Redmayne continues to grossly denigrate Alicia. From purely a campaign strategy perspective, Alicia’s smart to take Redmayne’s money. But I just don’t know if I fully buy that she really would. By episode’s end, she’s definitely feeling some regret, but Alicia has buried herself so deeply in this campaign and it’s becoming harder and harder for me to remember why. Does she even remember?
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Meanwhile in their little universe, Diane and Cary are trying to prove Colin Sweeney didn’t murder his wife…again. If it weren’t for Dylan Baker’s consistently stellar performance, I’d be a little more irritated with the show for coming back to this well. But alas, once again, Mr. Sweeney finds himself in a courtroom, only this time it starts out with a defamation case against Call It Murder, a TV show that depicts a pretty precise retelling of how he killed—ahem, allegedly killed—his wife. It’s an amusingly meta move for a show that rips many of its week-to-week cases from the headlines to tackle a defamation case about a show that rips its stories from the headlines. But you can see all of the twists in tonight’s case coming from a mile away. These Sweeney cases all tend to follow the same pattern.
So that just leaves Kalinda, who is the most removed from everyone else right now, making it hard for me to believe the character’s send-off is going to be emotionally grounded in the rest of the show. Tonight, Bishop calls in a favor and asks Kalinda to pick up his kid Dylan from school every day for two weeks. There’s a lot of suspense that builds to nothing, and that’s sort of the point. We’re made to believe—as Kalinda does—that Bishop is up to something here, when really it turns out that he’s just a dad who feels disconnected from his son. Fine. Bishop’s normal dad problems have been a part of what makes him interesting as a villain. But I’m not super into Kalinda just being used as a device to humanize Bishop here. The whole side plot could have been executed without her, and it feels like the writers just truly have no idea what to do with her character anymore.
Stray observations:
In the last two minutes, the show and Alicia Florrick both remember Grace exists.
Every time Colin Sweeney returns, I become more and more sure he really did kill his wife, and I think Alicia does too, which is why it also becomes harder and harder for me to swallow the fact that they keep him on as a client. But I guess it all just comes down to money.
I love all of the fictional shows that exist in The Good Wife’s universe, because they’re all so bonkers and over-the-top that they seem like Kroll Show parodies. Call It Murder is no exception.
I miss Finn.
I don’t miss Peter.
“I’d like Marissa to stay.” - Alicia Florrick, but also me, because Sarah Steele is a goddamn delight, but man did I roll my eyes hard when she says she joined the IDF for her novel.
It’s only a matter of time before it gets out that Bishop is financing Alicia’s PAC, right?Middle East television correspondents donned flak vests, helmets, and other military gear last week in anticipation of a crushing wave of violence and hysteria they were certain would follow President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
Experts on the region who uniformly opposed Trump's move—which the U.S. Senate voted 90-0 in favor of as recently as last summer—predicted utter chaos and essentially called for the U.S. to yield its foreign policy to the veto of a mob.
NBC's Richard Engel was ready.
CNN's Ian Lee got suited up.
CBS reporter Seth Doane strapped on the vest.
ABC's James Longman was prepared.
.
They might have been more comfortable in their regular clothes. In an unsurprising development, the promised "days of rage" gave us much roaring but comparatively little violence.
While stating a fact and removing a bargaining chip from a non-existent peace process, the Trump administration's decision didn't do much to the status quo except to reaffirm the ignorance of the so-called experts.Ovince Saint Preux is coming off of an impressive TKO victory over Patrick Cummins at UFC Fight Night 15. It was his second win in a row and a victory that Saint Preux was happy about because Cummins was a wrestler and so many doubted him after his unanimous decision loss to Ryan Bader.
“That victory was definitely a blessing within itself,” said Saint Preux. “I have been training really hard and I shut up a lot of critics. Everybody was more focused with me losing to Bader than me actually going out there and fighting my own fight. They all thought I was going to lose to another wrestler, so you know, that victory showed I could beat a wrestler.”
The victory was a big one for Saint Preux and he talked about whom he would like to fight next after his TKO victory over Cummins.
“I would say a fight with Rampage Jackson is probable,” said Saint Preux when talking about whom he would like to fight next. “August 8 card is in Nashville. Rampage being from Tennessee, and myself living in Knoxville, I think it would be a good fight.”
Saint Preux’s last three victories have come from KO/TKO, but lately he has been knocking out something else; hunger in Haiti.
Ovince Saint Preux is a first generation Haitian-American and is very proud of his Haitian culture. Saint Preux talked about how being Haitian has influenced his life.
“It had a big influence on my life just for the fact that I grew up in a Haitian house,” said Saint Preux “It was strong. My parents are strong-minded people and they wanted their kids to be strong-minded too.”
So, to help knockout hunger in Haiti, Saint Preux teamed up with Harvest107. For those of you that are not familiar with Harvest 107, Executive Director Gary Pfaff explained what Harvest107 is and what they do.
“The goal of Harvest107 is to provide safe and nutritious food for every person on the planet,” said Pfaff about Harvest107. “To put that in much more of a tangible description |
car next, the carbon-fibre air diffuser shattering like glass from the heavy impacts. Weiss remembered why she wanted to take her own car over the truck. With a top speed of well into three hundred kilometres per hour, the trip would have taken no more than twenty hours, instead of four days.
"Why?! So you could spend time with her? Unbelievable!"
The choice to take Ruby's truck had been a selfish one on her part. She knew they would need to take the Atlas municipal highways as the big VHI truck couldn't match the hundred and forty kilometre-per-hour minimum speed limit on the Autobahn network. This meant she could spend more time alone with the girl. And being alone would have left her open to activities. Activities she never got.
"Worthless scrap!"
Moving around to the other side with her vision clouded in a red haze, another blow was landed on the driver side door, leaving a manhole cover-sized dent in the delicate aluminum bodywork.
"I hate you!"
Whether or not the words were directed at herself or the car didn't matter. All that mattered to her was the destruction of the once elegant white sedan. The Klasse-7, to some, was an unattainable dream car with its massive top speed, brutal acceleration, and ultra-precise handling that only the elitest of elite could afford. And this car exactly was even more elite still, being the only one with a factory installed manual transmission.
"RRAAGHH!"
With a final blow to the hood in the approximate area of the battery, the alarm and flashing lights were silenced as no doubt one of the battery terminals had just been punted through the battery case itself. The electric door locks all unlatched and the sloping rear hatch sprung open as the power was cut. A neat safety feature in the event of electrical failure, but right now it seemed almost as if the car was mocking her. With a cry, she tossed to sledgehammer across the garage floor, where it thudded to a stop underneath the Range-Cruiser. She heaved her chest a few times, the tears welling up in her right eye.
"We could have been there..."
Her voice went quiet in the now-silent garage.
"We could have been there when she wasn't dying..."
A few days lead time would have meant Pyrrha would have been alive. Or slightly more alive than she had been, right at the end. She sniffled, wiping her nose on her sleeve and stumbling slightly.
"I... could have been...there when it happened..."
Another pause. The ringing in her ears was reaching an unbelievable level of deafening. Her left leg tried to give way as the alcohol had made its way into her extremities. Something in her head clicked.
"I could have been there to comfort her! It could have been ME she ran to!"
With a powerful kick, she planted her boot into the fine glass right-side headlight, shattering the assembly with the end of her foot. The glass fragments dug into the rich leather of her boot, ripping back the material and shredding the finish. With a stumble, she fell backwards onto the floor, pulling her foot free with an awkward twist of her ankle. Pain shot up her leg, numbed by the volume of booze in her system, and the feeling didn't quite pass her hips.
"Why?"
With a grunt, she pushed herself onto her feet again, her legs once again trying to knock her down. She wiped the tears out of her right eye. A cursory glance back over at the workshop got her blood boiling again. Her hammer was out of her reach, and her leg hurt too bad for another kick. Unsatisfied but in pain, she left the garage with haste. Marching up the two flights upstairs was a painful task on her now-wonky leg and her aching arms.
The grand staircase was steeper than she remembered it being not even a week prior when she had descended down them to the grand dining room to have crepes with the younger woman. It took her much more energy than her body had at this point to pull herself to the top of the carpeted stair, the railing trying its hardest to freeze her hand to it. The house was too cold for her liking, she was noticing. This was to be expected, of course, as she wasn't supposed to have returned for another five days or so, so the building's HVAC system was likely set on power-saving mode. It wasn't cold enough to see her breath as she stomped drunkenly down the upstairs hallway to her room, but it was cold enough to be uncomfortable.
With a purposeful shove from her shoulder, the door with the little Weiss badge on it swung open and bounced against the doorstop with a loud bang. The lights in her room came on automatically as she entered, lighting up the vast expansive bedroom. It had been expertly cleaned and kept up in her absence, all the clothes she had left out on the floor and bed had gone back to the closet, and the bed had been made exactly to her liking. Whoever had cleaned had also bothered to place her stuffed collectible dolls back up in their display cabinet. She eyed the room with distaste. Nearly two-thousand square feet of room stared back at her, beautifully furnished and expensively so. More mental calculations filled her head as she scanned the room.
Sixteen million lien in furniture, fabrics, and flooring. Just in the one room. The rug that sat just at the door was itself nine grand. Nine! She wanted to scream. It was all for show. All of it. Her body twitched. With a very well stifled shout, she stomped over to the makeup table, that was more of a makeup department than just a single table. She kicked the artist's stool out of her way, slamming her hands to the table and peering at herself in the mirror.
"Ugly..."
Muttered under her breath and so quiet that even she barely heard it, Weiss sniffed loudly at her reflection. Her face was a scarlet mess of pain. There was a blood stain under her left nostril. Her eyes were bloodshot red and puffed up, and a streak of dried salt stained down her right cheek. Ever since the fight with the possessed suit of armour and the acquisition of the gaudy scar, she had only ever been able to cry out of one eye. And it always left her like this, with one cheek stained with makeup and salt and not the other. On the plus side, she only used fifty percent as many tissues during sad movies compared to anyone else.
"Fucking joke..."
She gave herself a pitiful smile. Her teeth, stained by both wine and airport coffee, glared back at her, making her look down at the countertop. The little plush doll of her favourite TV show character sat against the mirror, leaning on a paint-can sized tub of concealer. With a smile, she picked the little toy into her hands. She thumbed the tag out of habit, reading Valerie the Redeemer on the little stripe of white fabric. She remembered loving the show the little character was from. Tales From Neverwinter, she remembered. It was a show about the comical battles of the character and her pluck sidekick, Ephriam the Huntsman. A dumb show, in hindsight. But it was supposed to teach a lesson, one of cultural acceptance and co-operation.
Interesting that her favourite show promoted positive human-faunus relations, especially after she had been lectured for years to the contrary by her father. Weiss nearly spat at her reflection just from the thought. She hated being his daughter. She hated him. Years of oppression, years of deceit, and years of being a dick to his children. And all so he could claim the Schnee fortune for himself. He wasn't even actually a Schnee! He was born Jacques Gelè, heir to nothing special at all save for maybe a small rural bank somewhere in Vacuo. In marrying her mother and abusing her last name for himself, he was able to collect on the vast fortune and become probably the richest man in all of Remnant.
That was, of course, until Weiss herself was given control of the family business. But she was still a Schnee. And she hated it every single day. She hated the insidious implications the name itself brought on. A short but violent history of gross misconduct at the hands of her father had turned what was once a prosperous and amicable company into one that promoted the enslavement of thousands. The specific enslavement of faunus, no less. 'Oh, but we do pay them'. Sure, with lies, a phony car towing service, and eight percent of what would have been considered minimum wage at the time.
The reparations alone had been something to the effect of seven hundred billion lien. The company had nearly gone into receivership twice. She had broken down and sold so many assets that she had very nearly closed the doors and shut down. It was only her own stubborn persistence that kept the business open, including hiring a teem of engineers to produce a whole new series of autonomous mining equipment to replace the workers deep in the dust mines, as well as boosting the wages well above what would be considered even high income. Even the lower-level employees were paid like brain surgeons. Weiss hated the company she ran. Not because it cost her huge amounts of money, no that part was okay. She hated it because it cost her her soul.
"What are you?"
She questioned hr reflection, wiping her cheek on the back of her palm. Of course, the reflection didn't respond. Everything that she was was wrong. A soiled name, attached to what she saw as a soiled person. Useless.
"...And why do you even exist!?"
With a shout, she slammed her fist into the mirror, shattering the lower half into a pile of razor-sharp shards. A sharp pain shot up her arm like she had been electrocuted. Her face in the mirror twisted, her teeth bared. Her hand felt wet as she pulled it off the mirror's backing board, and examining her knuckles, she saw the gallery of cuts she had just given herself. Blood seeped from the lacerations, down her wrist and arm. She looked back at the mirror. Or what was left of it, anyways. The fractured glass turned her face into an abstraction. Some of her hair fell into her face, obscuring her vision.
Her bloodied hand gripped her hair, pulling it from her face. The longer she looked at her reflection, the tighter her grip became, and the more blood seeped out and into the stark white locks. Her other hand fell against the pile of mirror shards, gripping one in her fingers. The pain in her fingers was apparent, but not as scorching as she liked. She wanted nothing more than to pull her own hair out until she passed out from the pain.
She hated her hair.
It didn't represent her.
It was a symbol of her resistance to her father, who hated women with short hair. She had grown it out to exuberant lengths out of spite so her long hair would collect around the house. And now it had been kept this way. And she hated it. She hated what the long hair represented.
"You are worthless..."
With a flick of her neck, she brought the glass shard up to the hand which gripped her hair. The glass dug into her neck, marring a tiny cut. Her breathing increased quickly as the muscles in her arms flexed, gripping both her hair and the glass tighter. Her hands burned from the pain.
"No more... Never again..."
With a tiny cry, she drove the piece of mirror through her hair, severing the whole of her ivory locks. Dropping the mass of hair to the ground, she tossed the piece of glass across the room, where it shattered into smaller pieces against the wall. Her lungs burned through the tears. Her head felt...well, in pain from the alcohol, impact with the suit of armour and floor, but it did feel lighter. Almost as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Almost.
"I hate you..."
Her short-but-fluffy-haired reflection glared back at her, making her finally turn away from the counter. With a final sob, she threw herself face-first at the swimming pool-sized bed in the middle of the room. She grabbed a pillow, and pulling it over her head, blocked out all the light in the room.
As much as everything was spinning, it was at least in visible.
Love sucked. Life sucked. She was stuck without the one thing she wanted or even cared about. Ruby was gone from her life, and there was nothing she could do about it.
She screamed into the fine silk sheets.
The world ceased to matter.David Mundy and Nat Fyfe will both suit up in the first NAB Challenge game for the Dockers
FREMANTLE superstar Nat Fyfe and former skipper Matthew Pavlich have been named in a strong Dockers squad for Friday's NAB Challenge clash against an inexperienced Richmond team.
The Tigers are leaving most of their big names behind for the trip to Mandurah, with skipper Trent Cotchin, Jack Riewoldt, Brett Deledio, Alex Rance and Dustin Martin sitting out the trip west.
Defender Nick Vlastuin will captain the Tigers in Cotchin's absence, while assistant coach Brendon Lade will take over the reins from Damien Hardwick for the match.
Fyfe has had an injury-interrupted pre-season recovering from surgery on his fractured leg and a bulging disc suffered in December, but the Brownlow medallist's powerful intraclub performance last Friday dispelled any doubts over his fitness.
Fremantle coach Ross Lyon said Fyfe's back injury was very minor.
"He's had a full summer and he's back early so it couldn't have been too bad," Lyon said.
"It was blown out of all proportion. We understand why. He's a very important player, reigning Brownlow medallist. It was a mountain out of a molehill to be honest."
New skipper David Mundy, Aaron Sandilands and Michael Walters are some of the other stars set to line up in Freo's first hit-out of 2016.
Lyon said the experienced trio of Mundy, Pavlich and Sandilands would play the majority of the NAB Challenge.
The Dockers' first draft pick Darcy Tucker is in the mix to pull on the purple guernsey for the first time, as is former Box Hill mature-age defender Sam Collins.
Star recruit Harley Bennell is still working his way back to full training after ongoing calf issues. But Lyon confirmed that Bennell would play at some stage in the NAB Challenge.
Richmond draftees Daniel Rioli, Oleg Markov, Nathan Broad, Callum Moore, Mabior Choi and mature-age recruit Adam Marcon could all debut in yellow and black in the 4.10pm (AWST) clash.
"We've left 8-10 experienced players out, and those positions will be up for grabs..." Richmond coach Damien Hardwick said.
"Our list has got better every year... I look forward to the competition it brings about in our players.
"We’re going to get some good results out of it."
However, Hardwick confirmed that former Blue Chris Yarran won't play any part in the NAB Challenge and could miss the first eight rounds of the season after repeated calf injuries.
Big-bodied midfield recruit Jacob Townsend could also make his debut for the Tigers after 28 games in four years for Greater Western Sydney.
Fremantle v Richmond, Rushton Park
Friday 19 February at 4.10pm AWST
FREMANTLE
1. Hayden Ballantyne, 3. Zac Dawson, 5. Garrick Ibbotson, 6. Danyle Pearce, 7. Nat Fyfe, 8. Nick Suban, 9. Matt de Boer, 10. Michael Walters, 11. Tommy Sheridan, 12. Jonathon Griffin, 13. Tendai Mzungu, 14. Lachie Weller, 16. David Mundy, 18. Darcy Tucker, 19. Connor Blakely, 20. Matt Taberner, 21. Michael Barlow, 23. Chris Mayne, 27. Lachie Neale, 28. Brady Grey, 29. Matthew Pavlich, 31. Aaron Sandilands, 32. Stephen Hill, 33. Cameron Sutcliffe, 34. Lee Spurr, 36. Alex Silvagni, 38. Jack Hannath, 40. Sam Collins, 46. Clancee Pearce.
RICHMOND
1. Nick Vlastuin, 5. Brandon Ellis, 6. Shaun Grigg, 7. Ben Lennon, 11. Jack Batchelor, 12. David Astbury, 17. Daniel Rioli, 21. Jacob Townsend, 23. Kane Lambert, 24. Ben Griffiths, 25. Troy Chaplin, 27. Sam Lloyd, 29. Ty Vickery, 30. Reece Conca, 31. Oleg Markov, 32. Corey Ellis, 33. Kamdyn McIntosh, 34. Liam McBean, 35. Nathan Broad, 36. Callum Moore, 37. Connor Menadue, 38. Steven Morris, 40. Dan Butler, 41. Mobior Chol, 43. Todd Elton, 44. Adam Marcon, 45. Jayden Short, 46. Jason Castagna, 47. Ivan Soldo.The Parents Television Council has released a new report claiming that foul talk of every shape, size, and odor is all but taking over broadcast television.
"These huge increases in harsh profanity should come as no surprise, given the Second Circuit Court's ruling last July—a ruling which overturned the FCC's authority to sanction broadcasters who air profanity on the airwaves the American people own!," the PTC declared in its press release accompanying the study.
It's difficult to understand how that could be the sole reason for the alleged jump, since the survey compares the present to 2005—estimating that between that year and this dirty language on over-the-air TV has increased by 69.3 percent.
We've been posting stories on the PTC's own troubles over the past few weeks, including claims that the organization is "beyond repair"—taking donor money but not following through on petition campaigns, among other charges. Some Ars readers have expressed hope that these allegations will lead to the group's downfall.
As for us, we want the PTC to stick around. Why? Because what other organization would put out a chart like this.
Reading through the categories on the left, we note that quite a few of the expletives to which the PTC objects are either euphemisms for bad words or bleeped. Bleeped f-bombs, for example, have risen by an impressive 1010 percent, it seems.
But here's where we really could use some help—what are "other breasts" and "other genitals"? Never mind.Get the biggest Everton 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
Long-time Farhad Moshiri associate Alexander Ryazantsev has been made an Everton director as part of a boardroom shake-up.
And in a double announcement today, the Blues revealed that chief executive Robert Elstone is now also on the Goodison board.
Ryazantsev has been described as Moshiri’s ‘finance man’ and will be the billionaire investor’s eyes and ears at the club on a day-to-day basis.
Ryazantsev, who has worked with Moshiri in a number of previous roles, has held management positions at Royal Bank of Scotland and Dutch and ABN AMRO Bank.
The new-look Everton board now consists of chairman Bill Kenwright, Jon Woods, Elstone and Ryazantsev following the departure of Robert Earl and the sad passing of Sir Philip Carter in April.
Moshiri, whose purchase of a 49.9% stake in Everton was ratified by the Premier League, will not be on the board.
It is not uncommon for owners, majority shareholders or those who own a controlling stake in football clubs, to not be on the board of directors.
Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich is not on the board at Stamford Bridge while Joe Lewis, Tottenham Hotspur’s principal owner, is not on the White Hart Lane board, instead appointing Daniel Levy as executive chairman.
Elstone’s appointment as a director at Everton is also seen as a natural step in the Blues reshuffle.
The 52-year-old will remain in his role as chief executive but be part of the rejigged Goodison boardroom.Mitt Romney highlighted ties between the United States and Poland in a speech here Tuesday, hailing the European nation’s march toward fiscal austerity as a model for the rest of the world.
Romney said a Polish leader told him during his visit that his country’s economic philosophy is, “You don’t borrow what you can’t pay back.” The presumptive Republican presidential nominee used the line to draw an implicit contrast with President Obama, saying the world — and, by definition, the United States — should emulate Poland’s economic and societal transformation toward smaller government.
“Rather than heeding the false promise of a government-dominated economy, Poland sought to stimulate innovation, attract investment, expand trade and live within its means,” Romney said. “Your success today is a reminder that the principles of free enterprise can propel an economy and transform a society.”
But the White House hopeful’s overseas tour took another rocky turn on its final day, as a campaign spokesman cursed at journalists shouting questions at Romney.
Romney had just laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square, personally thanking and shaking hands with about 50 uniformed Polish soldiers who watched the silent ceremony. Then, in a gesture of gratitude, Romney pressed his hand to his heart and bowed his head.
As he walked back to his vehicle, he ignored reporters’ shouted questions. When a journalist noted that Romney has taken almost no questions from his traveling press corps throughout the foreign trip, Romney spokesman Rick Gorka retorted, “Kiss my ass.”
“This is a holy site for the Polish people,” Gorka said. “Show some respect.”
Moments later, Gorka told another reporter to “shove it.” Gorka later called the reporters to apologize.
Shortly before Romney departed for the airport to fly home to the United States, his top campaign strategist tried to put a positive spin on the trip, saying “it was a great success.” But criticism continued to mount over Romney’s series of controversial remarks – the latest made Monday in Jerusalem when the candidate said the Israeli economy was stronger than the Palestinian economy because of “cultural” differences.
“He has a tendency to speak his mind and to say what he believes, and whenever you do that, there will be those that disagree with you, and there will be those that agree with you,” strategist Stuart Stevens told reporters. “That’s what he’s done in these situations. I think people like that. I think that this idea that you have to not speak your mind is something that’s not very appealing to people.”
Romney’s advisers have been arguing that Romney’s stumbles abroad, although unwanted distractions, will not have an impact on the November election, arguing instead that it will be a referendum on Obama’s stewardship of the economy.
Referencing the missteps of Romney’s trip, Stevens said, “I don’t think that will go down in history as very important.”
And Stevens defended Romney’s preparedness to be commander-in-chief, saying “it’s very easy to imagine him being president. I think that given his background, his stature, what he’s accomplished, his age: that he is someone that people think is qualified and ready to be president.”
At a meeting earlier with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, Romney thanked the Polish people for their contributions to the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Our friendship spans centuries and is built by our common values and love of freedom,” Romney told Sikorski. “As we face a world which seeks to determine a course towards greater freedom or more authoritarianism, we will continue to work together to be an example of the blessings of economic and political freedom and personal freedom, and to stand in our mutual efforts to secure peace for ourselves and for others.”
Later, in his 15-minute speech delivered at the University of Warsaw, Romney said the United States and Poland “share a common cause, tested by time, inseparable by foe.”
“It’s been a trip to three places far apart on the map,” Romney said of his trip overall. “But for an American, you can’t get much closer to the ideals and convictions of my own country than you can in these places. Our nations belong to the great fellowship of democracies. We speak the same language of freedom and justice. We uphold the right of every person to live in peace.”
Romney repeatedly praised the late Pope John Paul II, who hailed from Poland and remains a popular figure among American Catholics.
“John Paul II understood that a nation is not a flag or a plot of land,” Romney said. “It is a people — a community of values. And the highest value Poland honors — to the world’s great fortune — is man’s innate desire to be free.”Phyllis Gray in 2005 after her third son, Carlos Phillips, was shot and killed. On Sept. 17, a fourth son, Alonzo Phillips, 31, was killed at a community barbecue in Southeast Washington. (Susan Biddle/The Washington Post)
The fourth time around, it doesn’t get any easier to bury a son lost to gun violence.
Phyllis Gray is 53 and tired. Tired of the calls, tired of the funerals, tired of T-shirts with the faces of four dead sons. Tired of no justice.
She tried to lift her spirits a bit over the weekend with a new haircut, but, of course, it didn’t help.
“Justice is what I want,” she told me, leaning against the fence outside her apartment building on a leafy street in Southeast Washington, where three young boys — like hers once were — played soccer on the small lawn.
For the fourth time in her life, Gray got the news that a son had been gunned down on a D.C. street.
Evidence markers are scattered around the crime scene on Birney Place in Southeast Washington, where two people were killed and seven others injured on Sept. 17. (Faiz Siddiqui/The Washington Post)
And as the nation’s elite — a president and a former president, billionaires, lawmakers and celebrities — gathered just a few miles away to celebrate the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gray was stuck in a cycle all too familiar in her neighborhood.
Violence, silence. Violence, silence.
Over and over.
The first time she became a grieving mother was in February 2001, when her son Samuel Phillips, 23, was killed at a D.C. halfway house.
A suspect was arrested, but before his trial began in 2004, Gray got the call again. Samuel’s 21-year-old brother, Demetrius, one of the prosecution’s witnesses, was killed. No one was convicted in either son’s death, Gray said.
No justice.
[Woman loses a third son to violence]
A shoot out at Dorsey Day, an annual neighborhood block party at Barry Farm in Southeast Washington killed two men and wounded several others. (WUSA)
I met Gray the day before Thanksgiving 11 years ago, right after she received the same call a third time.
On a November night it was Carlos Phillips, 26, who was living in an apartment that his mom kept up for him because she said the father of nine was mentally disabled.
Again, for 11 years, there was no justice. And Gray kept working as a home health-care aide, and her remaining four children got older, finished school, gave her grandbabies.
And then the call came again this month.
It was her fourth son, Scorpio-Rodney Alonzo Phillips. He made it to age 31. Like his three dead brothers, he’d gotten into trouble with the law. But for the past five years, he’d been living a relatively quiet life. He worked as a landscaper, rooted for the Redskins and had a daughter who just started first grade.
On Sept. 17, he was at Dorsey Day, an annual neighborhood block party at Barry Farm, where there was barbecue, a bounce house and go-go bands.
About 8 p.m., when the party was going strong, two men pulled up, unloaded their guns into the crowd and sped off. Nine people were shot, two of them died.
[ D.C. barbecue disrupted by gun fire; residents ask why police weren’t there]
Still, no arrests. Do these black lives matter?
There will be a candlelight vigil for Phillips this week, but no protests. No outrage. Just resignation.
It’s a complex problem, this persistent cycle of violence that plagues America’s poorest neighborhoods. The victims and shooters are mostly young black men.
Homicide rates may rise and fall — heck, D.C. went from 248 homicides in 2003 to 88 in 2012, then back up to 162 last year — but the rate at which they are solved stays relatively the same, which is about 60 percent nationwide.
And it’s that heartbreaking lack of closure that helps feed the cycle of mistrust and, sometimes, of people exacting their own form of street justice.
Violence, then silence, then violence again.
Detectives often struggle to solve crimes in places where mistrust for the police runs deep. Phyllis Gray knows the deadly repercussions of talking to police all too well, after one son was killed as he was about to testify about the death of another.
So the detectives ask questions, no one talks and no one is arrested, let alone convicted. And the lack of justice only deepens the divide between the community and those who are sworn to protect it.
In Southeast Washington, many people describe being hassled or harassed by officers. How does a community trust police who have pulled a son over a dozen times, but can’t find his killer after that horrific call comes?
In Charlotte, in Baton Rouge, in Dallas, in Baltimore, in Ferguson, protesters demand accountability when a black man gets killed at the hands of police under questionable circumstances. And justifiably so.
But Phyllis Gray and mothers like her still want police to solve the killings of their sons. In their neighborhoods, black lives matter also means finding a way to end the cycle of violence, then silence.
Twitter: @petuladNew York's season to date is similar to the title-winning season two years ago
Two years ago, on a November night in Atlanta, Marcos Senna chipped in a shot from just outside the box, sending Cosmos Country into a frenzy. The Boys in Green were back, taking the NASL by storm in their reboot season and winning their first league championship in over 30 years.
Fast forward two years to this season. The Cosmos hope to raise the trophy for the second time in three seasons after exiting the 2014 postseason in the semifinals. The 2013 journey began with three friendly matches in England against Old Carthusians, Leyton Orient, and Gillingham.
“England was an experience to go see the other side of soccer in the world,” Cosmos midfielder Danny Szetela said. “They have some of the best soccer in the world there. We had great facilities to train on and played against some good teams.”
This season, the Cosmos became the first professional American sports team to play in Cuba since 1999, defeating the Cuban national team, 4-1, in Havana on June 2. Preseason opponents included South China AA in Hong Kong and C.D. FAS in El Salvador.
“Cuba was obviously a bigger deal, being the first team to go there in a very long time,” Cosmos defender and captain Carlos Mendes said. “In terms of the media and the hype around it, it was a very important and historic match for this club, hopefully for moving forward in terms of growing the sport.”
The 2013 regular season was highlighted by a 12-game league unbeaten streak. This year, the Cosmos had an 11-game unbeaten streak that lasted the entirety of the NASL Spring Season. Mendes says that this year’s team is a bit deeper than the one from 2013, and that it has definitely shown in training.
“The competition in training every single day is important because when you have a good team and a deep team, guys are competing for spots,” Mendes said. “I think we push each other to improve and get better, and that’s a key for our team this year.”
Over the last two years, the Cosmos have added pieces to bolster their attack. Lucky Mkosana, Andrés Flores, Leo Fernandes, and Walter Restrepo are just four of twelve different Cosmos goalscorers this season.
“Those are all guys that can create opportunities and finish opportunities on the field,” Szetela said. “That’s what the Cosmos are all about. We play exciting soccer. We want to score good goals and create good opportunities.”
And who could forget about Raúl? The Spanish legend was the team’s leading goalscorer in the spring.
“Raúl has played at the highest level,” Mendes said. “He brings that knowledge on and off the field too. He’s a great example because he works hard every single day. That’s key.”
Szetela reflected on joining the Cosmos in July 2013, citing the international appeal of the club.
“Everyone knows that the Cosmos are a world-renowned team,” Szetela said. “We rebooted in 2013, but the name is there and it’ll always be there. Being able to go out there and represent the Cosmos in the NASL is a great opportunity and a great responsibility.”
The team has already clinched a spot in The Championship, the league's four-team postseason tournament, and will have a chance to make a run at another league title later this fall. The work put forth thus far has resulted in an undefeated Spring Season and a place atop the NASL Combined Standings. While the Cosmos only played the Fall Season back in 2013, the message is the same this year: “Just win.”
“You work towards that and even though it was just half a season, we came into the Fall ready to go,” Mendes said. “Winning that was incredible. This year has been a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to hopefully playing in the championship and raising that cup at the end of the season.”20 KEY FINDINGS
1.The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
2. The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
3. The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
4. The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
5. The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.
6. The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
7. The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
8. The CIA's operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other Executive Branch agencies.
9. The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA's Office of Inspector General.
10. The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.
11. The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
12. The CIA's management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program's duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
13. Two contract psychologists devised the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.
14. CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA Headquarters.
15.The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention.
16. The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
17. The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.
18. The CIA marginalized and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.
19. The CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
20. The CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States' standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.Rubio Tries To Clarify How His Family Left Cuba
GOP rising star Sen. Marco Rubio caught heat last week for his Senate bio that misstated when his family left Cuba for the U.S., a detail of some relevance in his home state of Florida. But in explaining his side of the story in a Politico op-ed, Rubio laid out a narrative dramatically different from the one he provided to NPR in late 2009.
MICHELE NORRIS, HOST:
We have an update now to a story we aired Friday about Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. We interviewed a Washington Post reporter who contends that Rubio's parents did not flee Cuba after Fidel Castro rose to power in 1959. That's the family story long told by the senator and his official website. In fact, Rubio's parents immigrated for Cuba several years before the Cuban Revolution.
But a statement Rubio issued recently to clarify that family story is raising still more questions, as NPR's David Welna reports.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: The same day The Washington Post reported that Senator Marco Rubio's parents left Cuba for Miami in 1956, the second sentence in the senator's bio on his official Senate website got changed. No longer did it claim his parents had come to the U.S., quote, "following Fidel Castro's takeover on the first day of 1959." That sentence now says Rubio was, quote, "born in Miami in 1971 to Cuban exiles who first arrived in the United States in 1956."
That may put the claims made in Rubio's first TV ad during his run for the Senate last year in a different light.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
SENATOR MARCO RUBIO: My parents lost everything - their home, family, friends, even their country |
w Merriman.
Summary of the Automatic Travel Compensation Bill 2017-19
A Bill to make provision for passengers to receive automatic compensation from travel operators in certain circumstances; to require train operators to ring-fence certain funds received from Network Rail for service disruption and planned possessions for the development of ticketing technology to facilitate the payment of automatic compensation for passengers; and for connected purposes.HOUSTON, TX, October 6, 2017 - Starting October 11th, every Wednesday at 17:00 UTC, My Girlfriend is Shobitch will begin simulcasting on HIDIVE in international territories!
In these territories: United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Central America, and South America
When high school student Shinozaki confesses his feelings to the beautiful and aloof class representative, Akiho Kosaka, the last thing he expected was for her to say “yes.” Like everything else in her diligent life, Kosaka takes dating quite seriously. In an effort to be a good girlfriend, Kosaka decides to meticulously study (and bluntly suggest) all manner of ways to keep Shinozaki sexually satisfied… in the theoretical sense, that is. This innocently lewd relationship is only just the beginning.
To learn more about HIDIVE’s anime streaming services, or to sign up for a 7-day free trial, visit HIDIVE.com, or follow HIDIVE™ on Facebook and Twitter.
About HIDIVE™ LLC
HIDIVE is a new anime streaming service built with the needs of anime fans in mind. Currently offering a beta with a curated (and growing) catalog of some the most iconic anime and live action titles of the past and present, HIDIVE provides a unique streaming experience to its territories around the world. Featuring one of the industry’s best players, customizable subtitles, in-episode live-chat, pinned searches, and more, fans can watch, discover, and share their favorite shows. For more information, or to start a free trial, visit HIDIVE.com.Top Mount - for intermediate
Top mount decks attach their trucks directly to the bottom of the longboard deck. This mounting style allows top-mount decks to achieve more grip (than a drop through deck) when racing around bends. We have found that a correctly-tuned top-mount board will remain stable at high speeds (for as long as the rider is able to remain stable, that is). When it comes down to it, a top-mount board will give better performance down technical hills where sliding is necessary to slow down for tight corners. However, there are many skills to master before the advantages of a top-mount deck outweigh those of a drop-through. If you have experience on other types of skateboards or if you were born with the burning passion to be a racer, you may want to look into getting a top-mount downhill deck as your first downhill longboard.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FunWithAutocensors
Many Internet forums have an automated censor feature, the intended purpose of which is to bleep out profanity. But in the hands of a playful admin (or a Well-Intentioned Extremist determined to keep the forum clean), the results of the auto-censor can get... interesting.
Like more conventional censorship, this can lead to the Scunthorpe Problem, if the autocensor is designed to look for the prohibited string within longer strings. Compare Gosh Dang It to Heck!.
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Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
Genvid's Sailor Moon forum censors "lol" with "rantipole."
Comics
The Talk About Comics forums will replace 'aroma' with 'Iron Maiden'; maybe because their music stinks. note bring this savage back home!!
Literature
The anti-Twilight message board Twilight Sucks has replacements for each individual swear word, such as "Bella" for cunt.
On Warrior's Wish, words get censored to types of fruit, so you'll occasionally get people saying something like: "What a grapefruit blueberry!"
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Live-Action TV
Rangerboard, the Power Rangers fandom board, once had "meh" filtered out as it was being overused, changing it to "gaygaygay". Which caused the word "sogaygaygayow" to keep popping up in every other sentence.
The Survivor Sucks message board censors seemingly random words, such as "tears", "dudes", "petition", "ipod", "heart" and a bunch of random others. No actual curse words are censored.
Music
The Starflyer 59 fan messageboard at sf59fans.com copies Jason Martin's set of Unusual Euphemisms: "shit" becomes "shin", "fuck" becomes "eff", "damn" becomes "D", and so on.
Professional Wrestling
Professional Wrestling promotion CHIKARA had a wrestler named Chris Hero leave the promotion under bad terms that are kept very hush hush. On their official forums, "Chris Hero" is autocensored to "John Kerry". Fans get around this by referring to "a certain Heroic figure" or by using the name he was given once he signed with a WWE developmental territory, Kassius Ohno. They also censor the word kayfabe, turning it into "grape jelly." Chikara is also using the autocensor feature as part of an angle involving the shady corporation that (in-character) owns it. The words 'Condor', 'Titor', 'Conglomerate' and 'Conrad' are all blanked out by the autocensor.
The forum for pro wrestling fan site Death Valley Driver converts "gay" to "manly beyond my wildest expectations" and, oddly, "product" to "stuffing instead of potatoes". Even odder, although perhaps due to prior overuse, the expression "Meh" now expands to "I take umbrage at your previous assertion but cannot be arsed to respond appropriately."
Toys
At least one LEGO fan board replaces all swear words with "Megablocks". note Mega Bloks are a similar, competing product.
Amongst other words, the Allspark Transformers board changes "fuck" to "hug". This, combined with the site's purple coloration, led to a small purple Micromaster called Road Hugger becoming the site's mascot.
Video Games
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Web Comics
Web Original
Some of the characters in Scary News out of Tokyo-3 are stuck behind filters that automatically go through their submitted posts and redact anything top-secret or remotely related to anything top-secret. Being on either end of this process can be a little infuriating. But, seriously, why does the Yossarian-22 keep redacting my name? What the hell is wrong with "Dr. Adam F. Black Moon "?
Websites
Western Animation
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic image board Ponychan likes to ponify people's language (changing "everybody" to "everypony", etc.) as well as make some creative replacements for some of the more unsavory words. "Vagina" becomes "wahaHA!", "sex" becomes "marshmallow", "cunt" becomes "femoral artery" (a play on "female organ", perhaps?)... this amusingly led to new writer Natasha Levinger's sole credit on IMDb being changed to "My Marshmallowiest Mistake". Stereotypical Chan-speak gets put through the ringer as well: "lulz" becomes "schadenfreude", "u mad" becomes "u currently experiencing the emotion of anger", "jelly" becomes "marmalade", and "waifu" becomes "phantasmal significant other".
OtherGermany risks becoming the “greatest ATM machine” in history as a result of Brexit, the UK’s trade minister has warned. He said Berlin may be left to pay for a failing European Union which is in danger of collapse.
“If I were a German politician I would be worried that, without Britain, Germany has the potential to become the greatest ATM in global history,” Liam Fox, who served as a pro-Brexit campaigner during the referendum, told the Spectator magazine.
He noted that once Britain – the European Union’s second-largest economy – leaves the bloc, Berlin will have lost a key ally in enforcing “economic rigor.” As a result, it could end up paying for other EU nations.
Read more
Fox also said the bloc is facing the risk of “implosion.”
“The architecture is beginning to peel away,” he said.
“It’s going to sacrifice at least one generation of young Europeans on the altar of the single currency, and you can only rip out the social fabric from so much of Europe before it starts imploding.”
Fox did, however, admit that Britain has its own work to do after leaving the EU, stressing that it needs to reform in order to boost its economy.
“We’ve just now got to probe all the areas where we could be making changes,” he said.
“Government, the financial sector, culture, all of them will have to play a part.”
Fox is one of the high-ranking Euroskeptics tasked with dealing with the consequences of the Brexit vote.
His statements come less than three weeks after he faced a backlash from politicians and social media users for saying British businesses have become “too lazy” to maintain successful export trade, with executives “playing golf” instead of doing their duties.Picture this, in a thousand years time, archaeologists break into the vault of a museum and uncover artefacts from the 19th and 20th Century. This is one of them, the Internal Combustion Engine, one of the best examples of an invention that changed the world.
The Internal Combustion Engine is a cut-away section showing its working mechanisms, presented as if the machine had been unearthed from a bricked up room, like a treasure uncovered in its discovered environment.
This idea started when I thought 'what model would I like to have on my desk?', and as an engineer I wanted a model of a classic machine. There weren't models of specific machines around, so as engineers do, I set about making one.
As you can see on the back, I've connected the carburettor into the inlet valves, and stylized an exhaust pipe, connecting it to the outlet ports. I've also angled the model so that it can be seen better when placed on a desk, and included an angled name plate which I've left blank to accommodate different language translations of the model's name.
Have a look at higher resolution photos here on Flickr
https://www.flickr.com/photos/126803207@N02/
It contains 751 bricks and was a good challenge. Enjoy!Air pollution linked to low birth weight ENVIRONMENT
Tracey Woodruff, a principal investigator on the international study, with a six-months-pregnant colleague at UCSF's Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment. Tracey Woodruff, a principal investigator on the international study, with a six-months-pregnant colleague at UCSF's Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Air pollution linked to low birth weight 1 / 4 Back to Gallery
Mothers who breathe the kind of pollution emitted by vehicles, coal power plants and factories are significantly likelier to give birth to underweight children than mothers living in less polluted areas, according to international findings published Wednesday.
The study is believed to be the largest to examine how newborns' bodies are affected by air quality, an issue that has raised particular concern in China and other developing nations.
Nearly 30 researchers, including three from the Bay Area, based their conclusions on more than 3 million births at 14 sites in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Focusing on children born on-time in the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, they found that, worldwide, the greater the air pollution, the less babies tend to weigh at birth.
Chronic health issues
Weighing less than 5.5 pounds at birth is a factor for chronic health issues in childhood, including a higher risk for infection and developmental delays, experts say. Problems in adulthood can include cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other metabolic disorders.
"Being low birth weight basically is like you're starting at a little bit of disadvantage in terms of health throughout your lifetime," said Tracey Woodruff, the study's co-principal investigator and director of UCSF's Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment.
For the study, which appears in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers looked at two types of air pollutants, including inhalable coarse particles, which are about 10 micrometers in diameter and often appear in natural elements such as dirt, dust and sea salt.
Levels from 14 sites
The particles were found in various levels throughout the 14 sites. Seoul's air had the highest concentration, 66.5 micrograms per cubic meter, while Vancouver's had the lowest, 12.5 micrograms per cubic meter.
In the United States, California's levels - about 29 micrograms per cubic meter - exceeded those of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Atlanta. But the Golden State fared better than urban regions in Brazil, Italy and the Netherlands, where concentrations were in the 40s.
"It's all relative in terms of how you decide how bad California is," said Rachel Morello-Frosch, a UC Berkeley professor of environmental science, policy and management and public health. She and UC Berkeley researcher Bill Jesdale analyzed 1.7 million California births for the study.
The research showed that infants' risk of having a low birth weight rose by 3 percent with every increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter in inhalable coarse particles. Overall, with each increase, infants were born 3 grams lighter.
When the study factored in individual variables, such as the mother's age and tobacco use, the average weight drop tripled to 9 grams.
Fine particles' strong effect
The effect appeared to be even more dramatic with another type of air pollutant, fine particles. These are 2.5 micrometers in diameter and can come from forest fires, power plants, factories and cars.
For each increase in fine particles by 10 micrograms per cubic meter, there was a 10 percent higher chance that newborns had a low birth weight when individual variables were taken into account, the researchers said.
Air pollution may have a small impact on an individual mother and her child. But in a large population, it could lead to a significant increase in the number of low-birth-weight babies, Morello-Frosch said.
In the United States, the yearly average concentration of fine particles in the air must be no more than 12 micrograms per cubic meter. In contrast, the European Union's limit is twice as high - 25 micrograms per cubic meter - and regulatory agencies are considering lowering it.
Push for regulation
The onus is on policymakers, not on mothers, to improve conditions, researchers said.
"This really speaks to the need for regulatory action to ensure that air pollution levels are consistently regulated at levels that protect public health and, in particular, protect prenatal and perinatal health," Morello-Frosch said.
The study's message resonates in light of the air-quality crisis in Beijing, where the density of fine particles has reached extremely hazardous levels, said Beate Ritz, a UCLA epidemiologist who has studied birth outcomes and air pollution in California. She was not part of the new study.
Ritz said the researchers have shown on a large scale what has until now been seen through smaller lenses: Air pollution can hurt future generations.
"Whatever impacts fetal growth and fetal development," she said, "we should really be worried about it."Skye Gould/Business Insider
Stocking a home bar can be daunting — unless you have one of New York's savviest cocktail minds guiding your every purchase, which, thanks to this graphic curated by Eamon Rockey, you do.
A veteran bartender and the general manager of midtown's Betony restaurant, Rockey recently visited the B.I. offices to school us on building a home bar from scratch.
His primary advice? "Allow the process to be cumulative. Start with a couple of staples and then ask yourself, What do I need to add one more of to make something new?"
Here, Rockey simplifies things, choosing nine timeless cocktails and outlining everything required to make them. To the right are the liquor, pantry, and barware staples you should buy, and down below are all the recipes they'll yield.
Depending on your preferences, the whole setup can be had for approximately $500.Towards a Vim-like Emacs
I’ve previously written about my own process of transitioning from Vim to Emacs. It’s fairly high-level, however, and doesn’t cover the nitty-gritty: all those long, painful hours spent trying to smash Emacs into reasonable keybindings are lost. You get the retrospective, the analysis, but not the same benefit of hindsight I’ve gathered since I switched. Unfortunately, there aren’t many resources out there on how to do this right. People use Emacs. It’s a tool. Most of its users don’t write about it, and the percentage of Emacs users who try to emulate Vim and also write about it is even smaller.
There is Bling, the vim-airline developer, who switched and ultimately convinced me to give Emacs a shot. But his tips just scratch the surface of what’s necessary to replicate the finger-friendliness of a modern Vim workflow.
It’s a well-known and overstated joke that the default Emacs bindings are bad. If you’re reading this post, you probably already agree with me here, but for the uninitiated: key combos are the devil. Any time you are pressing two keys at once, with the same hand, hundreds of times per day, you are setting yourself up for repetitive stress injury. As programmers, we need to take care of our hands or our careers will be over.
This is going to be part-tutorial, part describing my configuration. With a little determination, this can take you from ground-zero to a working Evil configuration and generic development environment.
This post is geared at the determined Vim user who is willing to give Evil a shot and likes having a heavily customized editor. It has a number of tasks that are intended to teach the right attitude and mindset required to keep working with Emacs on your own. These will get you familiar enough with reading documentation that you know where to look when you want to do something. It is also Elisp-focused, with no emphasis on the more modern customization features of Emacs that ultimately prevent new users from groking its internals.
First, some terminology When you first fire up Emacs, you need to learn how they reference certain objects and keybindings. This is pretty simple, but can be confusing if you don’t have the initial introduction. M-x means press the <ALT> key, then press x while still holding that down. This brings up the Emacs command prompt, which gives you access to any of the functions that are declared interactive - that is, Elisp functions that may be run interactively by the user. If someone gives you a command sequence like M-x package-install <RET> evil <RET>, that means to do the M-x keybinding, type package-install, press enter, then type evil and press enter. Often the second <RET> will be omitted and taken as implicit.
means. This brings up the Emacs command prompt, which gives you access to any of the functions that are declared - that is, Elisp functions that may be run interactively by the user. A buffer is a place where text may go. This is distinct from a window which is a visual area on screen which displays a buffer.
is a place where text may go. This is distinct from a which is a visual area on screen which displays a buffer. A frame is another Emacs window in your window manager that is attached to the same Emacs process. That’s it for the basics. Let’s see where we can go from here.
Package archives In order to install packages from things besides the default repos, you need to define a variable called package-archives with the URLs of the package sources in it. You do this in your init.el file, which is located at ~/.emacs.d/init.el by default. (setq package-archives '(("melpa". "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") ("org". "http://orgmode.org/elpa/") ("gnu". "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/"))) MELPA is the most important source for up-to-date Emacs packages. It’s kind of like the Arch Linux of Emacs package archives - it builds directly from upstream all the time, and it works with the builtin Emacs package manager. Also, below the above code, you’ll need to initialize the package manager. (require 'package) (package-initialize) Once you’ve added the above to that file, you can evaluate each of these expressions inside Emacs with C-x C-e. To evaluate an expression, position the cursor outside and following the expression and hit that keybinding. This runs the command eval-last-sexp, which evaluates the symbolic expression before your cursor and pretty-prints the output. You’ll need to do this in order (i.e., evaluate the setq expression first), or it won’t work. Installing Evil Once the above is finished, you can install evil-mode with M-x package-install <RET> evil <RET>. The compilation log that pops up at the bottom of the screen can be killed with C-x 4 0. That runs the function kill-buffer-and-window, which you can also call interactively at the M-x prompt. More on that later. After that, Evil will be installed into the ~/.emacs.d directory. To enable it, type M-x evil-mode. Now all your Vim bindings work, as long as you don’t kill Emacs. You probably want to enable Evil more permanently. Add the following to the bottom of your ~/.emacs.d/init.el file: (require 'evil) (evil-mode 1) This will automatically enable evil-mode every time you start Emacs. It’s important that it goes at the bottom of the file. Evil relies on starting up after the rest of your packages, so that it can detect them and overlay its keybindings appropriately. If you break your configuration, restart Emacs with: $ emacs --debug-init to get debug information on your init files. Don’t feel bad if you have to use Vim to fix them in the meantime. Don’t get worried thinking Evil is not a first-class citizen in Emacs: this is an editor built to be ripped to pieces by the competent user. The interesting part of Emacs is its Lisp engine. It’s the scores of reusable functions for automating your interaction with code. Keybindings are just one way of calling these things.
Modes Like Vim, Emacs uses the word modes to refer to an element of state in its editor. Unlike Vim, this is not referring to modal editing, but rather to the composition of various modules that make up your current editing environment. A major mode defines your primary interaction with a buffer in Emacs. There can only be one of these active at once, and they are not all necessarily for editing text. For example, dired is a major mode for editing directories, and magit is a Git interaction interface. An important major mode to be aware of is fundamental mode, which is a major mode with no discerning features besides the ability to type text into a buffer. Minor modes are compositional - there can be more than one of them, and minor modes loaded after others can override the settings of a previous one. Evil is one such example of a minor mode. States Evil uses the term state to refer to what Vim calls a mode. There are more states than these, but here are a few to get you going: evil-emacs-state
evil-insert-state
evil-normal-state
evil-visual-state Each of these can be called interactively with M-x to enable them. The way Evil works is each of these states is bound to a different keymap, and those keymaps change the meanings of your keys to call different functions when they are pressed. This affords you the ability to remap bindings across different states, where they will only work when evil-mode is enabled and Evil is also in the right state to activate the keymap. Use ESC, i, v, etc. as you would in Vim to switch between Evil states. Then play around with using M-x to toggle the different states before moving on.
Binding keys Let’s get started by adding some bindings to Evil. We want switching between windows to be easy, so we can bind the following: (define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-h") 'evil-window-left) (define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-j") 'evil-window-down) (define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-k") 'evil-window-up) (define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-l") 'evil-window-right) This binds <CTRL>-hjkl to window movement commands when Evil is in normal state. There are a number of interesting things about these expressions. First, position your cursor over the word define-key and call M-x describe-function. It will provide the default value of the thing under your cursor, so you can just press RET again to bring up a buffer with help information. Read the help information it gives you, then move on. The buffer that appears will be in help-mode, which does not have Evil bindings, but you can use q to close it and keep working. The proper term in Emacs for your cursor would be point. This is used extensively in the help documentation, so it’s worth remembering. The thing at point that provided the default argument for describe-function was a symbol. A symbol is basically any thing in Emacs Lisp which has a name and can be hashed into a lookup table, where it then becomes an object in Lisp. These objects could be anything: functions, data, or text, for example, but symbols are interesting because we can give them names and refer to them later somehow. From the official manual: You can test whether an arbitrary Lisp object is a symbol with symbolp : — Function: symbolp object This function returns t if object is a symbol, nil otherwise. Now, use M-x apropos RET point RET and skim through the list that pops up. If you have Evil working properly, you can use :q to close that window when you’re done with it. Quoting Readers with keen eyes may have noticed that one of the arguments in the above code has an apostrophe (') before it. This is because evil-window-left is a function’s name, and we want to be able to call it later by binding it to a key. Putting an apostrophe before it when passing it as an argument to a function means we’re passing the quoted form of evil-window-left to define-key, not what it evaluates to. Since our intent is to pass the symbol 'evil-window-left into define-key, and not the evaluated form of evil-window-left itself, this is the right thing to do. All arguments in Elisp expressions, without quoting, will be evaluated before they are passed into a function call. Quoting lets us avoid that and pass their symbols instead. Maps and keys The two other arguments to each of those keybindings were unquoted. The keymap, evil-normal-state-map, goes directly into the function, since the purpose of define-key is to modify that map. The expression (kbd "C-h") is actually another separate function call that happens before the outside expression is evaluated. If we use M-x describe-function to look at the help documentation for kbd, we see: kbd is a compiled Lisp function in `subr.el'. (kbd KEYS) Convert KEYS to the internal Emacs key representation. KEYS should be a string constant in the format used for saving keyboard macros (see `edmacro-mode'). We need to use the kbd function to describe our keybindings, since they contain an extra operator (the <CTRL> key). While single character bindings can be looked up in keymaps directly, a key sequence like C-h is not stored in the map in that form. You can look at the value of (kbd "C-h") by typing it on a line below those bindings, and then evaluating it with C-x C-e as before. In the minibuffer, the text area with a blank line at the bottom of the screen, "^H" is displayed. That tells you that the expression (define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-h") 'evil-window-left) is internally binding "^H" to evil-window-left, but don’t doing that yourself—the way it’s shown in the minibuffer is still a displayed form, which is different from the hashed value it eventually becomes.
Lisp navigation Accessing help documentation using M-x describe-function is pretty awesome, but the interface for doing it is fairly clunky. We can make it better using elisp-sime-nav-mode, the superior Lisp interaction mode for Emacs. You can install it with M-x package-install RET elisp-slime-nav. Slime mode needs to be enabled for it to be used. To do this, we will define a function that we’ll tie to the hook for emacs-lisp-mode. A hook is a function that gets evaluated when something predefined happens in your editor. Most modes have hooks already configured, and all you will need to do is add functions to call with them using add-hook for them to become useful. First we require the package elisp-slime-nav, which ensures that it is loaded when Emacs starts: (require 'elisp-slime-nav) Then we define our function: (defun my-lisp-hook () (elisp-slime-nav-mode) (turn-on-eldoc-mode) ) Add that into your init file after the require call. Note that the function definition is prefixed by my-. While not all Emacs packages do this, Elisp does not have namespaces like Python or Ruby does. To counteract this, convention is to define all of your functions prefixed by your package name, and for personal code using my- is not uncommon. Then, we add it to to the emacs-lisp-mode-hook using add-hook : (add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook'my-lisp-hook) This makes elisp-slime-nav-mode and turn-on-eldoc-mode get called every time emacs-lisp-mode is enabled. Now go ahead and evaluate these with C-x C-e. To make this easier, you can surround the block in a (progn), which makes the whole thing get treated as one big expression for evaluation: (progn (require 'elisp-slime-nav) (defun my-lisp-hook () (elisp-slime-nav-mode) (turn-on-eldoc-mode) ) (add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook'my-lisp-hook) ) While the (progn) here doesn’t serve any practical purpose, it might help you group blocks of code for evaluation while you’re hacking at them. Since emacs-lisp-mode is already running (you’re in a.el file), you can force your hook’s evaluation by typing (my-lisp-hook) into the buffer and evaluating it manually. You’ll notice that when you hover over functions now, eldoc-mode shows their signature in the minibuffer. If you want to see the help information like we’d been doing manually before, though, you still need to type describe-function into the M-x prompt. Now that we have Slime, we can simplify this with another keybinding: (evil-define-key 'normal emacs-lisp-mode-map (kbd "K") 'elisp-slime-nav-describe-elisp-thing-at-point) Evaluating the above will do contextual lookup on the thing at point whenever you press K in Evil’s normal state. The syntax here is different from when we defined the window movement bindings earlier. This is because we want to define K to call elisp-slime-nav-describe-elisp-thing-at-point only when we are in emacs-lisp-mode-map and Evil is in normal state. The evil-define-key function lets us do this, by providing arguments for both the Evil state and the keymap for the binding to be active in. Now you have the tools necessary to explore Emacs Lisp code without getting lost. Doing documentation lookups on everything you see that you don’t understand is a great way to start familiarizing yourself with Elisp code. Before we move on, lookup the descriptions for progn, require, add-hook, and emacs-lisp-mode-hook and read them. Don’t be afraid if you encounter words you don’t understand. Seeing the bigger picture in all the lingo takes time, but just doing this will help you start to understand it.
Managing buffers You can list the buffers that are currently open by typing M-x list-buffers. Using the bindings we defined earlier, you can switch to the window that is opened and hit q to close it when you’re done. To switch to one of these buffers, typing M-x switch-to-buffer will bring up a minibuffer prompt where you can type the name of a buffer to switch to it. For a better listing, you can use M-x ibuffer. IBuffer with the default settings The default bindings you should care about right now are: n and p to go to the next and previous buffers.
and to go to the next and previous buffers. d (marking the buffer for deletion), then x on a buffer will make it go away.
(marking the buffer for deletion), then on a buffer will make it go away. RET while a buffer name is at point will take you to that buffer. IBuffer has all sorts of useful features for browsing, filtering, and editing open buffers. But at least for a Vim user, its keybindings won’t at all be intuitive. Typing j accidentally will call jump-to-buffer, which is almost certainly not what you want. If you felt like typing the name of the buffer at a prompt, you probably wouldn’t have opened IBuffer to begin with! Aside from being unnatural for Vim users, the interface to IBuffer isn’t actually that bad. The keybindings are mostly single-key sequences, unlike more poorly-designed Emacs modes, and the functions allow for quick actions that will save you tons of work. Stealing IBuffer’s keymap When I previously wrote about my experience switching to Evil, I mentioned there are a couple of different ways to deal with major mode keymaps being inconsistent with Evil. I’ll be covering the full remapping approach here, since it has a few benefits: Your major modes will be more tightly integrated with Evil.
You’ll have the ability to redefine keys at will, easily and quickly.
Remapping keys this way offers a chance at better understanding the functions in a major mode, which might just be missed otherwise. For core components of Emacs, like IBuffer and dired, building a more useful keymap can be a rewarding learning experience in itself. With ibuffer open, type M-x describe-mode to pull up the help info below. A link to ibuffer.el in help-mode Following that link will take you to the source code for IBuffer. Somewhere in there, you’ll find the keymap: Default IBuffer keymap Any one of these major mode keymaps is bound to be really large, so I won’t reproduce it here. The idea is to redefine these into a map within Evil, so IBuffer will respect your Evil keymaps and still have its functionality. The evil-define-key function we used earlier has the option of taking an unlimited number of arguments. Now, copy lines like the following out of ibuffer.el : (define-key map (kbd "m") 'ibuffer-mark-forward) (define-key map (kbd "t") 'ibuffer-toggle-marks) (define-key map (kbd "u") 'ibuffer-unmark-forward) (define-key map (kbd "=") 'ibuffer-diff-with-file) (define-key map (kbd "j") 'ibuffer-jump-to-buffer) (define-key map (kbd "M-g") 'ibuffer-jump-to-buffer) (define-key map (kbd "M-s a C-s") 'ibuffer-do-isearch) (define-key map (kbd "M-s a M-C-s") 'ibuffer-do-isearch-regexp) ;;... and drop them into ~/.emacs.d/init.el, after (require 'evil), like follows: (evil-define-key 'normal ibuffer-mode-map (kbd "m") 'ibuffer-mark-forward (kbd "t") 'ibuffer-toggle-marks (kbd "u") 'ibuffer-unmark-forward (kbd "=") 'ibuffer-diff-with-file (kbd "j") 'ibuffer-jump-to-buffer (kbd "M-g") 'ibuffer-jump-to-buffer (kbd "M-s a C-s") 'ibuffer-do-isearch (kbd "M-s a M-C-s") 'ibuffer-do-isearch-regexp ;;... ) I used a Vim macro and visual block selection to do the rewrite into evil-define-key form for me, and it only took about a minute to perform. To ensure IBuffer will use Evil’s keybindings, add the line (evil-set-initial-state 'ibuffer-mode 'normal) to your init file. You can use this to set Evil’s initial state for any major mode - before you know what to bind in a mode, sometimes using Emacs state isn’t a bad idea. Now, if you try to actually use this configuration, it won’t work. The reason is we need to ensure the Evil bindings are not applied until after IBuffer is loaded, since it needs to do some special setup. The solution here is to surround the bindings in an eval-after-load block, like follows: (eval-after-load 'ibuffer '(progn (evil-set-initial-state 'ibuffer-mode 'normal) (evil-define-key 'normal ibuffer-mode-map (kbd "m") 'ibuffer-mark-forward (kbd "t") 'ibuffer-toggle-marks (kbd "u") 'ibuffer-unmark-forward (kbd "=") 'ibuffer-diff-with-file (kbd "j") 'ibuffer-jump-to-buffer (kbd "M-g") 'ibuffer-jump-to-buffer (kbd "M-s a C-s") 'ibuffer-do-isearch (kbd "M-s a M-C-s") 'ibuffer-do-isearch-regexp ;;... ) ) ) This ensures your custom keymap does not try to set itself until after ibuffer has already initialized it properly. Your goal after this section is to read the help information for eval-after-load, as well as for some of the IBuffer bindings. Just pick ones that seem interesting, and again - don’t worry if you don’t understand things. Just read a few of them anyway. Once you’ve done your reading, get the custom keymap to work by evaluating the block with C-x C-e, and ensure it’s functional in evil-normal-state by calling M-x evil-normal-state manually within IBuffer. Rebinding You might think it’s crazy to place all of this configuration in one lone init file. We’ll get to that in the next section. For now, keeping things in init.el will get the job done and let us focus on keybindings. The obvious thing to do, now that we’ve copied the keymap, is to add proper hjkl bindings. Usually in major modes like this you want to bind j and k to |
bring squash to the masses, locals of all ages will be able to enjoy a miniature pop-up court which will make an appearance in Mission Bay, Devonport, and Orewa Park.
Squash Auckland general manager John Fletcher said it's a good chance to try something different as it looks to promote the game throughout the region.
"It's quite hard to get people down to a squash club," Fletcher said.
READ MORE:
* Stunning run continues for top New Zealand squash player Paul Coll
* Joelle King falls short of quarterfinals at Tournament of Champions in New York
* Kiwi squash player Paul Coll caps giantkilling run in style
"So we thought we'd change it up a bit and bring the squash court out to the people."
The sport has become notorious in recent years for the lavish locations in which the World Squash Championships take place.
A fully-perspex court outside the pyramids in Egypt, one in front of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, and recently in the middle of New York's Grand Central Station gave the sport a unique touch.
Like those courts, Squash Auckland's design allows players to enjoy the surrounding view as they smash the ball around with friends.
While New Zealand has seen a stagnation in the game since its boom in the 1980s - largely due to world champion Susan Devoy - Fletcher believes the sport is due for a change.
"We've got Kiwi Paul Coll flying up the world rankings," Fletcher said.
"You've also got squash all over TV these days so it's the right time to bring new players into a highly addictive sport."
Coll, from Greymouth, is ranked 20th in the world according to squahsinfo.com.
The court will be open from 11am to 3pm each day, with experienced coaches on hand organising fun games with giveaways and information available on how the public can get in touch with their local squash club.
Dates for the Summer Beach Series:
* Sunday 12 February – Selwyn Domain, Tamaki Drive, Mission Bay
* Sunday 19 February – Devonport Ferry Terminal, Devonport
* Sunday 26 February – Orewa Park, Orewa (near Corner of Hibiscus Coast Highway and Empire Road)(Photo: I-70Scout.com)
(CNSNews.com) -- Small business owners are the most optimistic about their situation than they have been in over a decade, according to a new poll by Gallup.
Measuring in at +106 in the third quarter of 2017, the Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index is up 11 points since the second quarter of 2017, making it the highest since 2007’s measure of +113.
The respondents, based on a random sample of small-business owners nationwide, were asked to evaluate both their present business situation and expectations about their business going forward.
(Photo: DellumsInstitute)
"The overall increase in the index this quarter is mainly the result of an uptick in present situation ratings, rather than expectations about the future," the Gallup poll report states.
"The present situation score rose from +36 in the second quarter to +45 in the third quarter."
Ten percent of business owners reported that the number of jobs at their company has declined in the past year, marking the lowest level seen since 2006. However, 21 percent of small-business owners say the number of jobs at their company has increased, which is only one point below the all-time high of 22 percent in 2007.
The top challenge small business owners say they face is issues relating to government policies, including regulations, taxes and Obamacare.
The survey was conducted by telephone interviews with 605 U.S. small-business owners in all 50 states, July 10-14.'13 Hours' did OK at the box office, but its $40 million (and counting) in home video is nearly unheard of as two real-life subjects stir up anti-Hillary sentiment at the RNC.
Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi did modest business at the box office after its January release, earning $52.9 million domestically and $69.4 million worldwide. But in an election-year surprise for Paramount, the film is doing herolike business in home entertainment, amassing more than $40 million since it became available digitally in May, followed by its Blu-ray/DVD and rental release June 7. That's a huge number for a movie of its size. (Digital purchases total about $7.1 million, digital and physical rentals are at $20.2 million, and $13.5 million is from Blu-ray and DVD sales.) "The gross could end up being on par with the box office," says Bob Buchi, Paramount's president of worldwide home media distribution.
Interestingly, Paramount says Bay's $50 million-budgeted film about the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya is doing well everywhere in America — not only in Donald Trump-leaning states — despite depicting an event conservatives often use against then-Secretary of State (now Democratic presidential nominee) Hillary Clinton. Bay says 13 Hours is apolitical and Clinton's name isn't mentioned, but two security contractors depicted, Mark Geist and John Tiegen, showed up at the Republican National Convention to berate Clinton. Insists Buchi, "The movie is showing broad appeal because it's based on a true story of American heroes."The Trump White House is on the verge of delivering a one-two punch to one of the most important health care programs in the United States: childhood immunizations.
The first punch would come from the Senate’s version of the American Health Care Act, which eliminates the Prevention and Public Health Fund (PPHF). The PPHF, which was created in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act, was originally intended to supplement several core public-health programs. During the past few years, however, the PPHF has evolved to be one of the most important government programs in support of vaccines. In fiscal 2016, for example, $324 million, or about 53 percent of immunization funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), came from the PPHF.
The second blow will come from the president’s proposed budget, which would reduce funds for the CDC to support vaccines, to $521 million in 2018 from $606 million in 2017. Most legislators have claimed that the president’s proposed budget is dead on arrival in Congress. Nonetheless, his budget makes clear the administration doesn’t value public health. Even if the final cuts are only a fraction of what is proposed, tens of millions of dollars will no longer be available for immunizations.
What would happen if the CDC’s immunization budget lost $100 million from the proposed budget and $324 million from the PPHF? One could expect the following:
• States will have less money to purchase vaccines.
• States will have less money to train personnel to administer vaccines.
• States will have less money to support the staff and technologies necessary to track immunization coverage.
• States will have less money to purchase cancer-preventing HPV vaccines for teens and pre-teens.
• The CDC will have a reduced capacity to respond to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, influenza pandemics, manmade disasters, and emerging threats like the Zika virus.
• The CDC will have less money to monitor vaccine safety.
While there is much to debate about the most efficient and effective ways to deliver health care to the American public, three things aren’t debatable: 1) Vaccines save lives, 2) Vaccines save money, and 3) Reduced support for vaccines will put children at unnecessary risk.
Before vaccines, Americans could expect that every year diphtheria would kill 15,000 people, mostly teenagers; rubella (German measles) would cause 20,000 babies to be born blind, deaf, or mentally disabled; pertussis (whooping cough) would kill 8,000 children, most of whom were less than 1 year old; and polio would permanently paralyze 15,000 children and kill 1,000. Because of vaccines, many of these diseases have been completely or virtually eliminated from the U.S. Smallpox—a disease estimated to have killed 500 million people—was eradicated by vaccines.
Further, for each dollar spent on childhood vaccines, the U.S. saves $10.10. During the past 23 years alone, vaccines have prevented 381 million illnesses, 855,000 deaths, and 24.5 million hospitalizations as well as saved $360 billion in direct costs and $1.65 trillion in societal costs (e.g., time lost from work).
Let’s presume that Congress eventually enacts the dramatic cuts in funding proposed by the Senate’s version of the AHCA and even a fraction of the cuts proposed by the president. The canary in the coalmine will be measles. Because measles is the most contagious vaccine-preventable disease, it will be the first to come back.
Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, every year measles would infect about 4 million children, causing 48,000 to be hospitalized and 500 to die. Because of the vaccine, measles was eliminated from the United States in 2000. Recently, however, more parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children. As a result, a series of measles outbreaks have occurred in undervaccinated communities.
For example:
• In 2014, an outbreak of measles in an Amish community in Ohio affected more than 600 children.
• In 2015, an outbreak of measles starting in Southern California’s wealthy suburbs spread to 25 states and affected 189 children.
• Currently, an outbreak of measles in a Somali community in Minnesota has caused 76 children to suffer, again because their parents had chosen not to vaccinate them.
Not surprisingly, controlling outbreaks is expensive. The CDC estimates that it costs about $140,000 to contain each individual case of measles ($143.5 million since 2014).
Today, according to the CDC, about 1 percent of parents choose not to immunize their children. If this 1 percent were evenly distributed across the country, the measles virus wouldn’t spread because enough members of the community would be vaccinated, protecting those who aren’t vaccinated or can’t be vaccinated (so-called herd immunity). But parents who choose not to vaccinate their children aren’t spread out equally. Pockets of unimmunized children in Ohio or Southern California or Minnesota were the fertile ground for our most recent measles outbreaks.
Imagine, however, if the reason that children weren’t getting vaccinated wasn’t that parents had chosen not to vaccinate them but that they couldn’t afford to vaccinate them. And that instead of 1 percent of American parents choosing not to immunize their children, 5 or 10 or 15 percent weren’t able to immunize them. To prevent the measles virus from spreading, about 95 percent of children in a given community need to be immunized. If the nationwide immunization rates drop well below that figure, measles will be back with a vengeance. And when hundreds of cases of measles a year becomes thousands of cases, children will again start dying from measles.
On June 13, Donald Trump, in a meeting with republican senators, called the AHCA proposals “mean.” He could have added “dangerous.” Because the only thing that the AHCA and the proposed budget will make great again are the viruses and bacteria that routinely disabled, hospitalized, and killed our children.
Paul A. Offit is a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2011).UPDATE: SourceForge has removed the offending Binkiland software from its installer. Read the full story here.
If you’ve been working with software for longer than five years, then you can remember a time when SourceForge was one of the pillars of open-source software. It used to be the only good place to go to find fresh builds of open-source projects, as most projects had their own pages spread around the Web.
Rather than poking around those individual sites, SourceForge aggregated the binaries and made them available to people for free, like some sort of saintly Download.com, benevolent and thoughtful in how it provided its services to the community at large.
Sure, there were ads and click-through pages, but SourceForge was still a place you could trust. Download.com, on the other hand, quickly turned into a spyware and malware distribution network, as CNET struggled to squeeze every dime it could out of the poor thing.
But not SourceForge. It was part of the Slashdot network. It understood the way developers thought and acted. It was tied into Freshmeat as a third leg on the stool of hacker culture that had originated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yes, SourceForge used to be a thing of beauty, and 3.7 million registered users seemed to agree.
Today, SourceForge is the knowing distributor of virus-laden software called Binkiland that cannot be removed from the host computer without editing the registry. That’s the very definition of a virus, and I consider this to be completely illegal.
This isn’t tacked on to silly programs that have little consequence. This virus is included with FileZilla, the excellent free FTP tool. And worse yet, the FileZilla website actually directs users to the SourceForge download link as the main way to download the tool. The maintainers of the FileZilla Project are culpable in all of this.
This is a step beyond the Ask Jeeves toolbar being installed with Java, which is now standard on even the Mac OS version of that language. It should be noted, however, that we have officially entered territory even Oracle is not willing to explore. This is actively attempting to compromise the user’s computer, and I think SourceForge should not only halt its distribution of this software, it should be very worried about legal repercussions from its users who have now compromised their seemingly secure machines.My fellow Americans, the state of our union is... well, quite wretched at the moment. As president, I owe you that honesty and candor.
It would be bad enough that we're stuck in an endless war against vicious terrorists or that we've just been through a financial crisis that wiped out a quarter of our wealth and left one in six adults without a job or underemployed, to say nothing of the fact that our planet is on the brink of an environmental calamity.
What's truly depressing, however, is that as a country we seem to have completely lost the will and the capacity to collectively confront these challenges. Our union has been torn asunder by a clash of ideologies and special interests and brigades of power-hungry partisans that has resulted in a paralyzing political stalemate. In response, our citizens have become angry, cynical, distrustful and dispirited.
Economists have long recognized that what distinguishes successful and wealthy countries from those that are poor and failing is not their natural endowments or even their level of human capital, but rather the quality of their institutions. By institutions, economists refer not only to governmental, business, educational and civic entities, but also the formal rules and informal protocols by which decisions are made, disputes are resolved, commerce is conducted and people interact. It was the quality of its institutions that led our country to become the richest, most powerful and most admired on the planet. Now the deterioration of those institutions threatens our standing in the world.
Hardly a day passes now that doesn't bring further evidence of this institutional deterioration.
Only a year after taxpayers were forced to mount an unprecedented rescue of the financial sector, industry profits and bonuses are back to near pre-crisis levels, and the Wall Street casino is again open for business.
While millions of homeowners struggle to keep up with home mortgages and student loans, highflying financiers and money managers think nothing of walking away from their bad investments and handing the keys over to their creditors.
Our highest court has abandoned all pretense of judicial restraint, allowing itself to become just another political branch doing the bidding of special interests and political factions.
California is now a failed state, financially bankrupt and politically incapacitated, while Massachusetts, which for nearly half a century proudly sent a senator to Washington to fight for social justice and universal health care, has chosen as his replacement someone who campaigned in effect on the slogan "We've got ours, so the hell with everyone else."
No institution, however, has deteriorated more than the one in which I stand now, the U.S. Congress, which has transformed itself into a hyper-partisan swamp that fails to live up even to its most basic constitutional duties -- making timely appropriations, confirming nominees for top positions and declaring when we are at war. You have saddled the country with a monstrous debt and projected deficits that will bankrupt the nation, yet you refuse even to allow an independent commission to draw up a reasonable plan to cut spending and raise taxes. You have spent a year deliberating on the urgent issues of health care, global warming and financial regulation, yet so far you have been able to agree on nothing.
I will be the first to acknowledge that I, too, have contributed to this institutional failure. I was elected to change the way business was done here in Washington, but too often, in my zeal to accomplish great things, I succumbed to the temptation to play the old games just to move things along or gain tactical advantage. As a result, I wound up sacrificing the support of too many of the idealistic and independent voters who provided the margin of victory in my election.
So here is what I'm going to do to try to get things back on track:While a guest on the Tuesday edition of Bravo's Watch What Happens Live program, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper responded to questions about Kathy Griffin by stating he is still friends with the far-left comedienne.
Host Andy Cohen asked the main anchor for AC360° about his feelings for Griffin because of her involvement in an incident on Tuesday, May 30, when she posted a video of herself holding "a mask styled to look like the severed, bloody head" of President Donald Trump on her Instagram and Twitter accounts.
Cohen brought up the subject after stating he had received “a bunch of questions” from the audience “wanting to know: Are you two still friends?”
“Yeah, we’re still friends,” Cooper stated, "and … I didn’t think what she [did] was appropriate, but I wish her the best, and I hope she bounces back.”
“She’s going to be touring in about a minute, don’t you think?” Cohen then asked.
“She’s incredibly funny, and a lot of people love her, and she’ll bounce back from this,” he responded.
As NewsBusters previously reported, Griffin posted the gruesome picture with the following text: “I caption this ‘there was blood coming out of his eyes, blood coming out of his … wherever,’" referring to a comment Trump had made that “there was blood coming out of the eyes” of journalist Megyn Kelly while she hosted one of the 2016 GOP presidential debates.
For much of that day, the country joined in rare collective outrage at the viral image. Politicians from the left and right side of the spectrum shared a sense of disgust over the image that some equated to promoting violence.
Almost immediately, Cooper responded to the situation by tweeting: “For the record, I am appalled by the photo shoot Kathy Griffin took part in. It is clearly disgusting and completely inappropriate.”
Expressions of outrage quickly came from 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Fox News Channel host Eric Bolling and Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former Democratic President Bill Clinton.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the TMZ website reported that Trump’s 11-year-old son, Barron, thought the photo was real and that his father had indeed been beheaded.
Even President Trump’s wife, Melania, released a statement on the matter:
As a mother, a wife and a human being, that photo is very disturbing. When you consider some of the atrocities happening in the world today, a photo opportunity like this is simply wrong and makes you wonder about the mental health of the person who did it.
It also wasn’t long before Griffin stated she was sorry for the stunt:
I sincerely apologize. I’m just now seeing the reaction of these images. I’m a comic. I crossed the line. I move the line and then I cross it. I went way too far.
The image is too disturbing. I understand how it offends people. It wasn’t funny, I get it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career. I will continue.
That response wasn’t enough to prevent CNN from terminating the cable channel’s agreement “with Kathy Griffin to appear on our New Year's Eve program.”
However, Griffin did receive support from a few liberals, including actor and Match Game host Alec Baldwin, who tweeted: "Kathy.... baby... I've been there” before referring to his own political drama in 1998, when he joked about then-Representative Henry Hyde on [NBC's] Late Night With Conan O'Brien.
“No one walked out of the studio and said, 'No, we're serious!' No one,” he stated. “But all your gutless, weasels in the GOP insisted I actually threatened Hyde. They played the victim beautifully."
"Kathy … f**k them. F**k them all. No 1 believes u meant 2 threaten Trump. Trump is such a senile idiot, all he has is Twitter fights," Baldwin continued. "Ignore him. Like all the leaders of the other countries in the world. Ignore him."
On Friday, June 2, Griffin’s attorney, Lisa Bloom stated:
Like many edgy works of artistic expression, the photo could be interpreted different ways. But Griffin never imagined that it could be misinterpreted as a threat of violence against Trump. She has never threatened or committed an act of violence against anyone.
But just to show she hadn’t learned anything from the incident, Griffin later said that the Trump family was "trying to ruin my life forever."
No, they’re not. You took care of that all on your own, Kathy."Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens (from the Greek kakistos "worst.")
I heard the word over dinner the other night. It probably describes the current state of the union better than any single term I know of. Its first known appearance was in 1829 in The Misfortunes of Elphin, written by the English satirical writer Thomas Love Peacock. The American poet James Russell Lowell wrote in a letter in 1876: "Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?"
It's certainly a word that should enter our vocabularies and our political discourse, perhaps find its rightful place on the SAT and be scrawled on the walls of colleges and public restrooms.
There's a website getyourkidtovote.com that encourages parents to send kakistocracy tee shirts to their college age kids to remind them and their classmates of the stakes in this election and to encourage them to vote.Consumption of tea is inversely associated with cardiovascular diseases. However, the active compound(s) responsible for the protective effects of tea are unknown. Although many favorable cardiovascular effects in vitro are mediated by epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), its contribution to the beneficial effects of tea in vivo remains unresolved. In a randomised crossover study, a single dose of 200 mg EGCG was applied in three different formulas (as green tea beverage, green tea extract (GTE), and isolated EGCG) to 50 healthy men. Flow-mediated dilation (FMD) and endothelial-independent nitro-mediated dilation (NMD) was measured before and two hours after ingestion. Plasma levels of tea compounds were determined after each intervention and correlated with FMD. FMD significantly improved after consumption of green tea containing 200 mg EGCG (p < 0.01). However, GTE and EGCG had no significant effect on FMD. NMD did not significantly differ between interventions. EGCG plasma levels were highest after administration of EGCG and lowest after consumption of green tea. Plasma levels of caffeine increased after green tea consumption. The results show that EGCG is most likely not involved in improvement of flow-mediated dilation by green tea. Instead, other tea compounds, metabolites or combinations thereof may play a role.Assassin’s Creed Origins takes place in ancient Egypt, thousands of years before every other Assassin’s Creed game, and Ubisoft showed a new trailer at its E3 2017 press briefing to give people glimpses at the sandy setting.
Open-world gaming is a foundational element of the Assassin’s Creed series, and the environment of Origins looks massive. Great pyramids, sculptures of deities, rocky cliffs, reedy swamps are all on display in the trailer. There are plenty of animals, too, including lions, horses, gazelles, a crocodile and even a hippopotamus. We get a look at life in ancient Egypt: farmers, religious leaders, sailing.
Ubisoft officially announced Origins during Microsoft’s E3 2017 press briefing yesterday afternoon, although the game had been leaked numerous times by that point.
Assassin’s Creed Origins is scheduled to be released Oct. 27 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. It will run at 4K resolution on Xbox One X and PC.The Pocket Monsters: The Origin television anime will premiere in Japan on October 2 at 7:00 p.m. The anime was announced at the "Pokémon Game Show" event held at the Tokyo Big Site event center on Saturday.
Images from a promotional video shown at the event reveal that the anime will feature the player and rival characters from Nintendo's original Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green (released as Pokémon Blue in North America) video games. The original games' and television series' first gym leader Takeshi (known as Brock in English) will also appear in the upcoming anime. The Pokémon Hitokage (Charmander), Ishitsubute (Geodude), and Kamex (Blastoise) are featured in the promotional video.
The separate Pocket Monsters XY television anime series will premiere in Japan on October 17 as a tie-in with the Pokémon X and Pokémon Y games. Pre-orders for Pokémon X and Pokémon Y opened in Japan on August 10, and the games will ship for the Nintendo 3Ds worldwide on October 12.
Source: Dengeki Online
More images are available at the above link.Uber fans have been raging about the bad press their favorite phoren cabwalla has been getting since driver Shiv Kumar Yadav allegedly raped a passenger last week. Fans are even more upset because the cab service just got banned from operating in Delhi. Initially, everyone was like: one cab driver doesn’t define how safe (or unsafe) the cab provider is.
But the thing is, this isn’t the first time Uber has gotten in trouble. Here’s a quick list of the shady shit their drivers have been up to.
Kidnapping and intent of sexual assault: Los Angeles
Hit and run death of a six year old girl: San Francisco
Accusation of rape: Washington, D.C (the case was dropped)
Uber clearly seems to have a legacy of not checking who they’re hiring.
This is why Uber needs to take some responsibility for the rape, instead of us thinking it wasn’t the company’s fault.
1. This isn’t the first time Uber has hired people who have been in jail
After someone complained of verbal and physical abuse from an Uber Driver in the US last year, it was found that the driver had done prison time – and Uber had ignored their criminal history. Even for Shiv Kumar Yadav, Uber needed to wait for a police interrogation to find out that this guy had done seven months in jail – that too for another rape case!
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2. How does Uber even verify its drivers?
While the arrested driver Shiv Kumar Yadav had served prison time, we don’t even know if he was acquitted (as he claims), or ran away from jail. On the Uber Delhi blog, the company wrote: “Uber exclusively partners with registered for-hire drivers who have undergone the commercial licensing process, hold government issued IDs, state-issued permits, and carry full commercial insurance.”
But does that mean Uber has verified these people?
3. Despite all the slick high-tech gear in these cars, there’s nothing for safety?
After the girl fell asleep, Shiv Kumar Yadav drove her to an isolated spot and then raped her. When the car went off course from the route to her home, why wasn't there an alert firing off at Uber headquarters? What’s the point of rigging the cabs with iPhones if the company can’t really do anything with the GPS information but compute your bill? If you're launching in Delhi, the Rape Capital Of India, you have to work on safety.
4. Why doesn’t Uber train its drivers in hospitality – and make them realize they can’t rape and get away with it?
All Uber does is tie up with cab permit owners to join their service. There’s no concept of gender sensitization here and no training that a girl in a miniskirt isn’t a hooker.
But this is what we’re paying for. We want to be able to fall asleep in a cab – is that too much to ask?My secret santa lives in BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA! She sent me the most thoughtful and gigantic package of tasty treats that are right up my alley!
Something my secret santa didn't know...
I met my husband in New Orleans and went to school in Louisiana. We moved to New York City and live in Manhattan - we've been here for the better part of a decade. We have a massive soft spot in our hearts for NOLA and miss so many things about the years we spent there. When I opened the package with my husband at my side we actually both teared up. There were things in there that hit a massive sentimental chord in us - things we used to have and used to enjoy that we haven't even seen for 7 years. Things we associate with the beginning of our relationship, our wild times in school, our start at life. After opening the box, we started talking about maybe, just maybe, moving back there one day.
The box was stuffed to the gills with treats like sodas we used to enjoy, beers we used to crack open on those hot humid nights on the front porch, seasonings we used to put on top of EVERYTHING (that they just don't have up here in the Northlands), Zapps (which I basically lived off of in college), tasty fresh raw honey (I'm almost out at home!), the very same exact jelly that I used to pull over and pick up from the roadside stand on the way to med school because it's just so dang good on toast... and to top it all off, the most ADORABLE T-shirt for my daughter (and it fits her PERFECTLY). She carried it around the house ALL NIGHT LONG sniffing it because it very vaguely had a Tony's scent on it and she LOVED it, then played all the next day in it on the playground.
Thank you for the AMAZING gift and AWESOME memories! That was so much more meaningful than a box from someplace I'd never seen or known... that box made us cry. Thank you!!!Story highlights Asteroid 1998 QE2 will next pass the Earth in 2028
Scientist have been anticipating the asteroid's passing for a few years
Images of it should compare well to those shot by spacecraft, NASA says
The asteroid "sailed harmlessly" past the Earth, albeit 3.6 million away
The world is OK -- at least this time -- and scientists are psyched.
An asteroid dubbed 1998 QE2 whizzed past Earth on Friday, with its own moon in tow.
It got within about 3.6 million miles of our planet. That's close relatively given the vastness of space, but still more than 15 times the distance from wherever you are to our moon.
The fly-by had astronomers less fearful and more excited about getting the "best look at this asteroid ever," according to NASA.
The resulting images should be of similar quality to those obtained when spacecraft get up close to asteroids, said Lance Benner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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Scientists have been rubbing their hands for a decade and a half for this opportunity since they discovered the asteroid on August 19, 1998, the year for which it is named. The letter "Q" stands for the month of August.
"As my old friend, radar astronomer Steve Ostro used to say, spaceship Earth is making a fly-by of the asteroid, so we're going to exploit the capabilities of the radars to understand as much as possible," Benner said, according to a story on NASA's website.
Forget falling stars: NASA plans to catch an asteroid
A milestone asteroid
1998 QE2 represents a milestone in NASA's Near Earth Object Project, which scopes out the heavens for potential danger from celestial projectiles whizzing past.
"It's one of the initial successes of our effort to find the big asteroids that could hit the Earth and cause global catastrophe," said Paul Chodas, a scientist with the project. "It's certainly one to keep an eye on."
NASA has been tracking it with radar devices since Thursday, not to clock its speed but to get good pictures of it. A day before, scientists got a shot of its moon. The images look less like photos and more like ultrasound images.
The discovery of its moon -- which makes it what scientists call a binary asteroid -- surprised the astronomers, said NASA radar scientist Marina Brozovic, who helped take the images at Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California.
More than 15% of asteroids travel in groups of two or three objects revolving around one another, according to NASA.
Destructive potential
1998 QE2's moon, which is 2,000 feet wide, is large enough for NASA to term it a "potential city killer." The asteroid it revolves around is much bigger, at 1.7 miles wide.
"This is one of the big ones," Chodas said.
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Any asteroid as large as a half-mile across would cause a global catastrophe, if it struck the blue planet, he added.
To put the potential for damage by an asteroid into perspective, the one that paleontologists believe triggered the extinction of dinosaurs on Earth 65 million years ago was six miles in diameter.
The meteor that exploded over Russia in February, injuring more than 1,000 people and causing millions of dollars in damage, was a "very small asteroid," according to the space agency.
The most dangerous asteroids contain a lot of stone or iron, according to NASA. 1998 QE2 contains a good bit of carbon and well as amino acids, the building blocks of protein.
The NEOP has identified 95% of asteroids of this most dangerous order, Chodas said. Luckily, there is no known possibility of one slamming into the planet.
But NASA has not yet done much work on the meteors one class lower, known as the "potential city killers." They start at a size of 150 yards in diameter. NASA astronomers have identified only 10% of the 10,000 they believe pass close to Earth.
NASA officials this year told a congressional panel, which was considering future defense systems to prevent a potential asteroid strike, that there is only a one in 20,000 chance that a truly dangerous one will hit Earth in a year's time.
Having a look
Even as it jets further and further away, astronomers will continue making images of 1998 QE2 through June 9 with two radar antennas -- one in California and a second one in Puerto Rico.
Amateur astronomers with telescopes as small as 10 inches long may just barely be able to see it in the southern skies. But their devices should be computer controlled because locating it otherwise will be difficult, NASA advises. The coordinates to locate the asteroid are on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory website
NASA takes threats from asteroids seriously, and will keep calculating the orbits of the large ones they identify long to check their flight paths for any potential danger to Earth.
Eventually, 1998 QE2 will curve back out toward the solar system's outer asteroid belt, which is just short of Jupiter.
It will go by Earth next on July 12, 2028, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But that time there will be lots more elbow space -- the asteroid is expected to be about 45 million miles away.
There will be a much closer call comes in about 200 years. Even then, though, scientists believe history will repeat itself -- and our planet will once again survive.:Wumpscut: critics tend to fall into two distinct camps: those who praise naïvely but critically misunderstand obvious flaws, and those who can do nothing else but look over their shoulders disdainfully and wetly express their wish that Rudy Ratzinger, :Wumpscut:’s sole member, would return to his so-called glories of old. Those grisly millstone glories broadly but reliably refer to his opening salvo of albums from 1991 (Music for a Slaughtering Tribe) to 1999 (Boeses Junges Fleisch, although yellow-toothed purists won’t go past Embryodead), a phase characterised by harsh overloads of noise, pitch-black lyrical tropes, and the EBM equivalent of the Somme. That Ratzinger produced some of the most remarkable and startlingly pure electro-industrial of the nineties without resorting to the full-on NIN/Ministry-esque metal fad—which pretty much guaranteed exposure circa 1994—is impressive but rarely credited.
Ever prolific, he is perhaps guilty of some quality-control issues. Returning to Throbbing Gristle‘s original industrial manifesto insomuch as the lifecycle of a :Wumpscut: album runs like a production line: Recording in earnest takes place usually during winter following an autumn announcement. Then, by Christmas, a remix competition and theme emerge. Finally, a release date around Good Friday is set. This predictable annual turnaround can render Ratzinger’s back-catalogue unfamiliar after a few years; the distance between the halcyon days of |
’s ordinary Americans who are stuck paying higher prices for utilities and gasoline.
But the hit working Americans take under voodoo environomics doesn’t end with higher utility bills and gas prices. In bowing to environmental extremists in rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline project, Mr. Obama has abandoned working Americans - or should I say unemployed Americans in search of good jobs?
In fact, Mr. Obama managed the rare feat of uniting business and labor, with both crying foul over this senseless decision. Jay Timmons, CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, decries the loss of 20,000 direct jobs and another 118,000 spinoff jobs that would have resulted from Keystone. Standing next to him, Terry O’Sullivan, head of the Laborers’ International Union of North America said, “Blue-collar construction workers across the U.S. will not forget this [decision].”
The application of voodoo environomics also puts style over substance. Mr. Obama’s rejection of Keystone XL won’t stop the extraction of oil from Canada’s oil sands - the primary objective behind the pressure to kill the project. Canada will proceed without pause in exploiting its oil sands, regardless of what American politicians or environmental extremists say or do.
Anti-Keystone activists also point to the need to protect the Ogallala Aquifer, which encompasses parts of eight states and underlies a portion of the proposed route of the pipeline. But reviews of the thousands and thousands of miles of oil and natural-gas pipelines over the Ogallala, some of which have been transporting oil for more than a half-century, show no contamination of the aquifer.
What the decision does do is ensure that oil won’t be shipped and refined by Americans and likely will go to other nations, particularly China. This may sound like hyperbole, and I wish it were. But Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in lambasting Mr. Obama’s rejection of Keystone, said Canada would look to China to sell the oil.
America’s energy insecurity is moving into a dangerous new phase, while our economy remains anemic and unemployment systemic. Rather than strengthening America’s energy position with a close ally and neighbor like Canada, Mr. Obama has increased our dependence on energy supplies from less friendly nations that ensure little or no environmental safeguards.
The negative impact of this decision doesn’t end there. America’s risk exposure to dangerous energy disruptions stemming from global hot spots just went up. Such disruptions - for instance, those that could result from the crisis brewing in the Strait of Hormuz - would be a disaster for working Americans and a significant national security crisis for the nation.
The phantom gains and real losses stemming from voodoo environomics are starting to be realized. America needs more opportunities, not lost opportunities.
H. Leighton Steward is a geologist and retired energy-industry executive. He is chairman of Plants Need CO2.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Jewish ethnic networking has been a theme at TOO, ranging from appointments to the Supreme Court (notoriously, Elena Kagan), admissions to elite universities, the world of art (e.g., Mark Rothko), literature (e.g., pro-Israel writers Shani Boianjiu and Risa Miller), and philosophy (e.g., Spinoza). Not to mention the intellectuals discussed in The Culture o f Critique.
Now comes an article by Samuel Goldman in The American Conservative “Mild Nepotism and the Illusion of Meritocracy,” the point of which is that the path of Nathaniel Rich to fame and fortune in the literary world has been greatly aided by having a “famous name and the connections that often go along with it.” Rich is the son of former New York Times columnist Frank Rich who has come to the attention of TOO several times, including for a piece of Jewish triumphalism in which, like the New York Times editorial page, he eagerly looks forward to an America with a White minority.
Goldman cites Margaret Sullivan’s comment in the Times:
It’s beginning to feel like Nathaniel Rich Month at The Times. The author’s new novel was reviewed in the Arts section on April 10, then again in the Sunday Book Review on April 14. Mr. Rich also wrote an essay for the Sunday Book Review, with many references to that novel, “Odds Against Tomorrow.” In addition, the Editors’ Choice section of the Sunday Book Review listed Mr. Rich’s novel second on its list.
So much attention to one young writer in some very elite places—and let’s not forget The New York Review of Books. But, according to the Times Theater and Books Editor Scott Heller, the system works just fine:
I [Margaret Sullivan] asked Mr. Heller about that kind of attention and why it happens. Again, he said, it comes from different section editors and writers making their own plans without consultation with one another. “In the best of all worlds, it would be healthiest to spread the attention around,” Mr. Heller said. “There are so many deserving writers out there, and it sends a wrong signal.” In general, though, the current system is the most practical and “seems to work,” he said.
Goldman’s take is that this new nepotism is very understandable and entirely benign, and he can’t help getting in a dig at the supposedly corrupt WASP elite that people like Rich replaced:
This isn’t the explicit favoritism of the old-fashioned Establishment, which often reward pedigree rather than competence. Instead, it’s a very contemporary form of advantage that coexists with the meritocratic principles of the new elite. Under this regime, rewards are available for “achievers” of any background. But it just so happens that the children of people who are already successful know how to achieve the most–and whom to inform of their accomplishments.
Is Goldman seriously suggesting that the writers who became famous before the rise of our new, super-talented elite were simply rewarded for their pedigree? People like Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway? Shakespeare and Dickens?
Is he suggesting that Nathaniel Rich’s book, Odds against Tomorrow—which deals with an ecological disaster resulting from climate change—is in their company? Rich is doubtless on firm ground by dealing with such a safe, politically correct topic—one sure to appeal to the new elite. Whatever else one might say, his book is certainly not going to offend the powers that be—not with a topic much beloved of liberals and a brilliant hero named Mitchell Zukor, a child of immigrants from Hungary whose name certainly indicates that he is not one of those bad old WASPs who got their positions simply because of their pedigree.
Like his father, Nathaniel Rich doubtless looks forward to the dispossession of White America. Come to think of it, that’s a great topic for his next book: the soon-to-be paradise of a White minority America where only the truly talented rise to the top. Daddy would be very proud.
And how do we know that Rich is talented apart from glowing reviews, several by his co-ethnics in literary organs edited by his co-ethnics? There is no gold standard here, any more than for the world historical reputations of Spinoza, Freud, Boas or the Frankfurt School.
But Goldman is quite right that this process extends far beyond the literary world:
Mild nepotism would not be a big deal if it were confined to publishing. But it’s also a fact of life in finance, academia, and the upper reaches of the legal world. These fields are open, in principle, to all. In practice, however, they are dominated by those who have been outfitted since childhood with the skills and contacts they’ll need to do well in the right schools, find the right jobs, and, when the time comes, to welcome others very much like themselves inside the magic circle.
Right. And, as we know, getting into the right schools is very much a matter of ethnic connections (Nathaniel Rich graduated from Yale; Goldman got his Ph.D. at Harvard) and that non-Jewish Whites are being discriminated by a factor of 15 when corrected for academic ability (see previous link). I’d like to see Rich’s SAT’s and I wonder how many non-Jewish Whites had better scores than he did but were refused admittance to Yale. Given that 15 to 1 ratio, I suspect there were quite a few. Just looking at IQ, there are 4.5 times as many non-Jewish Whites as Jews with an IQ over 140, but you’d never know it by looking at elite academic institutions.
Goldman is a post-doc in the Religion and the Tikvah Project on Jewish Thought at Princeton. His Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard was on three Jewish intellectuals, Leo Strauss, Heinrich Jacobi and Spinoza and won the Robert Noxon Toppan prize for best dissertation in political science.
Sounds like a Goldman is headed for high places as well.
Call me cynical, but I suspect there is more than a whiff of ethnic networking going on in Mr. Rich’s meteoric career. Those who have welcomed him into the magic circle are indeed “very much like” him. Besides Heller, the gatekeeper at the New York Times, his book was also given a glowing review by Cathleen Schine in The New York Review of Books, which is edited by Robert B. Silvers. (Rich has also published several essays in the NYRB.) Another very positive review was by Alan Cheuse on All Things Considered. The editor of the New York Times Book Review is Pamela Paul whose background seems completely opaque but she is quite attuned to Jewish issues.
And why should we believe Goldman when he writes that “it just so happens that the children of people who are already successful know how to achieve the most—and whom to inform of their accomplishments.” It’s a good sign that Goldman is part of the corrupt elite that he feels no need for an argument or for finding data to support his thesis. I guess we should just take his word for what’s going on. No need to seriously consider ethnic networking. It’s all very innocent and inevitable, and it’s certainly nothing that we should actually do anything about. (It’s a bit odd that The American Conservative would publish Ron Unz’s seminal article on the corrupt admissions process at Ivy League universities which strongly implicates Jewish ethnic networking but completely ignore the possibility of ethnic networking in the case of Nathaniel Rich.)
In the end, Goldman’s comment is little more than a rationalization for how the new predominantly Jewish elite protects and regenerates itself. Policing the media is a hugely important aspect of the power of the new elite. The gatekeepers at elite publications ensure that people like Nathaniel Rich get to the top. The road to the top for non-Jewish Whites, denied admission to elite universities and lacking ethnic connections with the new elite, is much harder and precluded entirely for any White with even a wee bit of ethnic identity or a sense that Whites, like everyone else, have ethnic interests.
The new elite is hostile and corrupt.NORTHVILLE, Mich. -- There's no way he would have approved. No way. Brad McCrimmon was many things, as reliable a defenseman as there was in hockey during his playing days. A stern, yet encouraging, coach who constantly looked for ways to improve every player on his team.
But first and foremost, he was a dad. A protective one.
When it came to his stance on tattoos, he made it abundantly clear to his kids: They weren't allowed. His rule even came with a threat.
If his teenage daughter Carlin ever got a tattoo, he promised that he was getting a bigger one. He threatened to shave his head, get a giant bald eagle tattooed on his back, with the eagle's head extending onto his shaved head where huge talons would hold a fish spilling blood and guts all over. It was quite the picture.
Last week, Carlin got a tattoo.
Pulling up the side of her shirt, she reveals the black ink of a phrase written in Russian. Translated, it says "Our team. Forever."
It was a phrase she saw everywhere when she went to Yaroslavl, Russia, last fall for the first time after her father's death. It was a phrase that never left her consciousness.
"I said, 'That's what I'm getting.' And now, a year later, it was still stuck with me. I figured it was time," she said Monday, two days before leaving for Russia to honor the one-year anniversary of her father's death. "Personally, for me, it kind of felt like a step forward. Like, 'OK, here I am a year later. I'm doing everything my dad would want me to do. I'm back in school. I'm still alive and breathing, which at times didn't feel like we were going to be. It felt good in that way to get it."
But.
"But he would kill me," she said, smiling. "Absolutely."
It's hard to believe it's been one year. One year since the hockey world was crushed by the devastating news that the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team plane had crashed shortly after takeoff on its way to play its first game of the KHL season. Forty-four of the 45 people on board the plane died. The lone survivor was the flight engineer.
One year since a tragedy permanently connected a Russian hockey team with its first-year head coach, proudly raised on a family farm in Plenty, Saskatchewan.
A coach who couldn't wait to lead his group to success in the KHL after spending years as an assistant coach in the NHL.
On the morning of Sept 7, 2011, he called home to Michigan like he did every day. The promise of a new season had him energized.
"He was so excited," his wife, Maureen, said. "'It's about [expletive] time we're getting this season started,' [he said.] I said, 'Call me when you get there.' I've been saying that to him for 100 years. He always did."
It's been a year, and the details of those last conversations haven't faded. They never will. For Carlin, it was a conversation on Skype. She had just moved into her new apartment by Wayne State University, where she's attending college. Before McCrimmon left for Russia, they shopped at Ikea together to furnish the place.
When the furniture was assembled, he wasn't satisfied just to hear about it. He requested a Skype tour from Russia. Carlin walked around her apartment, showing him her bed, her kitchen table, her living room. Everything they had picked out together.
"He goes, 'It looks really great. 'Where the [expletive] are you going to do your homework?'" Carlin said. "He was like, 'You need a desk. You need to be organized.' He was so about school, so about organization and whatever. That was the last time I talked to him. That day."
The McCrimmon family is back in Russia, the only place they wanted to be when the anniversary came. The past 12 months have brought close friendships with the families of those who died in the crash, and those bonds provide a comfort that can't be found stateside.
McCrimmon won a Stanley Cup in 1989, playing for the Calgary Flames. He partnered with Mark Howe to form one of the best defensive pairings of the 1980s in Philadelphia. He played his 1,000th game with the Detroit Red Wings.
But the connection is now strongest with Lokomotiv. It's the Lokomotiv team flag that flies under the American flag out front of the McCrimmon's new home here. It's a Lokomotiv T-shirt that McCrimmon's son Liam wore to a recent Windsor Spitfires game. And of course, it's a tribute to Lokomotiv that is permanently drawn on Carlin's side.
"He loved them," Carlin said of the bond that immediately formed between the players and their new coach. "Oh, my God, so quickly. That's the one thing about going over there that I'm excited for Liam to see. When I was there, I came home with a strange closure. I saw this city he talked about and loved and spoke so highly of. I would see little things and say, 'You know what? Dad definitely loved that.'"
The McCrimmon family has been moved by the constant support it has received from the people of Yaroslavl, but still, there were nerves before the return to Russia. There are the darker memories of the last trip, 40 days after the crash when Maureen and Carlin went to an investigator's office to recover personal items found at the crash site.
The memory of the cramped stairs that took them to a basement that felt like a bomb shelter. A room with a dirt floor that contained mud-covered laptops and burlap sacks full of clothes. Sacks that Carlin ripped through just to find anything left of her father's belongings.
"I just wanted to see something. I wanted that closure for myself that he was there, that he's not on vacation," she said. "From day one, I've always accepted the fact that this is what happened and he's gone and this is real life. But I wanted to see it."
The hard-nosed Brad McCrimmon won a Stanley Cup with Calgary. Bruce Bennett Studios/Getty Images
When she spotted a Calgary Flames toiletry bag, she immediately knew it was his. To prove it, she was able to recite exactly what it contained, right down to the bottle of cologne she bought him every Christmas.
When she struggled to find more personal items, an investigator brought out a bag with the No. 4 on it in Russian. McCrimmon's was the fourth body recovered from the wreck. In that bag, they found the jeans he always wore. They found his Reebok polo shirt. They found a belt.
Instead of comfort, it was an ugly reminder. They left most of it there.
Now, back in Michigan there are a few things recovered and saved. Two Dell laptaps, cracked and covered in mud. McCrimmon's wallet, still holding the money and identification cards he left his apartment with that morning. A broken pen sits in a plastic bag next to the Flames bag still filled with shaving cream, a toothbrush, a Sharpie, aftershave.
The mud has long dried, but even after one year, the smell of jet fuel is strong.
One year later, none of it has faded away. Not the pain, none of the memories. Not even the smell.
There's a historic home in Northville that was built in 1843. McCrimmon loved it. He'd drive by it on the way back to the house the family was renting and say, "A guy should buy that property."
He'd make excuses just to pass it and then sit out front admiring the old house. His kids would tease him that the owners might accuse him of stalking, so he'd finally move on to Starbucks or what other destination he invented to get a look at it.
The house has since been completely renovated, a spectacular blue mix of history and modern convenience that makes it impossible to miss when driving through Northville. Earlier this summer, it went on the market, and there was no hesitation. Maureen bought it. For the kids, for herself. For Brad.
Their old house was starting to suffocate the family. Too many memories. Every day for a month, the family's golden retriever walked to the bottom of the driveway and waited. The man called Beast by his friends called this dog his own majestic beast, and Finnegan's patience seemed endless.
"Daddy's not coming home," Maureen would say.
They left that house.
They're starting fresh in this old homestead. There's still unpacking to be done and furniture to move in, but McCrimmon's presence is everywhere. A picture in front of the fireplace. Framed jerseys in an office. A poem he always kept nearby, hung on a wall. A wife who shares his determination to put the family first and make sure the kids are always taken care of. A daughter with his eyes and incredible ability to tell a story. A son who shares his passion for hockey and a deep loyalty for friends and teammates.
Those teammates and the players whose lives McCrimmon changed have helped make this all a little bit easier. As Sept. 7 crept closer, the texts to Maureen became more frequent, quick notes from the hockey community to remind her that she's not alone. There's support nearby from the Red Wings in the presence of the Ilitch family, Ken Holland and Jim Nill, who have all made it clear that they're available, any time. The McCrimmons have formed a bond with the family of the late Bob Probert, with each helping the other move forward.
McCrimmon's impact on the world of hockey was so wide-reaching that his family won't ever be alone.
That doesn't always dull the pain.
In front of their beautiful home is a giant porch overlooking the street. Maureen looks at it and can't help but imagine how much Brad would have enjoyed sitting there, sipping Grey Goose and watching a summer parade go by.
And the large kitchen table is rarely used, with family dinners too painful a reminder of who is missing. Instead, they eat at the counter.
"You just don't enjoy it. You just miss him too much. You want him to be there with you. That's hard," Maureen said. "Your outlook changes on life after you lose somebody. Lots of things he just took for granted we would do. Always waiting for the right time to do something.... And so now, I don't."over 370 entries, covering all major holidays and feasts of the Catholic calendar;
almost 350 cocktails, from forgotten classics to original creations
a wide array of beers and ales, including ones made by monks
hundreds of wines named after the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints
the Catholic origins of whiskey, tequila, sparkling wine, and more
everything you need to know about the drinking preferences of the saints (and believe me, they had their preferences!)
For me, one of the greatest joys of the Sacra Liturgia 2015 conference was finally meeting in person the legendary liturgical calendar expert, Augustinian thinker, and pillar of Baylor, Dr. Michael P. Foley. Dr. Foley has been a long-time contributor to the cause of liturgical piety and restoration through his print publications, including a series of wonderful articles inmostly concerning the traditional calendar and its many obvious and subtle virtues.Given his intimate knowledge of the traditional calendar and its saints, seasons, cycles, feasts, fasts, and odd corners and curiosities, and given that he is a Catholic who proudly follows in the footsteps of such thoughtful wine-bibbers as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, Dr. Foley's new book,has the quality of something both delightfully surprising and utterly inevitable. In this beautifully-produced tome filled with saints' biographies, classic works of art, quips, quotations, and toasts, and drink recipes new and old, the extraliturgical celebration of the liturgical year has acquired a fantastic new resource. After all, if, as the Council reminded us, the liturgy is the beginning and the end, what about the middle? We should not forget the saints after we have left the church building, but bring them into our times of leisure and recreation as well.While I would hesitate to recommendfor RCIA programs, as it might send the wrong signal, it is a must for all Catholics who appreciate these words of Scripture: "Thou dost cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread to strengthen man's heart" (Ps 103:14-15). (As an aside, I can also recommend a book that is a kind of secular/scientific counterpart to Foley's, namely, Amy Stewart'swhich I have found both fascinating and entertaining, and which has often left me in a state of wonder at the bounty the Lord has left for us in his good creation.)The publisher, Regnery History, offered me some data on the book, which I now pass along to you. Inthe reader will discover:Below are a few enticing photographs to whet the appetite. To read more, visit the book's page, which makes available, among other things, an app with searchable liturgical calendars, recipes, and indices.Congratulations to Dr. Foley on this entertaining book, which should become a standard feature of Catholic households and their apostolate of hospitality for friends and strangers alike.The first article I ever wrote for the front page of Bleeding Green Nation was posted exactly one year and one month ago from today on February 19, 2013. (Happy belated anniversary to myself.) I didn't want my debut post to be just any generic piece. I wanted to tackle a subject that had been bothering me for a few months.
When Chip Kelly was hired last year, a lot of people were excited. They thought he was absolutely the perfect hire for the Eagles to make. I consider myself one of those people. At the same time, there was still a large amount of skepticism when it came to Kelly. Fast forward a year and things a little different. Kelly earned the respect of Eagles fans with a surprisingly success 2013 campaign. Look at these results from the Chip Kelly January 2014 BGN approval poll. As you can see, the numbers favor Kelly in an overwhelming fashion:
Entering this offseason, it looked like Kelly would easily retain those numbers. Aside from some free agency moves and the 2014 NFL draft, there weren't a lot of big decisions for Kelly to make compared to last year. Or so we thought. With reports of the Eagles being open to trade offers for DeSean Jackson, it looks like Kelly is involved in yet another major polarizing decision. I'll address this situation using the format from my original post. Let's examine the DeSean decision from the perspectives of the Kelly Trustee (KT) and the Chip Skeptic (CS).
KT: If you look at all of the noise surrounding Jackson this offseason, it seems like there's something brewing. This must all be for a good reason. Kelly is smart. He is not known for being petty and acting on emotions. Rather, he's cool and calculated. He's a big believer in science. For everything he does, there is a reason behind it. Trading DeSean admittedly doesn't seem to make much sense, but maybe it's time to accept that there's more to all of this than what we know.
CS: What the F*** are the Eagles doing? How could they trade DeSean Jackson?! Not only is he one of the biggest faces of the franchise as a fan favorite, but he's a great player. He's coming off a career year. He's still only 27. His role in the offense fits perfectly with what Chip wants: big plays. The Eagles can't just replace Jackson's production so easily. If he's gone, it greatly damages the team. It unnecessarily creates a roster hole that will have to be addressed. Kelly doesn't know what he's doing. And how are the Eagles only asking for a third round pick in return?
My Verdict: I've maintained from the beginning of this speculation that there's probably more to all of this than we are all privy to. I think it's naive to assuming what we know about the DeSean situation is all their is to know. It just doesn't add up. The puzzle is missing pieces that are waiting to be filled in.
I'd like to point out some tweets that back up my sentiment.
The Eagles front office has been spot on in almost every move since Chip got here. If Howie/Chip think DeSean has to go, he's got to go. Maybe, just maybe, this whole DeSean thing is more complicated than we know. I just don't think Eagles would entertain a DeSean trade unless there was a really good reason. Not their history to operate otherwise. Come on people. If the Eagles could get a 1st for DeSean, that's what they'd ask for. They're not asking for less just because. Chip Kelly has a history of giving his players the chance to rehab their image under him. Potentially getting rid of DeSean isn't a kneejerk reaction.
Conclusion:
Chip Kelly rightfully earned a lot trust with the team's performance last year. He also did it by proving to be right in the two major 2013 offseason decisions which I highlighted in my post from last year: the re-signing of Michael Vick and the hiring of Bill Davis. While some will say bringing Vick back was a mistake, I've already discussed how that thinking is inaccurate. Bringing Vick back created a high level of competition and pushed Nick Foles to play to the best of his ability. As far as Davis goes, many thought he would be one and done in Philly as the team's DC. While he wasn't exactly the second coming of Jim Johnson in his first season in Philly, Davis led the way of a unit that overachieved and performed at a higher level than people expected. There was a stretch in the season where the Eagles held their opponents to 21 or less points for 9 straight weeks; the only team to do it in that span. Both of those decisions were met with a lot of criticism at the time, but Kelly proved to know better.
This isn't to say Kelly's track record is infallible. I can't ask you to blindly trust him in this DeSean scenario. Mistakes are always possible. What I will ask, based on his history in Philadelphia, is that you consider Kelly just might know what he's doing. And that he also just might know better than any of us think we do. At the very least, try to keep an open mind. I know that's not easy to ask because of the nature of this issue. But it's the only way to survive this tough time.
In Chip Kelly We Trust.Former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner, who has twice had his political career derailed by sexting scandals, has hinted in a Facebook post that he might be working on a return to politics.
From The Hill:
Former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) may not be done with politics.
Weiner, whose run for New York City mayor imploded after it was revealed he hadn't stopped his online interactions with women apart from his wife, penned a Facebook post thanking his supporters and hinting at future political involvement.
"What's next? I'll keep you posted on my plans. But I hope we keep the band together," he says in the post.
"You have been an amazing resource and the network we have all become part of has helped lead the debate on national health care, the need for a smarter and more compassionate approach to the growing pockets of need in our nation, and we all have sought to make the argument that too often we progressives come to knife fights carrying library books."The folks over at the Arduining website must have had a lot of spare time, as they have created an automated boom system for a toy car car park. A servo operates the boom gate, and there are sensors 'under the ground' just like a real car park to detect the entry or exit of a vehicle. The system keeps track of how many cars are parked and refuses entry to newcomers when the carpark is full. This would be great for Matchbox car enthusiasts, or something to make with a youngster. Here it is in action:
Fascinating. All it needs now are some RFID readers, tags on the cars, a RTC - and you could make a little billing system for the carpark users :) To get started on your own carpark monopoly click here. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.Sharing documents with various government and private agencies for different purposes is a tedious task. From Income Tax Returns to University Degrees to PAN Cards, various agencies need these documents for processing loans, providing services etc. The Government plans to do away with physical sharing of documents with these agencies and hence has launched the Digital Locker, aimed at creating a repository of digital documents for each resident of the country.
Digital Locker is one of the key initiatives under the Digital India Program of the Government of India. A beta version of this initiative has been released on 10th Feb. 2015, by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY).
What is Digital Locker?
Digital Locker is aimed at minimizing the usage of physical documents and enable sharing of e-documents across agencies. The sharing of the e-documents will be done through registered repositories thereby ensuring the authenticity of the documents online. Residents can also upload their own electronic documents and digitally sign them using the e-sign facility. These digitally signed documents can be shared with Government organizations or other entities. Examples of such documents are Income Tax Returns, University Degrees etc.
Understanding the Jargon
An e-document is an electronic document in XML format issued to one or more individuals (Aadhaar holders) in appropriate formats (both as XML and printable) compliant to digital locker technical specifications. One may also upload govt. issued scanned documents and also digitally sign the same.
An Issuer is an entity issuing e-documents to individuals in a standard format and making them electronically available e.g. CBSE, Registrar Office, Income Tax department, etc.
A Requester is an entity requesting secure access to a particular e-document stored in the repository (e.g. University, Passport Office, Regional Transport Office, etc.)
A Repository is a Collection of e-Documents which are uploaded by issuers in a standard format for secure real-time search and access.
What are the key features of Digital Locker?
For citizens & residents who sign up for the digital locker, the following features are available,
Digital Locker of each resident is linked to their Aadhaar number
10MB of free space in the locker to securely store resident documents and store links (URI) of Govt. department or agency issued e-documents. The storage space allocation will be increased to 1GB in subsequent release.
eSign online service to digitally sign the documents online
Sharing of e-documents online with any registered requester agency or department
Download eAadhaar.
List of issuers which have issued e-documents to residents and list of requesters which have accessed resident’s documents.
For issuers who issue these e-documents like Universities, a facility to upload e-documents in a standard XML format in the digital locker repository and push e-document URI in the resident’s digital locker has been provided.
For Requesters, secure access to documents in repository or in digital has been provided.
How can one sign up for it?
To Sign-up for the Digilocker, one must have a valid Aadhaar number registered with UIDAI. The following is the process for signing up
One has to type his/her Aadhaar number in the given space.
After that, the user will be given two options for authentication. One can use OTP (One time Password) or a fingerprint. Your mobile number has to be registered with UIDAI for using the OTP option. You need to have a finger print device to use the finger print option.
Once the authentication is done, you will be asked to set a username and a password.
What kind of documents would be present in the user’s account?
Every user account would have two types of documents.
Digital Documents, which contains URI (links) of the documents issued to the resident by the Govt. department or other agencies.
which contains URI (links) of the documents issued to the resident by the Govt. department or other agencies. Uploaded Documents, the documents which are uploaded by the resident. This can be your SSC Certificate, HSC Certificate, PAN card, Voter ID card, etc. These documents have to e-signed for them to be valid and issued to the requester.
Each uploaded document can be a maximum of 1MB in size and can be in pdf, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp or gif file type.
How does sharing of documents happen?
For sharing an e-document, a facility to share is provided. One can click on the ‘Share’ link provided against the document one wishes to share. Then the email address of the recipient has to be entered. The document will be then shared with the recipient via email. The recipient will receive an email. The subject line of the email will mention the document name and document type. The email body will have the URI link of the document and the sender name and Aadhaar number. The recipient can access the document using the URI link provided in the email.
Who is using it?
The Beta version of the digital locker was launched in February, 2015. Since then, more than 2.5 lakh people have registered and uploaded more than 1.8 lakh documents according to the latest available data. In terms of states, Madhya Pradesh has more than 31000 users followed by Uttar Pradesh with close to 31000 users followed by Maharashtra with more than 23000 users. Incidentally, the BJP or its allies rule five of the top 6 states in terms of the Digital Locker users.
How do I learn more?
The Digital Locker website has a list of FAQs from where one can learn more about the initiative. It also has a user manual with detailed step by step instructions on the processes. You could also go through the introductory note to understand more about the initiative. The technical specifications are also available for those who wish to go through them.
Source: Digital Locker Website
Featured Image: digitallocker.gov.inHearing set for Friday, February 17
(Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch today announced a hearing will be held on Friday, February 17, 2017, regarding Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking emails “relating to official United States Government business sent to or from” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and three other top Homeland Security officials that used “non-‘.gov’” email addresses (Judicial Watch, Inc., v. United States Department of Homeland Security (No. l:l6-cv-00967)).
The hearing will focus on whether the Department of Homeland Security has made any efforts to recover the official government emails still residing in the private email accounts of former Secretary Johnson and other officials.
The hearing was ordered subsequent to a May 23, 2016, FOIA lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch after Homeland Security failed to respond to a December 29, 2015, FOIA request.
The court hearing is scheduled for Friday afternoon:
Date: Friday, February 17, 2017 Time: 2 p.m. ET Location: Courtroom 21 U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia 333 Constitution Ave NW Washington, DC 20001
Judicial Watch already has obtained 215 pages of documents containing official emails sent through the private, unsecure email accounts of Johnson and three other top Homeland Security officials. The documents include emails discussing high-level meetings Johnson was to have with the Kuwaiti ambassador and Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry officials, as well as a West African $4.5 million online consumer fraud scam.
Prior to the Obama administration’s leaving office, Judge Moss ordered the Department of Homeland Security to preserve email records sought by Judicial Watch “to minimize the risk of an inadvertent loss of potentially responsive emails.” In petitioning the court for the preservation order, Judicial Watch argued:
A court order |
B]ecause crude oil expands in the refining process, liquid fuel is captured in the processing of natural gas, and there are other sources of liquid fuel, including biofuels," EIA observed, reporting that these additional supplies totaled 4.2 MMbd in 2010.
In 2010, the U.S. imported 11.8 million barrels per day (MMbd) of crude oil and refined petroleum products. The U.S., however, also exported 2.3 MMbd of crude oil and petroleum products during 2010, so net imports (imports minus exports) equaled 9.4 MMbd, EIA noted.
Petroleum products imported by the United States during 2010 included gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, jet fuel, chemical feedstocks, asphalt, and other products. Still, most petroleum products consumed in the United States were refined here. Net imports of petroleum other than crude oil were 2 percent of the petroleum consumed in the United States during 2010, according to EIA.
About Half of U.S. Petroleum Imports from Western Hemisphere
Of the total crude oil and petroleum product imports, 49 percent came from the Western Hemisphere (North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean including U.S. territories) during 2010. About 18 percent of U.S. crude and imports of crude oil and petroleum products come from the Persian Gulf countries of Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. The U.S.' largest sources of net crude oil and petroleum product imports were Canada and Saudi Arabia, EIA said.
Reliance on Petroleum Imports has Declined
U.S. dependence on imported oil has dramatically declined since peaking in 2005, EIA emphasized.
"This trend is the result of a variety of factors including a decline in consumption and shifts in supply patterns," EIA said, continuing: "The economic downturn after the financial crisis of 2008, improvements in efficiency, changes in consumer behavior and patterns of economic growth, all contributed to the decline in petroleum consumption. At the same time, increased use of domestic biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel), and strong gains in domestic production of crude oil and natural gas plant liquids expanded domestic supplies and reduced the need for imports."
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WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone. All comments are subject to editorial review. Off-topic, inappropriate or insulting comments will be removed.Hello everyone,
Got a fantastic evening lined up.
Robert O’Brien (@robertobrien) is a software developer, designer and entrepreneur who has been working on large scale distributed financial market systems and wholesale B2B/B2C Payments for well over 17 years. He currently is working on the application of financial cryptography to build new mobile [NFC] phone payments for complimentary currency systems and person-to-person markets.
He's going to talk on: "Many of the design assumptions in Bitcoin are very subtle and only documented presently by the code. In this talk I will look at why Bitcoin is structured the way it is"
We're lucky to have some sponsors for the event. Thanks in advance go to:
http://www.moversandshakersbritomart.co.nz (http://www.moversandshakersbritomart.co.nz/) for providing a venue and
http://britomarthospitality.co.nz/bhc for supplying delicious pizza!
There's capacity for 50 people so please spread the word.
Look forward to seeing you there.
Cheers
SamOk in this post I want to talk to you about the people you will work with if you choose to advertise through Facebook or Myspace or any other outlet such as these and help you understand why most people could care less about you.
That’s right most of the people you deal with on a daily bases will not be interested in anything you have to say to them about your business no matter how good of an opportunity it may be. First and foremost do not take offense to that statement.
People will not respond to you because they are mean or because they are looking for a fight as to the information you may be seeking to pass on to them.
It is simply because they are mostly focused on themselves and the lives they lead.
Nine times out of ten people will say and believe that the world revolves around them and that they are to busy to take the time out for anyone who seeks more than five minutes of their valued time.
The fact is a TV program will be more important to many of them than working to better their lives.
This may sound harsh.
However it is the truth.
Think about the variety of thoughts a normal 24 hour hard working person has everyday.
The biggest thoughts are self directed as to what they are doing and what they should have done.
They are consumed with day dreams as to goals they had hoped to achieve by their age and how disappointed that they are still doing the same things they said they would not be doing years ago when they started to dream.
Then they are considering all the problems that they have in their lives that in their minds have stopped those dreams from becoming a reality.
Next is their feelings as to the way they see themselves and the worry as to the way others see them.
They become obsessed with what their friends and family may be or may not be thinking of them as to how they have lived or are living.
Which brings us to relationships many people are dealing with more than one relationship at any given time constantly being bombarded with advice rather wanted or not as to what and where their directions in life should take them. Out of love or simple association they will listen to those people faster than they will listen to a strangers voice on the other end of the phone.
Next they are placating as to what you have to tell them well trying to think of reasons why they can not speak with you at any given time.
When seeking to gain peoples trust in your home business you must consider all these things and never take anything personnel as to a persons reaction to what you have to say.
Because you never know what mood or thought pattern you will be finding them in on any given moment.
As a result, your phone call would only occupy a fraction of their time in most peoples minds, and only a couple valued minutes in a deeply bonded relationship.
Even if they have requested your information. Your call may be looked at as a sales person trying to sell them something.
So at best when you start to talk you have about five second to explain who you are and what your call pertains too only then by putting the person at ease can you start to build trust.
Please check out our links to the right.
Mark & Tammy Cowell
AdvertisementsThanks to a few hundred hours of flight experience in my Lancair Evolution so far, I am really improving the flight model in X-Plane in the area of PT-6 engines, electrical, and pressurization systems! And, while in the systems code, I’ve improved a lot of other systems simulations as well, which is always fun.
So, here is the new stuff done for 11.00 so far in the flight and systems modeling area!
PT-6 engine modeling
Thanks to LOTS OF FLIGHT-test IN N844X, which has a PT6, I am getting that engine just right in X-Plane! I got the RECIP engine performance dialed in when flying recip engine airplanes like the Cirrus SR-22 and Columbia-400, and now I’m dialing in the TURBOPROP performance now that I’m flying a turboprop! Not only are the fuel flow and efficiency now correct.. but the engine just FEELS right.
But how does an engine FEEL right in a simulator? How does that make any sense?
Well, the PT-6 engine has a distinct feel to it to operate. That engine is all about having enough AIRFLOW moving through it to balance the FUEL FLOW to keep the temperatures under control. The turbine is slow to respond at low power settings, since not enough air is racing through to rapidly change the turbine speed. The turbine feels HEAVY to slow-moving air with little dynamic pressure, so the turbine is at first sluggish, slow to spin up! But as the speed picks up and the airflow with it, the turbine seems comparatively lighter compared to the airflow moving through it and responds much more quickly! So, adding fuel from a low power setting, temperatures spike as you add fuel at low turbine rpm, and cool as the turbine spins up.
The turbine sound is one sound and feel, the prop completely another since there is no connection between the turbine and prop! Only air between turbines connects the prop to the rest of the engine! So a PT-6 engine has a real feel and response in turbine RPM, torque, fuel flow and temperature over time as you adjust the throttle, prop, and idle lever at different altitudes and temperatures, always spinning up or down at varying speeds and temperatures as the fuel and air moving through it change.. it is really very Steam-Punk in its operation.
Technically described improvements
Much better engine ITT modeling for those turboprops, including response speeds on power, prop, or condition lever changes.
Better torque and fuel flow modeling as well.
The dynamic pressure through the power turbine across varying rpm ranges controls exchanging torque and rpm to get the same power, for accurate cruise performance as you dial back the prop rpm but hold constant fuel flow, and glide with the prop feathered or not as well.
The new turbine model includes, by the way, compressor stalls, which I have gone through first-hand! As well, I have done a lot of engine failure simulation tuning for hot start, ITT runway, compressor stalls and the like.
The turbine idle is now floating point like everything in a real PT-6. Move the red knob to move smoothly from low to idle, or hold it partway if you want to keep the engine temps JUST where you want, as you would in reality. Just remember to tweak those idle speeds in Plane-Maker now to get your idles just right!
For turbines, you will want to enter a higher high idle than low idle now… X-Plane does not do this for you any more, since you can now tune those fuel flows at idle as you like for yourself! At low idle, you need to be above 52% Ng for PT6 engines. At high idle, you want to be higher… the King Airs like to spin about 70% Ng to have enough speed to turn their air conditioner compressors!
The shop adjusts the idle stop points per-engine, per-aircraft, based on pilot or company desires. I like my idle speeds a bit low in 844X so the plane taxis almost like it was carefully designed, and not trying to race away by taxiing at 50 knots! So the low and high idle adjusts, set in engine window of PLANE-MAKER, should be set according to how your airplane is dialed in in reality.
For a king air you probably want 55% Ng for low idle, 70% for high idle, which work out to about:
HI idle: 1.70
LO idle: 1.00
in Plane-Maker. In other words, our low idle is just enough to run the engine at the lowest Ng recommend, and we bump that up by 70% at high idle to spin the generators and air conditioning compressors. This is fun to do, since you can get that idle Ng just right for YOUR PT-6 setup!
NOTE: THIS WAY OF ADJUSTING IDLE SPEED IS A HAIR DIFFERENT FROM VERSION 10. In version 10, the high idle was automatically boosted inside of X-Plane, but now it is not: You have to boost that high idle manually by entering a higher value for high idle in Plane-Maker. Also our whole turbine model is different now which also means the idle speeds need to be re-tweaked in your planes.
In my REAL airplane, when you turn ON electrical system stuff, it DRAGS DOWN the speed of the compressor. The compressor provides the cooling air that keeps the engine from destroying itself! This is a BIG DEAL for pt-6 airplanes! So as the generator load comes up, the turbine Ng does DOWN, and the ITT comes up… possibly enough to destroy the engine!
One day when it was really hot and I was taxiing with the air conditioning on and I taxied into a tailwind, the ITT started to go to REDLINE!!!!! I quickly turned off the air conditioning and the ITT quickly came down! I said “whew,” advanced from LO IDLE to HI IDLE to get enough compressor speed to support the electrical draw of the air conditioner, and THEN turned the AC back on!
So why was the idle speed set too low to handle the air conditioning on a hot South Carolina summer day? Because I had just had the idle adjusted to be lower… IN OREGON, WHERE IT IS COLD, AND THEY DON’T NEED AIR CONDITIONING! HAR!!!!!!!!!!
Now, at this moment in X-Plane, I am making all of this DEFAULT behavior. It’s SO EASY! The aircraft author ALREADY enters the electrical load in Plane-Maker for each system. The aircraft author ALREADY enters the generators and what engines they attach to. The aircraft author ALREADY enters the horsepower of the engine. So now, as I am coding right this moment, X-Plane looks at the amperage and voltage of each generator hooked to each engine.
What is amperage times voltage? POWER!
So we can MATHEMATICALLY FIND the power that is sucked from the compressor by the generator! And, yes, as you turn stuff on, the generator load will go up, the Ng will come down from the drag, and the ITT will go up! So it is all baked right into the model.. no user-mods needed.
As you increase electrical load on the airplane, that load will be passed to any turned-on generators which will drag down any engine attached to those generators, changing power output and temperatures accordingly! COOL!!!! All of this is done by the direct application of load to the engine. There is no ‘faking it’! If you have more electrical load on a smaller engine, then turning on your various electrical devices will have a greater impact on the engine, especially noticeable at idle!
While this is surely most noticeable on the PT-6, I have applied the affect to the pure jets and recip-engine airplanes as well, and also applied the drag on the engine from the pressurization system, when applicable. So we now have accessory drag on the engines. This is real, and very important.
Pressurization modeling
Also thanks to my experience in the Evolution N844X, which has has several pressurization failures in reality, in X-Plane I now have a whole new pressurization model!
In reality as well as now in X-Plane, you have to carry enough Ng (gas generator RPM) to hold up that pressure, and now we have fractional pressurization available to hold SOME pressure, but maybe not ALL pressure, as in the real airplane!
We look at the ratio of bleed air available and what part of the engine it comes from to see if we have adequate bleed air inflow to the cabin based on the current engine RPM, and local atmospheric pressure! The higher you are, the more power you better carry to keep cabin pressure, as in the real airplane! The cabin altitude will climb if you don’t.. and how much it climbs will depend on the air density outside the plane and the gas generator speed on a turbine! How much power you need to hold pressurization depends on the altitude and even baro pressure setting, since this is hooked to air pressure! Cool! Also a more efficient inlet pressure recovery and more speed gives more pressurization.. because the INLET pressurizes the air before handing it to the engine to pressurize further, as in reality! NICE!
After going over the Pilots Operating Handbook and my old notes from my Columbia-400, we have a new manifold pressure model! This seems to be better than the previous one!!
Electrical system modeling
The electrical system code is overhauled, with new models for generators and batteries, all connected though the various buses and cross-ties.
You can hop in a plane, take it up high, fail the engines, see the generator output sag based on the low engine RPM while gliding, watch the batteries in partial discharge due to low generator output, start the APU, turn on the APU generator, watch it power systems and charge the batteries, turn on too many systems and watch the APU get overloaded and have it’s amperage sag and the avionics flicker on and off, load-shed to get within
the APU amperage, turn off the batteries to avoid trying to charge them, and bring the airplane home on APU power only.
If yer good, that is.
Tire-force modeling.. WHEN THE PLANE IS NOT MOVING!!!
OK maybe my sense of humor is all screwed up after 2 weeks of straight coding but this one is just too funny:
For X-Plane 11 beta-3, I just solved a bug (pointed out by Vit Zenisek) that has actually been in X-Plane for 20 years… and only affects the motion of the airplane when it isn’t moving.
Got it?
Here’re the dynamics of the non-dynamic situation:
The tire force model in X-Plane is good enough to use in a driving racing simulator, as it actually gets right down to the vector along which the rubber is dragged across the pavement on the contact-patch of the tire. The dynamics are really quite good, especially in X-Plane 11 where I have taken tire-modeling updates from Stradale.
BUT, this physical model has fatal flaw: The model that simulates the detail right down to how the rubber interacts as it is being dragged across the pavements….only works WHEN THE RUBBER IS BEING DRAGGED ACROSS THE PAVEMENT! DUH! So when does it NOT work? WHEN YOU ARE STOPPED!!! HAR!!!
So, whenever an aircraft in X-Plane has been STOPPED, I simply ‘locked the airplane down’, bypassing the tire model altogether.
No motion? No flight model!
This SOUNDS fine, right?
WRONG!!!!!!
During the run-up, the plane is indeed motionless, but the forces acting on the airplane, via the landing gear, are HUGELY important! As you add power, for example, the force opposing propeller thrust is COMING FROM THE TIRE CONTACT PATCH FAR BELOW THE PROPELLER! This aft force, far BELOW the prop, opposing the forward motion of the prop, creates a torque that LOWERS THE NOSE when power is applied with the brakes on!
You sure feel this on short-field take-offs, when you add power, holding the brakes, and the nose hunkers DOWN. Then, when you release the brakes, the nose POPS up as the nose-gear strut is unloaded and it is off you go! So, even though the airplane is NOT EVEN MOVING during the run-up or power application before brake-release, the forces on the landing gear and resulting aircraft dynamics are CRITICAL to making the X-Plane aircraft behave, and feel, like the real airplane!
SOOOO, how do we BUILD a tire model that is based on MOTION, but still works when the plane is STOPPED?
SIMPLE! We simulate a WELD!
When the plane is stopped and the tire forces are adequate to HOLD it there, we imagine that the tire contact patch is WELDED DOWN TO THE GROUND right at the center of the tire contact patch! The force on the airplane from the tires is a damped spring that opposes any displacement of the aircraft from that welded-down spot! Any (small) displacement from that world-point of the tire contact patch is due to the flexing of the tire sidewall, allowing the axle to move ever so slightly fore and aft as the tire flexes under the loads of the engine, wind, a sloped runway, or whatever else it is that is trying to move the airplane!
SO, when STOPPED, we weld the tire contact patch to the ground with a damped spring simulating the tire sidewall that holds you in place with, indeed, some FLEX! Then, as the brake are released OR the forces on the aircraft EXCEED the braking allowed by the tires… we switch over to the rolling or dragging dynamic tire models as needed! Cool!
The whole thing happens seamlessly, and the effect is really quite amazing. With the Cessna 172, for a short-field take-off, get all the way on the brakes and go to full power.. the nose starts to dive under the thrust! Then, get OFF the brakes and the nose POPS up and oscillates as the nose strut unloads, over-extends from the aircraft inertia, and oscillates a few times until the motion is damped out, as the airplane starts to accelerate down the runway!
It feels JUST like the real plane!
Control-effectiveness improvements
Control effectiveness at high AOA reduced according to wind tunnel results.. you lose it all by around 45 deg AOA… and a good solid 30% of it around 20 deg AOA. (This is in addition to losses due to dynamic pressure and local flight path no longer being aligned with the airplane, of course!) So, this makes the stalls a good bit scarier… that control deflection comes down for the recovery! And, if the stall is ICE-induced, where the ice lowers the stalling angle of attack, well, that plus reduced control effectiveness in the stall makes for some pretty scary stalls!
Based on information from a TBM-850 pilot that has done some stalls in his airplane when iced (by ACCIDENT!), ice is QUITE a different experience now. QUITE different.
A customer sent me a video of him stalling a TBM-850 with ice on its wings… it stalled WAY earlier than he planned. So now, rather than just adding weight and drag and reducing lift, which is what they teach you and what X-Plane used to do, we NOW lower the stall angle of attack as the ice builds as well.
This can lead you to think that everything is mostly ok with only a bit of ice, and then WHAM! That stall bites fast and hard, sooner than expected! A nasty stall at a much lower AOA than you expected! Then you have to recover without exceeding a much lower-than-expected AOA, with limited lift and extra weight and drag… which means you need to re-evaluate your new stall AOA from that first stall and not let yourself get up to that AOA level again to hit a SECONDARY stall! This is where the skill requirement shoots up through the roof.
So the ice is much more realistic, which results in it being more terrifying, by far. The new improvements in flight control realism at higher angles of attack then increase the challenge-factor further.
Rotor modelling
This is a modest upgrade to the rotor model for helos. We have some small internal re-organization, and significant tuning, to really nail the performance in:
Climb and cruise,
Effective Translational Lift,
Setting with power,
Settling WITHOUT power
mast-bumping, with mast-bumping limits in disc tilt set in the Plane-Maker window where you enter your cyclid deflections.
These tweaks really dial in the rotor performance to another level of refinement, which has been really fun to flight-test in the sim, for sure!
Other reciprocating engine improvements
We track the fuel in the cylinders or carb from the prime or simply running the fuel pump when the engine is not running! So the engine starts with a bang if you primed it enough or too much, or just barely rumbles to life if not. And, yes, in an emergency, you can fly the thing on the primer if the engine driven pump fails! That was not custom-coded. It works out because I coded the dynamics of the system!
Jet engine modeling
Low/high jet engine bypass types: GONE! Now we ONLY go off the bypass RATIO that you entered! This lets cool things like exhaust smokiness and engine mass for mass distribution all be floating point with bypass ratio for infinite variation, which is nice.
Hydraulic system modeling
Hydraulic systems have a bit more oomph, delivering at or near full actuation power at idle when engine-driven, as they should. So really dialing in these physical systems models here for 11.00.
Pitot-static modelling
Now we have more realism in the LAG of the airspeed indicator, which is really noticeable in a Columbia-400 doing a short-field take-off, and also the correct reactions when the pitot tube, static port, both, and neither are iced over to infinitely-variable fractions as well.
Other systems modeling
For roll with with elevator, yaw with rudder, aileron with pitch, the TRIMS now apply there as well! So if you use those controls, X-Plane now gives you the TRIM as well.
Updated electric motor dynamics as well! Now more accurate with battery depletion. I have a sense of how electric motors and re-generative braking work now from (wait for it) our family Tesla!
Now with cowl-flap drag! Set it in Plane-Maker! Drag scales with cowl flap deployment! Cool! I’m told it makes 15 knot difference on the Mooney Encore! Set the drag as need for your plane! Now cowl flaps can be a joystick axis as well.
Other flight-model improvements
There is now a BUTTON for boost, so in the engines page where you enter water injection or NOX or other boost, you gotta turn it on with the button to get it at max throttle.
The nosewheel steering model is a hair refined: We go from max to min nosewheel steering as the speed picks up as always, but if we have a tiller axis assigned, then we add the tiller and nosewheel steer, like real airliners. Cool!
Engine specific fuel consumption now scales with density not altitude, which is more accurate.
Propeller gyroscopic forces now fixed.. they were not quite right before but are now. Even though prop gyroscopic forces are fairly small in most cases, we have them mathematically perfect now!
Other features and refinements as requested
New view option: Lock to point. Lock onto any spot on the ground and you TRACK it! Nice for VFR pattern, etc.
Slung loads now rotate as they should on the end of the cable, so they look pretty decent now.
Radio altimeter has +/- 40 degree scan, so up to 40 deg of aircraft bank it is correct.. then it goes slant range… and of course useless at 90 deg bank or more.
More cockpit instruments and controls transmitted to external cockpits to really keep those external panels in sync with the master machine.
Unlimited weapons attachable to the aircraft in Plane-Maker, with that weapon action saved in replays as well, and a more efficient snapshot structure to recall the replays also.
Major new features
Pushback trucks and ground service vehicles! All with dynamic flight models and stuff and paths that they drive that are different for every airport so they never do the same thing twice… it’s all dynamic.
Overall
These are just tiny little bits of notes I took while coding. The real exciting thing here is the internal file formats: Everything is now designed, internally, to be object oriented, extensible and flexible, so we can add stuff in the future without breaking file formats.Photo source in above tweet: AZ Family
AZ Family reports:
Police said he’s still being interviewed and hasn’t been booked on any charges yet.
When 3TV/CBS 5 talked to him on Wednesday, he asked us not to use his name. Phoenix police haven’t identified him.
The man was caught on video, that has since gone viral, kicking a can of tear gas back at police officers. They returned the favor with a nonlethal round that hit him in the pelvic area and he went straight to the ground.
A man in a Colin Kaepernick jersey helped him out of the line of fire.
He spent Tuesday night in the emergency room for inhaling pepper spray and second-degree burns from picking up a hot can of tear gas.
The incident happened after police said protesters threw rocks, bottles and gas at them so they used tear gas and pepper balls to disperse the crowd.North Korea has announced it will scrap an agreement aimed at preventing accidental naval clashes with South Korea, amid rising tensions over the sinking of a South Korean warship.
The move is in retaliation for Seoul blaming Pyongyang for a torpedo attack that sank the Cheonan in March.
The announcement comes as the South Korean navy conducts a major anti-submarine drill.
An international probe found the Cheonan was sunk by a Northern torpedo.
North Korea has denied the allegation.
In a statement on the North Korean official news agency on Thursday, the North Korean military said the country would "completely nullify the bilateral agreement that was concluded to prevent a contingent clash in the West Sea of Korea [Yellow Sea].
SINKING OF CHEONAN - KEY DATES Image caption South Korea's president has vowed to punish those who carried out the attack March 26: Explosion hits naval corvette near disputed maritime border, killing 46 on board
May 20: Independent investigators produce proof North Korean torpedo struck vessel
May 24: South Korea declares trade with North frozen, demands apology
May 25: North Korea announces it is severing all ties with South Korean propaganda fight Korean War armistice Q&A: Cheonan sinking Timeline: North Korean attacks
"In connection with this, [we] will completely stop using international maritime ultra-short wave walkie-talkies and will immediately cut off the communication line that was opened to handle an emergency situation."
It also warned of an immediate attack if the South's navy violated the disputed Yellow Sea borderline, and that it would consider a complete block on access to a joint industrial project in the North Korean city of Kaesong.
The BBC's John Sudworth in Seoul says the announcement is another piece in the picture that is coming out of North Korea of increasing tension.
On Tuesday, North Korea announced it would sever all ties with the South.
It had also banned South Korean ships and planes from its territory - a measure it repeated in its Thursday statement.
South Korea will "resolutely" deal with the North's measures, a South Korean defence ministry official said without elaborating, according to the Associated Press news agency.
South Korea had already announced a package of measures, including a halt to most trade with North Korea. It is also seeking action via the United Nations Security Council.
The Yellow Sea was the site of deadly naval skirmishes in 1999 and 2002.
South Korean drill
Thursday's announcement came hours after 10 South Korean warships took part in an anti-submarine drill.
The South Korean exercise is one of the first visible signs of a raising of South Korea's defence posture in response to the incident, our correspondent says.
With tensions rising rapidly, the North has reacted angrily to trade and shipping sanctions announced by the South.
The two states are technically still at war after the Korean conflict ended without a peace treaty in 1953.To turn dirty lakewater into drinkable H 2 O, peel away the bark from a nearby tree branch and slowly pour water through the wood. According to new research, this neat, low-tech trick ought to trap any bacteria, leaving you with uncontaminated water.
Okay, time for a little tree physiology. To get water and minerals up a tree, wood is comprised of xylem, porous tissue arranged in tubes for conducing sap from the roots upwards through a system of vessels and pores. Xylem tissue is found in sapwood, the younger wood that lies in concentric circles between the central heartwood and the bark. Tiny pores called pit membranes are scattered throughout the walls of the vessels, allowing sap to flow from one vessel to another, feeding various structures along a tree’s length.
Turns out, the same tissue that evolved to transport sap up the length of a tree also has exactly the right-sized pores to allow water through while blocking bacteria. Additionally, the pores also trap air bubbles, which could kill a tree if spread in the xylem. “Plants have had to figure out how to filter out bubbles but allow easy flow of sap,” study author Rohit Karnik from MIT says in a news release. “It’s the same problem with water filtration where we want to filter out microbes but maintain a high flow rate. So it’s a nice coincidence that the problems are similar.”
As Karnik’s team finds, a small piece of sapwood can filter out more than 99 percent of the E. coli from water, at the rate of several liters per day.
To study sapwood’s water-filtering potential, the team collected white pine branches and stripped off their outer bark. They attached inch-long sections of sapwood to plastic tubing, then sealed it with epoxy and secured it with clamps.
They tested their improvised filter using water mixed with particles ranging in size. They found that while sapwood naturally filters out particles bigger than 70 nanometers, it wasn’t able to separate out 20-nanometer particles.
When they poured water contaminated with inactivated E. coli through the sapwood filter, they saw how bacteria had accumulated around the pores in the first few millimeters of the wood. In the false-color electron microscope image above, (green) bacteria are trapped over pit membranes (red and blue).
Existing water-purification technologies that use chlorine treatments and membranes with nano-scale pores are expensive. Even boiling water requires fuel for heat. Here, just take some wood and make a filter of it -- it’s low-cost, efficient, and readily accessible for rural communities as well as dehydrated campers in the Northeast. “Ideally, a filter would be a thin slice of wood you could use for a few days, then throw it away and replace at almost no cost,” Karnik explains
The group is looking into the filtering potential of other types of sapwood. Flowering trees, for example, tend to have smaller pores than coniferous trees and may be able to filter out even smaller particles, like viruses.
The work was published in PLOS ONE last week.
Images: Boutilier et al.Netflix will take over most of the Icon office tower in Los Angeles, slated to be completed in late 2016, announcing a long-term lease for about 200,000 square feet in the building at Sunset Bronson Studios.
Netflix’s lease with real-estate development company Hudson Pacific Properties for office and production space in the 14-story Icon building is the largest such pact ever signed in Hollywood in terms of square footage, according to the companies. A Netflix rep declined to disclose the length of the lease or financial terms.
The Sunset Bronson site is steeped in movie history, and the symbolism won’t be lost on Netflix watchers: It’s the original location of Warner Bros. Studios where “The Jazz Singer” was filmed in the 1920s.
“Icon is a state-of-the-art facility that places Netflix squarely in the middle of Hollywood’s creative culture to support our next stage of growth and content creation,” said Netflix CFO David Wells. “The property’s combination of office, stage and production space provides an ideal setting.”
Icon, located at 5800 West Sunset Blvd., will comprise 323,000 square feet total upon completion. Netflix plans to relocate its other Southern California operations, including its space in Beverly Hills, to the new building. The deal doubles the footprint of Netflix’s facilities in L.A.
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In a statement, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Netflix’s deal for the Icon office tower “reaffirms that Los Angeles remains the nexus for innovative tech and creative companies, and that the future of the entertainment industry will call Hollywood home.” Garcetti added that his staff is assisting Netflix with relocation and permit approvals.
Netflix has shot several original series in or around Los Angeles, including “Arrested Development,” “Grace and Frankie” as well as upcoming series “Fuller House,” “The Ranch,” “Lady Dynamite,” “Flaked,” “Love” and “With Bob and David.” In addition, Netflix original film “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday” is being produced in L.A.
Hudson Pacific’s other projects under way at Sunset Bronson Studios include a 1,600-space parking structure and a five-story, 96,000-square-foot creative office building scheduled to be completed in mid-2017.
Netflix also is leasing more office space for its headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif. The company has signed a lease for 240,000 square feet in a new Los Gatos office complex starting in December 2015. Netflix has commitments of $151.6 million for its expanded headquarters and other commitments of $74.6 million for facilities under non-cancelable operating leases, which have expiration dates varying through approximately 2025, according to the company’s most recent 10-Q filing with the SEC.I honestly thought I would never see a National Championship come back to Clemson during my lifetime. I always hoped. Always suffering along with everyone through thick and thin.
I’m good. I just wanted to win one natty.
Not going to lie, I shed tears. Tears of sorrow when Hurts seemingly stole the trophy and, of course, tears of exuberant relief and joy—exorcising decades of jaded cynicism and doubt. I could barely breathe on the last drive.
In the first quarter, I felt like I was back in the Georgia Dome about to get rolled. This team was absolutely made of different stuff, different mettle.
I should just end this post right now, sign off and go out on top....
I don’t think nationally people realize how hard it is to be a Clemson fan. This is not a fanbase that gets to rely on the prestige and winning tradition of a Bama, LSU, OSU, or Michigan.
That is easy fandom.
Teams like Florida and Florida State have a recent history to fallback upon. Clemson got one taste in a different era and then was stuck knowing they could be better. Clemson was stuck knowing they could beat the best teams in the country, but then fall flat on our collective faces time and time again. It hurt because we knew we could be great. We were great, and then we would lose to Boston College or Duke, get spanked by Bama in an opener, win the ACC and then get blown out by WVU, put up with Clemsoning and being laughed at as we kicked the bleachers and wailed into the night (looking at you Jesse Palmer).
Dabo helped us all to believe. I’m sure he hates most (if not all) of what I write because he wanted to overcome the pessimism that inculcated our Clemson football culture.
Thank you Dabo Swinney.
Negatives??
I promised there would be no negatives. Sure, I could talk about Guillermo and Hearn getting blown up at times and the bad snaps (I think his fingers were bothering him) or Pollard and Anch |
D tried to work with them to recover the money and legal action was only used as a last resort.
Tax consultant Terry Baucher said the IRD was often too slow to act and it needed to do more to educate small businesses about their obligations to pass on, and pay their own, KiwiSaver contributions.
Photo: SUPPLIED
"There's a lot of employers and people slip through the cracks. We have seen instances where five or six years have passed without Inland Revenue taking any action," he said.
While employees' KiwiSaver deductions were guaranteed by the government, employers' contributions were not.
Labour's finance spokesperson Grant Robertson said that might need to change.
"I am prepared to look at the idea of a guarantee because I think the workers who enrol in KiwiSaver deserve to know they'll get all the benefits of being part of the scheme."
But he said it first needed to be worked out whether IRD was doing all it could to try and recover the missing money.
IRD said any workers who were missing KiwiSaver payments should first talk to their employer or contact them for advice.Pro-Russian activists shout slogans during a rally in the center of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, on March 2, 2014.
Pro-Russian activists in eastern Ukraine have declared Donetsk a sovereign republic and asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to send in peacekeepers, local media reported.
The announcement was made by a republican council of the "Peoples' Republic of Donetsk," who gathered at the local administration building, which was occupied by pro-Russian activists Sunday. They announced that a referendum on whether to join Russia will be held on May 11.
Earlier Monday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said Monday that protests in eastern Ukraine in which pro-Russian activists seized public buildings in three cities are part of a plan to destabilize the country and bring in Russian troops.
Saying Russian troops were within a 30-kilometer (19 mile) zone from the Ukrainian border, Yatseniuk told a government meeting: "An anti-Ukrainian plan is being put into operation... under which foreign troops will cross the border and seize the territory of the country.
"We will not allow this," he said.
Pro-Russian protesters in the east seized official buildings in three cities - Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk - on Sunday night, demanding that referendums be held on whether to join Russia.
A similar move preceded a Russia-backed takeover of Crimea in March followed by annexation of the peninsula by Russia.
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Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on Monday the main regional administration building in Kharkiv had been cleared of "separatists".
But police said protesters occupying the state security building in Luhansk had seized weapons and highway police had closed off roads into the city.
"Unknown people who are in the building have broken into the building's arsenal and have seized weapons," a police statement said. Nine people had been hurt in the disturbances in Luhansk.
Mainly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine has seen a sharp rise in tension since Moscow-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich's overthrow in February and the advent of an interim government in Kiev that wants closer ties with Europe.
Russia has branded the new leadership in Kiev illegitimate and has annexed Ukraine's Crimea region, citing threats to its Russian-speaking majority - a move that caused the biggest standoff between Moscow and the West since the end of the Cold War.
The protesters appeared to be responding in part to Yanukovich, who fled to Russia after he was ousted and who on March 28 issued a public call for each of Ukraine's regions to hold a referendum on its status inside the country.
Russia has been pushing internationally a plan proposing the "federalization" of Ukraine in which regions of the country of 46 million would have broad powers of autonomy.
Ukraine, while drawing up its own blueprint of constitutional changes for 'de-centralization' in which smaller municipalities would be able to develop their own areas by retaining a portion of state taxes raised, says the Russian plan is aimed at breaking up the country.
Yatseniuk said that though much of the unrest had died down in eastern Ukraine in the past month there remained about 1,500 "radicals" in each region who spoke with "clear Russian accents" and whose activity was being coordinated through foreign intelligence services.
But he said Ukrainian authorities had drawn up a plan to handle the crisis.
"We have a clear action plan," he said, adding that senior officials would head to the towns concerned.
Referring to the Russian plan, Yatseniuk said: "It is an attempt to destroy Ukrainian statehood, a script which has been written in the Russian Federation, the aim of which is to divide and destroy Ukraine and turn part of Ukraine into a slave territory under the dictatorship of Russia," he said.
"This is not going to happen," he said.
"I appeal to the people and the elites of the east. Our common responsibility is to preserve the country and I am sure that no-one wants to be under a neighboring country. We have our country. Let's keep it," he said.The next iteration of the popular graphics API, OpenGL, will be on hand at next month’s GDC, and Valve will be involved.
The event page for the upcoming Game Developers Conference has been updated with a session hosted by multiple high-profile industry developers to unveil glNext, the future of OpenGL.
The session, titled ‘glNext: The Future of High Performance Graphics’, will be presented by Valve.
“Join us for the unveiling of Khronos’ glNext initiative, the upcoming cross-platform graphics API designed for modern programming techniques and processors. glNext will be the singular choice for developers who demand peak performance in their applications,” reads the descriptor.
“We will present a technical breakdown of the API, advanced techniques and live demos of real-world applications running on glNext drivers and hardware.”
The choice of Valve comes as no surprise, given that it’s one of the API’s strongest proponents. After all, it’s what SteamOS is based on and Valve has always said that the future of PC gaming is a Windows-free, DirectX-free one.
This, along with the expected large presence of Steam Machines at the conference, could mean very interesting announcements are on the horizon for Valve’s Steam Machines and PC gamin as a whole.
GDC 2015 takes place March 2-6 in San Francisco.As news of large-scale data breaches and vulnerabilities grows, new findings from the Pew Research Center suggest that growing numbers of online Americans have had important personal information stolen and many have had an account compromised.
Findings from a January 2014 survey show that:
18% of online adults have had important personal information stolen such as their Social Security Number, credit card, or bank account information. That’s an increase from the 11% who reported personal information theft in July 2013.
such as their Social Security Number, credit card, or bank account information. That’s an increase from the 11% who reported personal information theft in July 2013. 21% of online adults said they had an email or social networking account compromised or taken over without their permission.The same number reported this experience in a July 2013 survey.
Last week’s discovery of the Heartbleed security flaw is the latest in a long string of bad news about the vulnerabilities of digital data. The bug, which affects a widely-used encryption technology that is intended to protect online transactions and accounts, went undetected for more than two years. Security researchers are unsure whether or not hackers have been exploiting the problem, but the scope of the problem is estimated to affect up to 66% of active sites on the Internet.
In December, Target announced that credit and debit card information for 40 million of its customers had been compromised. Shortly thereafter, the retailer reported that an even larger share of its customers may have had personal information like email and mailing addresses stolen. In January, Nieman Marcus reported the theft of 1.1 million credit and debit cards by hackers who had invaded its systems with malware.
The consequences of these flaws and breaches may add insult to injury for those who have already experienced some kind of personal information theft. And research suggests that young adults and younger baby boomers may have been especially hard hit in the second half of 2013.
In our survey last year, we found that 7% of online adults ages 18-29 were aware that they had important personal information stolen such as their Social Security Number, credit card or bank account information. The latest survey finds that 15% of young adults have experienced this kind of personal information theft. Similarly, those ages 50-64 became significantly more likely to report that they had personal information stolen; while 11% said they had this experience in July, that figure jumped to 20% in January. Increases among other age groups were not statistically significant.
As online Americans have become ever more engaged with online life, their concerns about the amount of personal information available about them online have shifted as well. When we look at how broad measures of concern among adults have changed over the past five years, we find that internet users have become more worried about the amount of personal information available about them online—50% reported this concern in January 2014, up from 33% in 2009.
See questions and survey methodology.
Topics: Internet Activities, Online Privacy and SafetyWhen Spotlight won two Academy awards at the recent award ceremony for best picture and original screenplay. Many saw it as sign of the power and recognition of professional investigative journalism, and how over 10 years on this is still important in this world of an ever-changing profession. While the subject matter is very important, the approach shown is of the traditional methods of journalism and that is why I want to show how in over year since Nightcrawler which was nominated for an Oscar, it shows the traditional values are still considered important but are becoming a rarity in this technological dependent world of journalism which has given an autonomy to people who 10 years prior would of struggled to break into the industry.
Nightcrawler released last year works as a wonderful commentary on the modern day exploitative nature of today’s journalism climate, while Spotlight shows us the old school type of journalism of chasing leads and collecting evidence the two films can be contrasted as the polar opposites of the traditional values of media and the ethics of the industry. While many articles since Spotlight won have announced it as an ode to those traditional news gathering values, many perceive that in this world of democratization of the industry, that Nightcrawler is where it is heading and it where it is currently.
Spotlight follows the real life story of the Boston globe writing team’s pursuit of the Catholic churches abuse of children over a number of decades. The film is classic in how it shows the ethical side of journalism, deadlines, extensions and also of gathering the evidence before publishing the story. It has received universal acclaim for critics and people in industry. But over 10 years since this story broke. It now is the rarity that stories like this are gathered and released in an industry which is losing it’s importance of this type of journalism to internet and citizen journalist’s. I hope that isn’t the case, I love the romantic view of investigative journalist, like a detective chasing down a story to shed light on an issue which we wouldn’t know about if wasn’t for there pursuit of a story. But unfortunately as the money grows tighter in the industry with the field so vast the money can’t be spared for stories like this as often as they should.
Nightcrawler is far different, you have one man who purchases a camera, a police scanner and listens and races to the scene before the competition arrives to shoot the scene and sell it on to a news network. The film is perfect demonstration of the new age of journalism, where if you have the drive and equipment you can become a journalist. The film is a clear satire of the contemporary news game. It shows the exploitative nature of journalism and the lack of moral it has. Spotlight shows us the team has values while the lead character in Nightcrawler has none but an ambition to be the best. Nightcrawler works better than Spotlight, in this age of citizen journalism. Spotlight feels to be a historical document to something from a different age, where the journalism industry was still a closed group that led to quality material, now we have a journalism world like Nightcrawler, although more immersive and quick to show us what’s happening, it has led to a culture of what I see as the quality is harder to find in the vast reaches of the internet age. Both films get there message out there and a traditionalist such as myself would prefer to have the quality journalism of Spotlight, but as attention spans decrease in a generation who looks down on a screen it is more likely that the world of Nightcrawler will become the norm while Spotlight could become a relic of what is still a morally grey industry.
The two films do leave questions. Is the age of traditional journalism a dying breed? Is the democratization of journalism a good thing? And also is journalism something thought or is it something that is born and refined? These questions are just a few that I have had when I thought about when doing this article.
AdvertisementsExclusive NPC - Pre-painted miniature & card.
8 Exclusive Envoy Missions with every backer copy!
Picture of current prototype.
What is Xia: Legends of a Drift System?
Xia is a 3-4 player sandbox style competitive space adventure. Each player starts as a lowly but hopeful captain of a small starship.
Players fly their ships about the system, completing a variety of missions, exploring new sectors and battling other ships. Navigating hazardous environments, players choose to mine, salvage, or trade valuable cargo. Captains vie with each other for Titles, riches, and most importantly Fame.
The most adaptive, risk taking, and creative players will excel. One captain will rise above the others, surpassing mortality by becoming Legend!
Full Rules: Small summary not enough for you? Really want to dig-in and read? Check out the full color 16 page PDF (Still a work in progress): Full Rules
Stretch Goals
Why should I back now?
Kickstarter Exclusive: 8 new mission cards of a new mission type - Envoy. These come with every Kickstarter copy of Xia! After that, there is no way to get them, we won't make any more.
Exclusive Access: Once you backers have your copies of Xia, we won't ship a single retail copy for a full 2 months! No one gets it sooner than backers. Backing is the FASTEST way to get Xia!
Price Advantage: As the sole retailer, we promise to list Xia at full retail ($5 more than what you're paying) for the first 6 months. No one is getting it cheaper than backers. Backing is the CHEAPEST way to get Xia!
Gameplay Video
What comes in the box?
Unlocked Stretch Goals
Unlocked new sector tile - Smugglers Den
Two Tier 1 ships, Two Tier 2 ships (rough draft)
Replaced plastic credits with metal credits! (rough draft)
Unlocked Tier 3 Ship
Unlocked Sector tile - Tigris Gate
2nd unlocked Tier 3 ship - yet to be revealed!
Pledge Levels
[BOXED COPY] - At this pledge level you will receive:
A boxed copy of Xia: Legends of a Drift System (Everything pictured above)
8 Kickstarter exclusive Envoy Mission cards
Unlocked Stretch Goals Now Included:
2 additional Sectors: Smugglers' Den & Tigris Gate
6 additional pre-painted starships & cards.
1 additional set of player markers and outfits (for 5 player support).
Replace plastic poker chips with metal credits.
[SELLSWORD] - At this pledge level you will receive:
A boxed copy of Xia: Legends of a Drift System
8 Kickstarter exclusive Envoy Mission cards
1 Sellsword pre-painted miniature on flight stand & Sellsword card.
1 "Dev Kit" including: 3 empty sectors, 3 empty flight stands, 1 set of 12 blank outfits, for your modding pleasure. *You can also use the sectors as empty space in Xia, no modding required.
Unlocked Stretch Goals Now Included:
2 additional Sectors: Smugglers' Den & Tigris Gate
6 additional pre-painted starships & cards.
1 additional set of player markers and outfits (for 5 player support).
Replace plastic poker chips with metal credits.
Lets get specific! How do you play?
Customize: Each player begins the game by choosing and customizing a Tier 1 starship. Invest all your money in engines and be a rapid, yet fragile, explorer. Put all your credits into an uber missile and watch other players flee in terror. Get a small engine and save space and credits to invest in buying and selling cargo. Or create a well rounded ship, ready for anything. In Xia, the choice is always yours.
Customize your ship!
Adapt: The goal of Xia is to become the most famous captain. Completing missions, besting ships in combat, purchasing higher tier ships, selling Cargo Cubes and claiming Titles are all ways that players can earn Fame Points. The best pilots will adapt to their surroundings, making snap judgments and changing plans on-the-fly. If you can think on your feet, you'll do well in Xia!
Sandbox: The real fun of Xia is that each game will be different. There is no set direction of play, players may choose to be peaceful traders, fierce pirates, workers, miners, opportunists, etc. The game board is randomly laid out and explored each time you play. Players might choose not to explore at all, creating a tiny arena for swift and deadly combat, or explore all 19 sectors and have a large play-scape to exploit. It's up to you!
Don't take our word for it!
Undead Viking posts a 50 minute epic preview:
Dice Tower's Tom Vasel has posted an awesome overview of Xia:
Tom Vasel also mentions us in his May 20 news post!
Check out James Floyd Kelly's in-depth preview!
Preview by James Floyd Kelly
What makes Xia awesome?
• Stacking ship powers: Each ship has a unique special ability. When you purchase a new ship, you get to keep your previous ability, allowing you to stack up to three abilities for powerful combinations!
Click to enlarge
• Pre-painted ship miniatures: 15 gorgeous and inspired miniatures (12 player ships & 3 NPC ships).
3D printed prototypes, not final versions.
• Legal / Illegal Missions: Legal missions are a great source of income and fame for upstanding citizens. However, a captain can make more money outside of the law, but at greater risk.
Click to enlarge
• Bounty system: You can choose the quick an easy path...but it will cost you. Illegal acts will make you a wanted fugitive, operating on the fringes.
• NPCs: 3 NPCs each with their own agenda that fly and interact with players and each other. A villainous Scoundrel, the unyielding Enforcer, and the wealthy Merchant.
Click to enlarge
• Exploration: Exploration is engaging, dangerous, and fun! You start each game with only a small portion of the system revealed. There are two ways to explore: You can stop your ship, spend valuable energy, and scan a nearby sector. Or you can blind jump into the unknown, maintaining velocity, but possibly flying into danger! You decide: Gamble? Or play it safe?
Click to enlarge
• Variable game length: Choose how many points to play to at the start of the game. Feel like a quick rush for points? Or an epic adventure? It's up to you!
• Titles: Think of Titles as "achievements" that randomly come up as you play.When you stride into the spaceport bar others will whisper of your exploits... become the "Dare Devil" by flying through a dangerous asteroid field or the "Velocity Warden" by racing across the system.
Click to enlarge
• Trade system: You can buy cargo to fill your hold and sell it at a profit, but you can also mine, salvage, or harvest goods, though those options are not without their own risks. If your ship is full of cargo, other players may target you to try and take the goods for their own!
• Energy system: Will you be able to make it two more sectors to deliver your cargo? Or should you take the safe route and go out of your way to refuel? Managing your ship's energy is an important part of Xia.
• Damage system: When you take damage you have to decide where your ship is hit. Will you take damage on your engine, crippling your ship? Or will you sacrifice your valuable cargo, watching it spiral out to space as you flee for your life?
• Delicious flavor text: Each Mission has a story to draw you deeper into the universe. Every ship has a "Back Story" detailing how you came by her, as well as a "Victory Story" which you get to read aloud to your friends when you win!
• Multiple paths to victory: Every path has its strengths and weaknesses. Combat is totally optional (but totally awesome). There isn't one "best" strategy. A good player will adapt, plan ahead, and stack the odds to win!
Click to enlarge
What about 3D printing and modding?
If this project is funded, we will fully support 3D printing and modding! The goal is for players to be able to create their very own starships, complete with Ship Cards, Special Ability Cards, and Miniatures!
That sounds great, but let's get specific:
1. We'll release Ship Card, and Special Ability Card templates. These will be Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop files. With these templates you'll be able to make your own custom ship cards for your creations using the same art we're using to print Xia!
2. 3D Printing - We will release a mini-expansion of at least 3 NEW official ships that you'll be able to print out using a 3D printer. These ships will have Ship Cards and Special Ability Cards that will only be available to print yourself!
3. We'll release "How to's" and tutorials on how to create your very own starships! Not a 3D modeler? No problem, we'll show you where you can hire an artist! Don't have a 3D printer? No worries! You can use www.shapeways.com to print out our 3D files. Or make your own and have them printed there!
4. If the community is excited, we'll try and be a hub where players can share their creations and find new ships to print*!
(Note: To create 3D models you'll need a modeling program, like Blender)
*Obviously we can't host anything that's copyrighted!
Why Kickstarter?
My name is Cody Miller. Xia: Legends of a Drift System is my passion project, it's my dream.
It's just me. There's no big company, no media machine, no team of artists. I've poured the last 7 years of my free-time into this game. The only help I've had has been from Steve "Coolhand" Tyler (http://coolhand.cgsociety.org) who created the awesome 3D models and 2D renders of the starships. Everything else I've done myself (with the love and support of my gorgeous wife and amazing sons!).
If this was a video game I'd upload it to Steam and see how things went, but a board game takes quite a bit of money to get started. Especially if you want pre-painted miniatures!
I work full time, I'm a full time student, I have a wife and two boys, my paychecks are instantly transmuted into diapers and electric bills...
I realize that the goal is very high, I didn't want to compromise on cheap cardboard components, or generic plastic pawns, I wanted painted miniatures, and something I would feel had a great value.
I began looking at Kickstarter last year, and it seemed the perfect solution, so that's why I'm here.
Thank you for your support, I am very excited for you to play Xia!You’ve nailed the job interview, and now you’re standing in the supply closet you were certain was the same door you came in through. Here are the next seven steps you need to take to lock up that job!
1. Stay in the closet
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You walked confidently out of the room, so you can’t just feebly tiptoe your way back past your interviewer. Just sit tight for now!
2. Send a follow-up email
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Since you have plenty of time, make sure to fashion the perfect “thank you” email to your interviewer, including phrases like, “I look forward to hearing from you,” and “I definitely exited the building correctly.”
3. Show some initiative
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Is the supply closet a little messy? Tidy up a bit, and alphabetize any records that are in there to show the company that you have the right stuff.
4. Don’t be overanxious
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Sure, you’d like to call your interviewer every hour asking if they have decided to hire you, or if the cooling vent in the supply closet leads out to an auxiliary system that feeds out to street level. Let them make their decision on their own timetable.
5. Check to see if there are other applicants in there who made the same mistake you did
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If it happened to you, it could happen to others. You may feel adversarial toward another applicant at first, but at the end of the day, you are both stuck in that closet. Be sure to share closet resources, and the day will go by much quicker.
6. Call in a favor
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Do you have a friend who works at the company you just interviewed at? Text them and ask if they wouldn’t mind urinating on the Bible in the middle of your prospective employer’s office to divert attention from the supply closet.
7. Be YOU
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Leaving an interview and entering a closet by accident is no longer the death sentence it once was. Enjoy your time in there! Hum silently or think about when people’s birthdays are!Let's find out, shall we?
I took this fairly large round mirror and scanned it using my Canon flatbed. The result was…let's say, not very mirror-like at all. In fact, the glass area was almost black.
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So what happened? Where's the shiny glass mirror we were hoping to see?
To understand why we got the result we did, we first need to look at how a scanner works.
There are many variations of this setup, but at its most basic, here's what happens after you place a paper document on the glass bed and press Scan:
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A light source illuminates the document through the glass bed. The light source moves along a track as the document is being scanned. The document is reflected into an angled mirror, which also moves along a track at the same speed. The first mirror's reflection is captured by a fixed mirror at the other end of the scanner. The image from the fixed mirror is captured by a CCD (charge-coupled device) and can then be saved to a computer hard-drive.
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This is another way of looking at it, with a three-mirror setup.
Now here's what happens when you replace the document with a mirror:
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Everything works the same way as before, except that what the scanner's movable mirror sees now is not a document, but a reflection of what is below. And what's below is the inside base of the scanner, which is black.
So what your scan will capture is essentially a dark reflection, and maybe some fingerprints or light scratches…but no shiny objects.
Images: Wikimedia Commons, Quora
About the author: Archie D'Cruz, Editor, Designer, Writer
What would happen if you put a mirror in a scanner? originally appeared on Quora. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.Though 20/20 vision is the dream for most people, especially those with vision impairment, but what if we said 3 x 20/20 vision is possible?
With Dr. Garth Webb’s Ocumetics Bionic Lens, that is exactly what you would achieve when you undergo the 8-minute painless surgery to have them implanted. The bionic lens can be used on anyone’s eyes, regardless of age or health, and would last forever.
While many people today need glasses for everyday activities such as driving, reading, and just plain living, the eye care industry is working to forever eliminate the need for both glasses and contacts.
With this surgery, patients would never need glasses or contacts and they would also never get cataracts because the lens replaces their natural eye lens, where cataracts form and cloud a person’s vision.
Webb doesn’t recommend that children undergo the surgery, and says that anyone over the age of 25 is the best candidate because the eye is fully developed at this age. He told CBC,
“This is vision enhancement that the world has never seen before. If you can just barely see the clock at 10 feet, when you get the Bionic Lens you can see the clock at 30 feet away.”
As far as surgery goes, each lens would be custom-made to fit the person’s eye and is folded like a taco in a saline-filled syringe. It is then placed in the eye, where it unravels itself within 10 seconds. It takes up to 8 minutes for it to take effect and the patient’s vision is corrected immediately.
Research for the lens has been underway for nine years now and has cost $3 million in research and development fees. Though the design has been successfully adapted for mass production, it’s estimated that with pending clinical trials, it will take up to two years to be released in Canada and Europe. Approval from the FDA will take two to three years longer.
Webb’s design has been called “clever” by other top ophthalmologists and one of them, Dr. Vincent DeLuise, who teaches at Yale University and Weill Cornell Medical College, said this about the lens:
“I think this device is going to bring us closer to the holy grail of excellent vision at all ranges—distant, intermediate and near.”
With this new technology, Webb is hoping to do away with laser eye surgery because it’s not as efficient as it should be, despite years of using it on patients. He said that,
“Perfect eyesight should be a human right.”
What are your thoughts on this new lens? Please share, like, and comment on this article!
This article (You Could Have Superhuman Vision Forever With This 8-Minute Surgery) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.comThis article is about heat measuring devices. For particle detectors, see Calorimeter (particle physics)
Not to be confused with Colorimeter (chemistry)
A calorimeter is an object used for calorimetry, or the process of measuring the heat of chemical reactions or physical changes as well as heat capacity. Differential scanning calorimeters, isothermal micro calorimeters, titration calorimeters and accelerated rate calorimeters are among the most common types. A simple calorimeter just consists of a thermometer attached to a metal container full of water suspended above a combustion chamber. It is one of the measurement devices used in the study of thermodynamics, chemistry, and biochemistry.
To find the enthalpy change per mole of a substance A in a reaction between two substances A and B, the substances are separately added to a calorimeter and the initial and final temperatures (before the reaction has started and after it has finished) are noted. Multiplying the temperature change by the mass and specific heat capacities of the substances gives a value for the energy given off or absorbed during the reaction. Dividing the energy change by how many moles of A were present gives its enthalpy change of reaction.
q = C v ( T f − T i ) {\displaystyle q=C_{v}(T_{f}-T_{i})}
Where q is the amount of heat according to the change in temperature measured in joules and C v is the heat capacity of the calorimeter which is a value associated with each individual apparatus in units of energy per temperature (Joules/Kelvin).
History [ edit ]
In 1761 Joseph Black introduced the idea of latent heat which lead to creation of the first ice-calorimeters.[1] In 1780, Antoine Lavoisier used the heat from the guinea pig's respiration to melt snow surrounding his apparatus, showing that respiratory gas exchange is combustion, similar to a candle burning.[2] Lavoisier dubbed this apparatus the calorimeter, based on both Greek and Latin roots. One of the first ice calorimeters was used in the winter of 1782 by Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace, which relied on the heat required to melt ice to water to measure the heat released from chemical reactions.[3]
Adiabatic calorimeters [ edit ]
An adiabatic calorimeter is a calorimeter used to examine a runaway reaction. Since the calorimeter runs in an adiabatic environment, any heat generated by the material sample under test causes the sample to increase in temperature, thus fueling the reaction.
No adiabatic calorimeter is fully adiabatic - some heat will be lost by the sample to the sample holder. A mathematical correction factor, known as the phi-factor, can be used to adjust the calorimetric result to account for these heat losses. The phi-factor is the ratio of the thermal mass of the sample and sample holder to the thermal mass of the sample alone.
Reaction calorimeters [ edit ]
A reaction calorimeter is a calorimeter in which a chemical reaction is initiated within a closed insulated container. Reaction heats are measured and the total heat is obtained by integrating heatflow versus time. This is the standard used in industry to measure heats since industrial processes are engineered to run at constant temperatures.[citation needed] Reaction calorimetry can also be used to determine maximum heat release rate for chemical process engineering and for tracking the global kinetics of reactions. There are four main methods for measuring the heat in reaction calorimeter:
Heat flow calorimeter [ edit ]
The cooling/heating jacket controls either the temperature of the process or the temperature of the jacket. Heat is measured by monitoring the temperature difference between heat transfer fluid and the process fluid. In addition, fill volumes (i.e. wetted area), specific heat, heat transfer coefficient have to be determined to arrive at a correct value. It is possible with this type of calorimeter to do reactions at reflux, although the accuracy is not as good.
Heat balance calorimeter [ edit ]
The cooling/heating jacket controls the temperature of the process. Heat is measured by monitoring the heat gained or lost by the heat transfer fluid.
Power compensation [ edit ]
Power compensation uses a heater placed within the vessel to maintain a constant temperature. The energy supplied to this heater can be varied as reactions require and the calorimetry signal is purely derived from this electrical power.
Constant flux [ edit ]
Constant flux calorimetry (or COFLUX as it is often termed) is derived from heat balance calorimetry and uses specialized control mechanisms to maintain a constant heat flow (or flux) across the vessel wall.
Bomb calorimeters [ edit ]
Bomb calorimeter
Bomb calorimeter
A bomb calorimeter is a type of constant-volume calorimeter used in measuring the heat of combustion of a particular reaction. Bomb calorimeters have to withstand the large pressure within the calorimeter as the reaction is being measured. Electrical energy is used to ignite the fuel; as the fuel is burning, it will heat up the surrounding air, which expands and escapes through a tube that leads the air out of the calorimeter. When the air is escaping through the copper tube it will also heat up the water outside the tube. The change in temperature of the water allows for calculating calorie content of the fuel.
In more recent calorimeter designs, the whole bomb, pressurized with excess pure oxygen (typically at 30atm) and containing a weighed mass of a sample (typically 1–1.5 g) and a small fixed amount of water (to saturate the internal atmosphere, thus ensuring that all water produced is liquid, and removing the need to include enthalpy of vaporization in calculations), is submerged under a known volume of water (ca. 2000 ml) before the charge is electrically ignited. The bomb, with the known mass of the sample and oxygen, form a closed system — no gases escape during the reaction. The weighed reactant put inside the steel container is then ignited. Energy is released by the combustion and heat flow from this crosses the stainless steel wall, thus raising the temperature of the steel bomb, its contents, and the surrounding water jacket. The temperature change in the water is then accurately measured with a thermometer. This reading, along with a bomb factor (which is dependent on the heat capacity of the metal bomb parts), is used to calculate the energy given out by the sample burn. A small correction is made to account for the electrical energy input, the burning fuse, and acid production (by titration of the residual liquid). After the temperature rise has been measured, the excess pressure in the bomb is released.
Basically, a bomb calorimeter consists of a small cup to contain the sample, oxygen, a stainless steel bomb, water, a stirrer, a thermometer, the dewar or insulating container (to prevent heat flow from the calorimeter to the surroundings) and ignition circuit connected to the bomb. By using stainless steel for the bomb, the reaction will occur with no volume change observed.
Since there is no heat exchange between the calorimeter and surroundings (Q=0) (adiabatic), no work is performed (W = 0)
Thus, the total internal energy change
Δ E t o t a l = Q + W = 0 {\displaystyle \Delta E_{total}=Q+W=0}
Also, total internal energy change
Δ E t o t a l = Δ E s y s t e m + Δ E s u r r o u n d i n g s = 0 → Δ E s y s t e m = − Δ E s u r r o u n d i n g s = − C v Δ T ( constant volume → d V = 0 ) {\displaystyle \Delta E_{total}=\Delta E_{system}+\Delta E_{surroundings}=0\ \rightarrow \ \Delta E_{system}=-\Delta E_{surroundings}=-C_{v}\Delta T\ \left({\text{constant volume}}\rightarrow \mathrm {d} V=0\right)}
where C v {\displaystyle C_{v}} is heat capacity of the bomb
Before the bomb can be used to determine heat of combustion of any compound, it must be calibrated. The value of C v {\displaystyle C_{v}} can be estimated by C v, c a l o r i m e t e r = m w a t e r ⋅ C v, w a t e r + m s t e e l ⋅ C v, |
attract the young to any political party as opposed to pressure groups is difficult and has been analysed in depth, but in comparison with the Tories, for example, who appear to have just given up, casually accepting the constant decline, UKIP appears to be making a determined if chaotic effort. The large numbers involved in the recent row over the support by senior officers in Young Independence for gay marriage and the fallout from it gives indication of truth in the UKIP claims that the numbers of young members are increasing, that they have an impact on the party and that there is internal debate.
Above all, the party has not been rejected at any time by the young as some sort of a pariah (like, say, the BNP would be).
This is important because another strain of the argument about UKIP ('the BNP in blazers' label) will not now work, however much the daft pre-politics antics and statements of some hastily drafted new UKIP candidates are exposed by Conservative Central Office. One of the problems with this old argument is that practically everyone now knows a UKIP member or activist and the fumbled, feeble and tortuous attempts to make UKIP appear like the BNP tend to sound cynical, self-serving and simply crying wolf. Countering this is the stale and featureless candidates of the main parties, almost every one of whom have joined young, been hot-housed to avoid doing or saying anything that might be used against them (therefore doing very little outside of sanctioned party activities) and parachuted in. They mouth the careful and cautious, centrally-planned platitudes of Party HQ, in response to their voters' fears and anger; they never actually seem to say anything. They are the "compliant" half of the "Radical or compliant: young party members in Britain?" title of the Bennie and Russell paper. Were the main parties deemed worthy of respect by voters, the indiscretions of UKIP candidates would probably go against the party big time. But UKIP's sole problem with this appears now to be one of management. And although Nigel Farage and I have not spoken for many years, I would suggest that his handling of this has been effective. He appears to have ensured candidates infringing rules about equality and diversity are dealt with quickly according to the party rules.
An important additional aspect is that UKIP’s determination to ensure that no links could be made to the BNP by mischief makers has paid off. At a time when Labour were actively accepting and courting BNP councillors in Burnley for political gain, UKIP barred any ex-BNP member from membership for all time. To some degree, therefore, unless one suggests that Labour has a pass and can accept what it describes daily as "racists" into its fold willingly in return for a cynical party-scripted recant, it lost the moral high ground in any claim against a party which avowedly will not accept such people. The main point, however, is that the argument will not now work as a way of reducing support for UKIP.
Niki Seth-Smith refers to the strengthening of English identity and, she is quite right, this must not be linked to racism or xenophobia. But one of the dangers with politicians trying to surf the new mood of Englishness is that they are profoundly unsympathetic and out of touch with it, and their appreciation is as contrived as Gordon Brown's supposed love for the Arctic Monkeys or the Tory embrace of the welfare state in 1945. It is patently lacking in conviction and insincere. The openDemocracy title of the piece about the Olympics speech sums it up - 'Labour should talk about England (but no action please): Ed Miliband on the Union'. To some degree, all the main parties have also spent 50 years branding as racist anyone who talks about ‘England’ or ‘Englishness’, with all the attendant stupidities of banning the flag of St George (“because of racism fears”) and creating the impression that the only people who talk about ‘England’ are football hooligans.
The talking therefore began quite a long time ago and the main parties have explaining to do and some recanting of their own if they are to appear sincere. The perception now will be that the old parties cannot just come along, claim the issue, and think they can neuter it with bland words, all the while banning the English flag as racist. Picture the scene: Nigel Farage has made a barnstorming speech about England and fairness, punctuated by humour and awkward points about flag bans and quotes from tortuous justifications made by clueless councillors, all received by cheers and much waving of flags. Ed Miliband “grabs the microphone from Farage” as suggested by Niki Seth-Smith and says: "we must all work together and maybe we need a dialogue and then ‘move on’". Oh dear. It will not go away and the Farage statement about an English Parliament is closer to the views of the electorate than the cautious talking shop views of the other parties, even if it is controversial in a party called UKIP. It may be that this is an occasion when parties might have to consider adopting urgent stances on the position of England to outflank a party offering what English voters think is right or fair. But the fear, one suspects, is that this appears to legitimise UKIP yet further (“they were right”) and so the paralysis will continue.
Weighing up UKIP generally, it is worth those on the left in particular remembering something else about UKIP members (and voters). Although they have by and large stayed away at senior level from the populist attacks on bankers etc, the members themselves in polling do not perceive themselves as right wing: as Skey says in reference to trying to place UKIP on a spectrum, there is not the corporate muscle behind UKIP that lies behind the Tea Party in the USA. And part of the restraint on these certain issues is through gritted teeth. Speak to some senior UKIP members about the articles on openDemocracy referring to the US-EU trading agreement and the dangers it represents to the NHS, and there is absolutely no difference between their views and that of the contributors here - these cannot be described as right wing. Ask the membership themselves at a UKIP conference to sign a petition about this and you would probably obtain a majority of the attendees' support. In my time on the party NEC, had Labour followed the Peter Shore, Gwyneth Dunwoody and Tony Benn line on the EU, and the Gisela Stuart thinking about the EU Constitution, then a third of UKIP's NEC would have considered joining the Labour Party when UKIP was in one of its periods of turmoil. The days of the party being full of “Tories in Mourning” are over.
It is also no secret that many in UKIP, and even more in the eurosceptic movement generally, have the view that it would be easier to deal with a Labour government after 2015, one with a commitment to a referendum, and (frankly) that a referendum held by an unpopular mid-term Labour government could unite the eurosceptics, who could then pull off a vote demanding an EU exit. Farage has also made clear he would find it easier to deal with Miliband than Cameron after the 2015 election, a view echoed even by former Tories in the party and received with little internal opposition.
"Our best option for leaving the EU is for Labour to promise a referendum and for us to vote the party into office", says Richard North, the author of the well respected eureferendum.com site. Well, quite.Taking Uber or Lyft to and from work and to run errands might seem more expensive than driving yourself–but in many cases, relying on a ride-hailing service is cheaper than buying and using a car of your own. A new calculator compares both scenarios, and might help you decide to ditch car ownership entirely.
“The goal of this work was to try to basically take the true, full cost of ownership–all of the obvious and non-obvious costs associated with owning a car–and then begin to compare it to mobility services,” Todd Davidson, a research associate and lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute and Webber Energy Group, tells Fast Company. Davidson is part of a team that created the Ride or Drive calculator.
In the calculator, you can plug in the sticker price of a new car, details about your loan, and how much you drive. You can also tweak details about how much you spend on maintenance, insurance, gas, and registration. But the tool also includes costs that people likely never consider, such as property taxes you pay on your garage, or the value of the time you spend stuck behind the wheel.
“The value of your time is something that I don’t think most people account for at all when it comes to transportation,” Davidson says. “People might understand it in the sense that they realize how long it takes them to get to work, but I’m not sure people are really internalizing what an alternative might be and whether or not it would save them money.” (The calculator also considers the time that riders usually wait for a ride-hailing car.)
In some cases–if you drive a lot and have a cheap, fuel-efficient car that you plan to keep for a long time, for example–the calculator suggests that buying a car makes more sense than a ride-hailing app. The researchers didn’t design the tool to advocate for people to get rid of cars, but wanted to challenge the common assumption that owning a car is the better choice, and educate people so that they can fairly compare the tradeoffs.
The calculator is one part of a larger research project that attempts to understand how transportation patterns may shift in the near future, and what that means for carbon emissions. By better understanding the economic drivers of transportation choices (including public transit, though it isn’t included in the simplified public app), the University of Texas researchers plan to estimate how many drivers may make the shift to ride-hailing and what impacts that could have on energy use. Electric cars are likely to become more commonly used for ride-hailing, particularly as companies like Lyft start to use autonomous cars and own their own fleets rather than using drivers’ vehicles. As that shift accelerates, emissions are likely to decrease.
“When most people talk about energy consumption and CO2 emissions, a lot of the focus of the discussion gets shifted towards the electric grid, when in reality a lot of the lowest hanging fruit is in the transportation sector,” says Davidson. The electric grid has already started to shift to lower emissions as coal plants close and renewable energy grows–and as cars plug into a cleaner grid instead of using gas, that will impact climate pollution.NEW DELHI: Employment in 8 sectors including IT/BPO, automobiles, gems & jewellery and textile rose by 5.21 lakh last fiscal, said a government report.
However, job creation in these 8 sectors which also include handloom/powerloom, leather, transport and metal remained little stressed in the January-March quarter at 64,000 over the previous quarter, as per Labour Bureau's '25th Quarterly Report on Changes in Employment'.
During the first three quarters of 2014-15, these sectors witnessed an overall increase in employment by 1.82 lakh, 1.58 lakh and 1.17 lakh over the previous quarters.
As per the 24th report, the overall employment had reduced by 36,000 in the January-March quarter in 2013-14.
The report also stated that the overall employment increased by 2.76 lakh during 2013-14, lower than 5.21 lakh in the previous fiscal.
At industry level, the highest increase in employment is observed in IT/BPOs sector where jobs increased by 37,000 during January-March, over November-December, 2014, followed by textiles including apparel sector (24,000), automobiles sector (20,000) and metals sector (1,000).
The largest decrease in employment was recorded in leather sector (8,000) followed by gem & jewellery (6,000), transport (2,000) and handloom/powerloom (2,000).
In the direct category of workers, employment has increased by 15,000 whereas for contract category of workers, it has increased by 49,000 during the quarter ended March, 2015 over December, 2014.
Employment in the exporting units has increased by 73,000 at overall level, whereas in the non-exporting units, it has decreased by 9,000 during January-March, 2015 over the previous quarter November-December, 2014.
Labour Bureau has been conducting a series of quarterly quick employment surveys since January, 2009 to study the impact of global economic slowdown on employment in Indian economy. The first one was conducted to study the impact of economic slowdown on employment during the October-December quarter of 2008.Shameless star Emmy Rossum is demanding a raise; and the standoff over her salary negotiations is why Showtime has thus far failed to renew the drama for an eighth season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Sources tell THR that Rossum wants to be paid the same amount as her co-star William H. Macy, and has even suggested that she should be paid more per episode than Macy, who has earned more than her on the show for years.
Macy, who recently renegotiated his contract and received a raise, has always earned more than his co-stars, given his film pedigree and past Oscar, Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. The last time the cast renegotiated their contracts was several years ago, and all series regulars received raises at that time. Macy's exact salary is unconfirmed, but sources tell THR that his paycheck puts him "in the upper echelon of cable dramas." Rossum plays the eldest daughter of Macy's character on the show.
Rossum also directed her first episode of Shameless this season, and her star has clearly been rising not just on the show, but publicly. And she may not have the Oscar and Emmy noms Macy does, but she was Golden Globe nominated for Phantom of the Opera, and has released multiple albums. Point being, her request isn't completely (or even remotely) out of left field.
If she successfully renegotiates her salary, then it's likely her other co-stars will renegotiate theirs as well. If Rossum can not come to an agreement with Showtime and producer Warner Bros. Television, then the network would either have to renew the show without one of its main stars, or cancel it entirely.
(Full disclosure: TVGuide.com is owned by CBS, one of Showtime's parent companies.)brianacooper11 Member
Join Date: Apr 2016 Location: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Posts: 128
First off, I picked the Tu-22M3 because it's largely an analog airplane. Most systems or cockpit indicators just do a few simple things, and they don't talk as much with each other. The code for them will have low complexity. One measure of this is
Now, before I produce a single line of code, I create a monstrous Design Document (DD). That's where you spell out in plain English or with engineering diagrams what every cockpit indication does, how every single system works in detail. It keeps the software project organized. It highlights work scope creep. It gives you a metric to measure progress. It also, most importantly, allows you to split up work, and I will be delegating like gangbusters. I am in a position due to experience and training, to go through tons of Russian documentation, translate it, and then incorporate the stuff that's relevent to simulation into the design document. In just that respect, I am doing something by myself. But A design document is sufficiently detailed for a programmer with no knowledge of the system to go and implement it in code. My wife is a programmer. Tons of my friends are programmers; they are engineers too, so they have tools like Simulink, detailed below. DD. Delegation. Those are what will make this project awesome and on time.
Engineers like me who have to incorporate electronics on our aircraft or engines are programmers by circumstance, and even then, under duress. We think and communicate in diagrams, equations, concepts. A fuel system isn't a bunch of ones and zeros, it's twelve damned fuel tanks with various pumps, vents, fire suppression systems and cockpit indications. Engineers have long switched to graphical programming environments like Simulink, and to a lesser extent NPSS (Numerical Propulsion Simulation something-or-other) to program simulations of physical systems faster and more accurately than with hand code. It looks like this:
Simulink takes those diagrams and converts them to C-code, and can them compile them into the dll(s) that DCS will use. I can test my logic at a very high level, within simulink, I will do a validation check of the added system in DCS, and it gets checked again when alpha and beta (since there are four positions, maybe we have alpha, beta, gamma and delta testers?) testers get their hands on it. I can even program HUDS (there isn't one in this case) and displays within Simulink/Matlab, and trade args with the airframe and cockpit in this environment. It's far faster and easier in this way. Eventually, there is C++ and lua programming required to tie everything together, but high level stuff is done in Simulink.
I'm not sure I can give a quick explanation here of how I am going to do the flight and engine models. Maybe later. I will be using some modern tools for both that should let me create accurate models quickly, that can then be validated by open source information I have on both. The Tu-22M3 has one or two aerodynamic bugaboos, a nasty stall with the wings swept, plus the wings flex as much as eight degrees at high sweep, high load factor and high angle of attack. That cannot be ignored aerodynamically, but all of these issues have been faced and solved by others before me.
To summarize the things that make this simulation tractable:
- I chose an aircraft with significantly less complexity than it's brethren.
- Design Document
- Delegation
- Graphical programming environment (Simulink/Matlab)
- Modern software tools for speedy flight and engine modeling
In the midst of all this, I personally have two unknowns. At present I'm not sure how to impliment multi-crewing. I know it's been done for two; I assume there is some way to do four. If any of you have solid thoughts on solving that particular item, I'm all ears. I'm also not going to take the time to model the radar reflectivity of the terrain for the radars, so I hope to lean on ED's experience for that, but we'll see what happens.
I hope this was informative, and not preachy.
Brian Reading these responses, I perceive excitement and hope, but I also perceive doubt about eventual success. I also neglected to mention some important details in the initial announcement (updated). I'd like to explain my battle-plan for the programming effort, in the hope that the whole effort will be believable.First off, I picked the Tu-22M3 because it's largely an analog airplane. Most systems or cockpit indicators just do a few simple things, and they don't talk as much with each other. The code for them will have low complexity. One measure of this is cyclomatic complexity. Contrast this with the F/A-18 ED is working on, or any modern real world aircraft for that matter. Their cockpit displays and aircraft systems are extremely integrated, and as the degree of integration or complexity increases, the development effort increases exponentially. That's just my experience. The Tu-22M3 has redundant systems, but they are a'simple' redundancy: they are in parallel, like power buses, or there are two or more physical units like airspeed indicators. If something breaks, you don't have to program a reaction to it. On modern systems, if something fails, all the computers have a stupid confab about it, and often decide to DO something, like swap channels, or vote on the best source of data, or average the remaining sources of data. The options are endless, and the powers that be dictate that all options must be implemented. Tons of code results. Ask the ED guys about it on the F/A-18. The Tu-160, B-52, B-1B, etc all have at multiple integrated digital systems that would have ground things to a halt. With the Tu-22M3, I don't have to deal with that. If the BN's airspeed indicator dies, he asks the pilot to read him airspeeds. If the autopilot goes out, he starts giving course corrections to the pilot. This isn't ideal in the real world, and that's why we have progress, but for our simulation purposes, it makes my life much, much easier. An Su-24 is similar to to the Tu-22M3 in this respect, but it requires a single player to be in two places at once during the final critical phases of a bombing run or weapons launch, as the pilot is truly directing the airplane, but he doesn't have the attack radar in front of him, and in the final moments, you need EVERYTHING for cross-checking. The Tu-22M3 is a bit old fashioned, in that the pilot hands off the plane to the BN entirely, and you only need to be in that position during the bombing run. You've got the optical bombsight, autopilot control, attack radar, nav radar, and standard six pack instruments all at that single station. Some weapons controls are at EW but you can preset all that, and pickle from the BN seat. A single player doesn't have to go mad. There will be optional AI for the RWR for single player mode. For these reasons of complexity, and a reasonable single player experience, there is only one option in a modern bomber: Tu-22M3.Now, before I produce a single line of code, I create a monstrous Design Document (DD). That's where you spell out in plain English or with engineering diagrams what every cockpit indication does, how every single system works in detail. It keeps the software project organized. It highlights work scope creep. It gives you a metric to measure progress. It also, most importantly, allows you to split up work, and I will be delegating like gangbusters. I am in a position due to experience and training, to go through tons of Russian documentation, translate it, and then incorporate the stuff that's relevent to simulation into the design document. In just that respect, I am doing something by myself. But A design document is sufficiently detailed for a programmer with no knowledge of the system to go and implement it in code. My wife is a programmer. Tons of my friends are programmers; they are engineers too, so they have tools like Simulink, detailed below. DD. Delegation. Those are what will make this project awesome and on time.Engineers like me who have to incorporate electronics on our aircraft or engines are programmers by circumstance, and even then, under duress. We think and communicate in diagrams, equations, concepts. A fuel system isn't a bunch of ones and zeros, it's twelve damned fuel tanks with various pumps, vents, fire suppression systems and cockpit indications. Engineers have long switched to graphical programming environments like Simulink, and to a lesser extent NPSS (Numerical Propulsion Simulation something-or-other) to program simulations of physical systems faster and more accurately than with hand code. It looks like this:Simulink takes those diagrams and converts them to C-code, and can them compile them into the dll(s) that DCS will use. I can test my logic at a very high level, within simulink, I will do a validation check of the added system in DCS, and it gets checked again when alpha and beta (since there are four positions, maybe we have alpha, beta, gamma and delta testers?) testers get their hands on it. I can even program HUDS (there isn't one in this case) and displays within Simulink/Matlab, and trade args with the airframe and cockpit in this environment. It's far faster and easier in this way. Eventually, there is C++ and lua programming required to tie everything together, but high level stuff is done in Simulink.I'm not sure I can give a quick explanation here of how I am going to do the flight and engine models. Maybe later. I will be using some modern tools for both that should let me create accurate models quickly, that can then be validated by open source information I have on both. The Tu-22M3 has one or two aerodynamic bugaboos, a nasty stall with the wings swept, plus the wings flex as much as eight degrees at high sweep, high load factor and high angle of attack. That cannot be ignored aerodynamically, but all of these issues have been faced and solved by others before me.To summarize the things that make this simulation tractable:- I chose an aircraft with significantly less complexity than it's brethren.- Design Document- Delegation- Graphical programming environment (Simulink/Matlab)- Modern software tools for speedy flight and engine modelingIn the midst of all this, I personally have two unknowns. At present I'm not sure how to impliment multi-crewing. I know it's been done for two; I assume there is some way to do four. If any of you have solid thoughts on solving that particular item, I'm all ears. I'm also not going to take the time to model the radar reflectivity of the terrain for the radars, so I hope to lean on ED's experience for that, but we'll see what happens.I hope this was informative, and not preachy.Brian Last edited by brianacooper11; 05-08-2016 at 08:19 PM.Top 5 episodes of 2011
2011 was a great year. We posted only 22 episodes, but managed to reach 2.4 million readers, which makes our small black hearts very very happy. Here are our Top 5 episodes of 2011.
The evil pigeons conduct some questionable research projects involving sea creatures. When inspector Gugustück comes to shut down their operation, it’s up to Pid’jin to save the day.
[read comic]
Fredo is in danger, as a series of sniper attacks threaten his life. Luckily, his bodyguards are all cats.
[read comic]
Facebook now tracks what you do in real life. Time for Fredo to spy on Pid’jin’s vacation in Cuba.
[read comic]
Our most controversial episode to date. Fredo and Pid’jin have to do one good deed, so they decide to resurrect Jesus.
[read comic]
Our most popular episode of 2011 brings together the joy of love, magic, children and faith.
[read comic]
See you all in 2012!Today on The View, we met 15-year-old Amanda, who had a breast reduction and liposuction on her stomach. Amanda is small, so you can see that DD/E cup breasts might be a strain on her tiny frame. But since she is obviously not obese, why would lipo be necessary? To prevent an eating disorder, of course! Amanda's mom explained that everyone in their family has belly fat, so she knew that even though her daughter was "eating less and less" it would never go away. Amanda's doctor had no problem doing the surgery, since "not everyone is blessed with the right looks," and he likes to "give children who are disadvantaged a chance to look better." Check out the clip above, and try to figure out what about Amanda's normal physique made her so "disadvantaged."Paul Wolfowitz (right) in 1991 was apparently pleased with the
outcome of Desert Storm. He believed that the time was ripe
to seize global hegemony before another world power rose to
challenge the Anglo-American establishment.
1980's
1990's:
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2011
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"The way they start to make statements or to understand the conflicts is unbelievable, beyond my imagination. The only explanation I can offer is because they have been affected - whether they like it or not - by the wave of democracy."
Long before the verified lies of Qaddafi's " door-to-door " genocide and even before the media cleverly tagged the engineered destabilization of the Middle East the "Arab Spring," Libya was already marked for destabilization and regime change. For nearly thirty years the US and UK have funded groups both inside Libya and beyond its borders in various attempts to remove Qaddafi from power. The current administration's feigned ignorance over the nature of the rebels in Libya is nothing short of absolute deception. The CIA and MI6 are on record for decades following, and in many cases supporting, these very groups.Below is a partial time line covering Western efforts to implement regime change in Libya. US-CIA backed National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) made multiple attempts to assassinate Qaddafi and initiate armed rebellion throughout Libya.Noman Benotman and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) wage a campaign of terror against Qaddafi with Osama Bin Laden's assistance.: Upon Qaddafi's abandonment of WMD programs, Libya's collaboration with MI6 & the CIA to identify and expose the LIFG networks begins, giving Western intelligence a windfall of information regarding the group. NFSL's Ibrahim Sahad founds the National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO) in London England.: Early February, the London based NCLO calls for a Libyan "Day of Rage," beginning the "February 17th revolution.": Late February, NFSL/NCLO's Ibrahim Sahad is leading opposition rhetoric, literally in front of the White House in Washington D.C. Calls for no-fly zone in reaction to unsubstantiated accusations Qaddafi is strafing "unarmed protesters" with warplanes.: Late February, Senators Lieberman and McCain and UK PM David Cameron call for providing air cover for Libyan rebels as well as providing them additional arms.: Early March; it is revealed UK SAS special forces are already operating inside Libya : Mid-March; UN adopts no-fly zone over Libya, including air strikes. Immediately, the mission is changed from "protecting civilians" to "ousting Qaddafi." Egypt violates the arms embargo of UN r.1973 with Washington's full knowledge by supplying Libyan rebels with weapons, while Al Qaeda's ties to the rebels are admitted by everyone including the rebels themselves Recently, Fareed Zakaria on his CNN show interviewed a former Libyan Al-Qaeda associate, Noman Benotman, to dispel "allegations" that Al Qaeda was playing a key role in the rebellion against Qaddafi. Benotman would concede that Al Qaeda was involved but not significantly, suggesting there were only a few hundred fighters. The Washington Times would later quote Benotman upgrading the number to a thousand. Then after Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi admitted to recruiting extremists into his ranks and that he believed Al Qaeda members were "good Muslims," Benotman began back peddling and even claiming It should be noted that Al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel commander, received his training in Afghanistan and witnessed the US bombing campaign which began in late 2001. He would fight Americans in Afghanistan and was eventually captured in Pakistan, handed over to the US and later released back to Libya in 2008. Now the same man that fought Americans is being provided American air cover over Benghazi while he leads fellow Al Qaeda fighters, some of which fought Americans in Iraq as well For the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was founded in the mountains of Afghanistan during the CIA-backed war against the Soviets, then fighting the Americans in both Afghanistan and Iraq, now having the CIA back on the ground in Libya by their side may seem like a reunion of sorts, punctuated by the irony of jets flying overhead that had been hunting them abroad but are now protecting their lives. But to the thousands of US soldiers who have died and the tens of thousands maimed and destroyed supposedly fighting Al Qaeda, to the Americans who have been financially bled to death over the last ten years of war, and to the millions of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Libya who have been killed, maimed, displaced or otherwise affected by the "War on Terror," it is more like the punchline of a bad joke.
But the implications go much deeper than merely a conjured army of duped extremists, serving the globalist agenda every step of the way. The implications are deep, and dark indeed.
The Grander Agenda
General Wesley Clark tells of how Middle East destabilization
was planned as far back as 1991, with the destruction of Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Iran on the
drawing board following the invasion of Afghanistan.
Ten days after 9/11, General Wesley Clark visited the Pentagon where an officer from the Joint Staff warned him of an impending attack on Iraq. After the Afghan invasion, this officer shared with Clark a document handed down from the Office of the Secretary of Defense indicating plans to attack and destroy the governments of 7 countries; Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Lebanon and Libya. General Wesley Clark would go on to share this story in a 2007 speech given to the Commonwealth Club of California where he repeated this list.Of course, the campaigns have already begun against each of the nations Clark listed. Iraq was invaded, decimated, and has been occupied by US troops since 2003. In 2006, Israel attempted to invade and dismantle Hezbollah in Lebanon but the conflict ended in a stalemate and an eventual Israeli withdrawal. Somalia was attacked by a proxy Ethiopian invasion force with US air support starting in 2007, but it too eventually ended in failure. A silent war has already begun within Iran, including covert military operations, the arming of terrorists, assassinations, and 2 failed US backed color revolutions. Sudan has been recently carved into two states and Syria is now being intentionally destabilized by US trained and funded activists And now, of course in Libya's case, aerial bombardment by US, UK, and French warplanes has begun, while the CIA and MI6 are on the ground attempting to collapse the Qaddafi regime.Wesley Clark would backtrack in his 2007 talk in California and recall a conversation he had in 1991 with then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz regarding Desert Storm. Clark was told that America's intervention in Iraq proved that the US could use its military force and the Soviets wouldn't stop them. Wolfowitz said the US had 5-10 years to clean up the old Soviet "client regimes" before the next super power rose up and challenged western hegemony. Clark claimed that this, along with the aftermath of 9/11 constituted a policy coup where Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other members of the of Project for a New American Century had hijacked US foreign policy to destabilize and turn the nations of the Middle East upside down - much the way they are now. The "Neo-Conservative" element of this current round of destabilization goes deeper than the promotion of war, as the "Neo-Cons" have uncharacteristically dedicated themselves to "human rights" and "democracy " side-by-side with the likes of George Soros and Zbigniew Brzezinski.Bush campaigned on an anti-war, anti-nation building platform. Obama then pledged to roll back the agenda Bush swindled the nation into, only to then continue it in earnest. All along we have been treated to the theatrics of the corporate-owned media, with pundits on the left and right reacting in shock and surprise as these engineered events unfolded according to plan.
Despite Wolfowitz' agenda being meted out nearly 20 years ago, the ham-fisted nature of both the operation itself in Libya and the propaganda surrounding it suggests a rushed sense of desperation on the globalists' behalf. Wesley Clark suggested that the operation to destabilize the Middle East and Northern Africa would take 5 years, starting in 2001. Wolfowitz believed that in 1991 the operation would have taken 5-10 years. The failed FBI attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 was most likely the staged impetus to trigger the first blitzkrieg. Not only did the attacks fail to cause the catastrophic effects needed to justify such an operation, the Egyptian informant assisting the FBI had recorded his conversations with agents indicating that they were indeed building a bomb for extremists and providing them with real explosives as well.
1993 would have fit in perfectly to tip off Wolfowitz' plan. Upon failing, he and his PNAC cadre would attempt to destroy the World Trade Center buildings again, this time successfully on September 11, 2001. The catastrophic loss of life, the confusion, and the rage that was left in its wake gave the PNAC what they called a "new Pearl Harbor" they claimed they needed in their September 2000 report titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses."
These men, who in fact helped create Al Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan to face the Soviets in the 80s would call on their legion of foreign mercenaries to wreck havoc across the planet, heralding globalist intervention along the way. Certainly this had nothing to do with defending America or spreading "democracy" but rather bolstering the hegemony of the corporate-financier oligarchy that both the PNAC cadre and the bankers who thoroughly saturate Obama's administration constitute.
What appears to have happened is a costly delay in 1993 and a post-9/11 campaign that has dragged on 5 years longer than expected. With the same clumsy hands fumbling in Libya also trying to stab simultaneously at both Moscow and Beijing with their agenda laid on the table openly for all to see, failure on the globalists' behalf now may incur a wrathful response from a planet about to truly awaken.
It should be expected that that any excuse to complete regime change in Libya will be made, including creating the conditions necessary to put troops on the ground - be it because of a failing rebellion, a false flag attack carried out in Qaddafi's name, or even feigned fears the globalists' own Al Qaeda might "seize" Libya should they not intervene. Similarly, with the US openly admitting to funding subversive activities across the Arab world, in Iran, and even as far as China, the globalists have painted themselves into an irredeemable, inescapable corner of confrontation.
Look past the feckless puppets occupying our public offices and toward the corporations and financial empires that are our true "misleaders." Boycott these corporations and systematically replace them by getting self-sufficient as an individual, as a household, and as a community. Independence is freedom, freedom is independence and the dominion of this dark empire can be broken by understanding that they need us, we do not need them.
For ways to battle the globalists by achieving self-sufficiency and freedom through independence please read on:
Self-Sufficiency
Alternative Economics
The Lost Key to Real Revolution
Boycott the Globalists
Naming Names: Your Real GovernmentThis post was contributed by a community member.
A local dentist in Mclean, Virginia has started a campaign to raise awareness for optimal oral health.
Dr. Wiltbank of Dolley Madison Dentistry thought of the idea after the success of the |
, 2013. They include photographs from the first Bilderberg conference, invitations, correspondence, opinions, participants lists, bar menu’s, receipts, notes, and more. Numerous years are covered in these photographs, but thousands of pages of documents still remain un-photographed on location. This site will act as a resource for journalists, writers and researchers interested in various topics covered in this release, as well as an outlet for the general population to view what this author is now calling, “Proof of the Bilderberg Conspiracy”.
In the documents below is some of the most crucial evidence against claims of Bilderberg members that the organization is simply a place to have discussions, and that agreements are not made, policies not influenced, and opinions not brought together in order to create a global system of governance. These documents prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group has been illegally planning the future of the world, without the input of the public.
Whether their “undertaking” (In their words.) be well-intentioned or not, the group can now be proven to have been attempting to steer planetary affairs, from behind closed doors, with no serious media scrutiny, from 1954 to 2013, and beyond. This author hopes that the disclosure of these documents will help lead to an open forum, where the people of the world may bring into discussion – and hopefully the courts – the actions the Bilderberg Group has been taking in the government and private sectors, that may be found to have led to the death of millions of people over the previous decades, due to their foreign policy objectives.
(CLICK ON PHOTOS TO ENLARGE OR DOWNLOAD)
(Excuse the likely lack of order in the photos)OXFORD, England, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- A British home with a giant fiberglass shark sculpture appearing to crash through the roof is available for rent for about $3,500 per month.
The home of the "Headington Shark" in Oxford, England, is being advertised as for rent by the Scott Fraser real estate agency for the price of $3,518 per month.
"Suitable for a family who are passionate about being involved with the local community and who will enjoy not only living in but living with the famous Headington shark," the agency said.
However, the listing says the shark is to be the only non-human resident of the home.
"Sorry, no pets," the agency said.
The shark was installed by owner Bill Heine in 1986. He said the shark represents "someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation. It is saying something about CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament], nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki."CDC Officially Admits People With HIV Who Are Undetectable Can't Transmit HIV
After hundreds of other experts and HIV organizations have already signed on to a pledge that recognizes that people living with HIV whose treatment has brought their viral load to an undetectable level — which is nearly half of all HIV-positive people in the U.S. — do not transmit HIV to any other person, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has come out with the definitive statement on the subject.
In recognition of National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, the CDC memo stated, "On this day, we join together in taking actions to prevent HIV among gay and bisexual men and ensure that all gay and bisexual men living with HIV get the care they need to stay healthy." Gay and bisexual men, the CDC noted, continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV, with, "more than 26,000 gay and bisexual men received an HIV diagnosis in 2015, representing two-thirds of all new diagnoses in the United States, and diagnoses increased among Hispanic/Latino gay and bisexual men from 2010 to 2014."
Although these findings are certainly disappointing, the letter's key paragraph is not. Noting that research has shown that antiretroviral therapy both keeps people living with HIV healthy and has a preventative effect, the CDC writes, "When [antiretroviral treatment] results in viral suppression, defined as less than 200 copies/ml or undetectable levels, it prevents sexual HIV transmission."
In other words, having one's HIV suppressed to undetectable levels prevents transmission.
"Across three different studies, including thousands of couples and many thousand acts of sex without a condom or pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)," the statement continues, "no HIV transmissions to an HIV-negative partner were observed when the HIV-positive person was virally suppressed. This means that people who take ART daily as prescribed and achieve and maintain an undetectable viral load have effectively no risk of sexually transmitting the virus to an HIV-negative partner."
“That is a remarkable statement”, as Bruce Richman, executive director of the Prevention Access Campaign’s Undetectable=Untransmittable campaign tells us, "This is the moment we have been waiting for! The CDC agreed today there is 'effectively no risk' of sexually transmitting HIV when on treatment and undetectable. The overwhelming data clearly shows that taking our medication daily protects our health and our partners.“
Richman points out, “this isn’t advising people with HIV and their partners to abandon condoms or PrEP. Being undetectable is another powerful option in the HIV prevention toolbox to be used in combination with other prevention options or independently depending on the circumstances.” He says that awareness of U=U is not only improving people’s social, sexual, and reproductive lives, “it’s changing what it means to live with HIV and will propel us toward ending the epidemic.”
Richman says congratulations are in order to "all the pioneering people and partners in the community and in the city, state, and federal health departments who worked together to ensure the messaging is aligned with the science and make this change. What a beautiful moment! The CDC’s new language is a result of [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’] review of viral suppression and HIV transmission messaging across departments which will be rolling out in the coming weeks and months."
Richman, whose Prevention Access Campaign has led the advocacy and educational effort around the Undetectable=Untransmittable message, points to the other people living with HIV, who "have been leading the way for this change here in the U.S. and around the world. Our experience as part of the review process and as early as last summer with HHS, [National Institutes of Health], and CDC has been productive and positive even when the gaps in our positions seemed wide. We appreciate their commitment and decisive action to follow the data during a time when our health and human rights have been continually under assault."
At this year's U.S. Conference on AIDS, Richman notes that Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, "confirmed 'the science really does verify and validate U=U (Undetectable = Untransmittable)' in follow-up to his statements at [the 2017 International AIDS Society] in Paris."
Now, Richman adds, "It’s time to make history and share this news!" He calls on other HIV, LGBT, and sexual and reproductive health organizations to join "nearly 400 organizations from 56 countries that have signed on as part of a growing and vibrant U=U Community Partner network. Resources on U=U messaging in the U.S. and around the world as well as the related issues of HIV criminalization, social determinants of health, and unequal access are on our website."Earlier today President Trump let fly a stunning poisoned-tip tweet:
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
He offered no evidence, not an iota of proof to back up the astonishing allegation against his predecessor – a charge that if true would constitute a constitutional crisis of the first order. Where did he get his information? CIA? FBI? NSA? Breitbart News? Sean Hannity? He did not say. Instead, he continued to rant:
Just out: The same Russian Ambassador that met Jeff Sessions visited the Obama White House 22 times, and 4 times last year alone. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
We have here the most disturbing revelation yet into the president’s character and state of mind. He is no longer a candidate, he is the president, and he is still obsessed with the man whose legitimacy as an American citizen Trump did everything to undermine as he scrounged for an issue that would launch him into politics.
What’s behind this latest slander? Consider these possibilities: Trump has the proof but decided against disclosing it, bolstering his authority as leaker-in-chief. But why would he do this, knowing his refusal to offer the evidence would further diminish his own battered credibility, more deeply divide the country between those who believe him no matter what and those who already consider him a pathological liar, and set off one of the firestorms he loves to ignite in a country already smoldering with anger and resentment?
Was his purpose to feed his ravenous base another full course of Obama hatred? Was it to distract his adversaries as the Republicans continue to enact the most regressive measures of policy and taxation since the 1920s? For sure, this latest and most sinister rant will be the chief subject on the Sunday talk shows, not the creeping corruption spreading across Washington and the steady annihilation by his cronies of public safeguards, the social contract and the safety net taking place every day in Congress and the agencies of government.
Does Donald Trump in his fevered, ungovernable mind relish polluting the public with ever more abominable lies? Is he so unhinged he wants to take the republic down with him, like a raging, blinded Samson?
Is he delusional, the ultimate narcissist, seeing himself no longer as the mere center of the universe but as The Universe itself?
Who knows? But for sure our president is up to no good. As we are reminded by the evangelist Peter: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
By coincidence, when these latest rants erupted earlier today, we were just about to post excerpts from a speech delivered Thursday night at McMaster University in Canada by Henry Giroux, who was being honored by his colleagues there for his prolific career as a scholar and author. As the Global TV Network Chair Professor in McMaster’s English and Cultural Studies Department, Giroux has kept a keen eye on American culture in particular and the growth of authoritarian politics in general. After reading Trump’s latest rants, we thought these remarks more pertinent than ever.
— Bill Moyers
Trump’s Authoritarianism: Rethinking Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Strategizing the Resistance
By Henry Giroux
With the rise of Donald Trump to the office of president of the United States, politics has descended, like never before, to a theater of the absurd. Unbridled anti-intellectualism, deception and “vindictive chaos” offer the rhetorical tools for repeating elements of a morally reprehensible past in the guise of “making America great again.” Advancing an aggressively alarmist agenda bolstered by “alternative facts,” the Trump administration has unleashed a type of anti-politics that unburdens people of any responsibility to challenge, let alone collectively transform, the fundamental precepts of a society torn asunder by blatant misogyny, massive inequality, open bigotry and violence against immigrants, Muslims and poor minorities of color.
In the new age of Trump, justice becomes the enemy of democratic leadership and the capacity to name this collectively agreed-upon reality recedes with each assertion of fakery in infinite repetition. When evidence, science and reason are purged of their legitimacy, politics capitulates to the venomous ideals, policies and practices one associates with a totalitarian past. Despite his populist posturing, Trump’s contempt of democratic processes is matched by his commitment to the market and economic policies that favor the financial elite. In short, as the Washington Post observed, Trump is a “unique threat to democracy,” and a triumph for the forces of nativism, racism and misogyny.
Trump’s ascendancy has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the decline of public life and the use of violence and fear to shock and numb everyday people. Galvanizing his base of true-believers in post-election rallies, the country witnesses how politics is transformed into a spectacle of fear, divisions and disinformation. Under President Trump, the scourge of mid-20th century authoritarianism has returned, not only in the menacing plague of populist rallies, fear-mongering, hate and humiliation, but also in an emboldened culture of war, militarization and violence that looms over society like a rising storm.
Reviving the memory of a dystopian past strikingly represented in George Orwell’s fiction, is a way to understand, perhaps the only way left for us to fully grasp, the present descent of the United States into an authoritarian nightmare. Focusing on their engagement with authoritarian visions, language, truth and lies offer a critical arsenal of defense against a Trump era of tweets and news fakery, and the more generalized and more lethal attacks on reason, science and liberal modernity.
Number one with a bullet
The intersection, if not merger, of popular culture and American politics was evident in the frenzied media circus that took place after Trump assumed the presidency, a fact not lost on the American public. Orwell’s novel 1984 surged as the number one bestseller on Amazon.com both in the United States and Canada. This followed significant political events worthy of a Star Trek episode. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s advisor, in a move reminiscent of the linguistic inventions of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth coined the term “alternative facts” to justify why press secretary Sean Spicer lied in advancing disproved claims about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd. With apologies his late father — a pastor — Bill Moyers, has called Conway, the “Queen of Bullshit.”
But before we credit Trump with using the great novel as his codebook, it is important to note that George Orwell’s terrifying vision of a totalitarian society has been a waking dream in the United States for many years. 1984 provided a stunningly prophetic image of the totalitarian machinery of the surveillance state that was exposed in 2013 through Edward Snowden’s divulgement of the mass spying conducted by the National Security Agency. Orwell’s genius was not limited to this predictive capacity alone. His fiction also explores how modern democratic populations are won over by authoritarian ideologies, revealing how language functioned in the service of deception, abuse and violence. He warned in exquisite and alarming detail how “totalitarian practice becomes internalized in totalitarian thinking.” For Orwell, the mind controlling totalitarian state took as its first priority a war against what it called “thought crimes,” nullifying opposition to its authority not simply by controlling access to information but by undermining the very basis on which challenges could be waged and communicated.
In recognizing how language fundamentally structures as much as it expresses thought, Orwell made clear how language could be distorted and circulated to function in the service of violence, deceit and misuse, and in doing so utterly collapsed any distinction between good and evil, truth and lies.
According to Orwell, totalitarian power drained words of any meaning by turning language against itself, exemplified infamously through his Ministry of Truth which dissolved politics into a pathology by promoting slogans such as: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” Hannah Arendt added theoretical weight to Orwell’s fictional nightmare by arguing that totalitarianism begins with a contempt for critical thought and that the foundation for authoritarianism lies in a kind of mass thoughtlessness in which a citizenry “is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also its capacity to think and to judge.”
Alternative facts (outright lies)
Trump’s “alternative facts” or more precisely, outright lies, is an updated term what Orwell called “Doublethink,” in which people blindly accept contradictory ideas or allow truth to be subverted in the name of unquestioned commonsense. Almost within hours of his presidency, Trump penned a series of executive orders that compelled Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, to rethink the relevance of 1984. He states that he had to go back to Orwell’s book “Because the single most striking thing about [Trump’s] matchlessly strange first few weeks is how primitive, atavistic and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be.”
Unfortunately, the machinery of remolding, manipulation and distortion has gained enormous traction under the Trump administration. In this Orwellian universe, there are only winners and losers. Under such circumstances, “greed, vengeance and gratuitous cruelty aren’t wrong, but are legitimate motivations for political behavior.” This is a discourse that reinforces a future in which totalitarianism thrives and democracies die.
As Orwell often remarked, historical memory is dangerous to authoritarian regimes. In Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, it is a crime to read history against the grain. In fact, history is falsified so as to render it useless both for understanding the conditions that shape the present and for remembering what should never be forgotten. As Orwell makes clear, this is precisely why tyrants consider historical memory dangerous; history can readily be put to use in identifying present-day abuses of power and corruption.
The Trump administration offered a pointed example of this Orwellian principle when it issued a statement regarding the observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the statement, the White House refused to mention its Jewish victims, thus erasing them from a monstrous act directed against an entire people. Politico reported that the official White House “statement drew widespread criticism for overlooking the Jews’ suffering, and was cheered by neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.”
This act of erasure is but another example of the willingness of the Trump administration to empty language of any meaning, a practice that constitutes a flight from historical memory, ethics, justice and social responsibility. Under such circumstances, government takes on the workings of a dis-imagination machine, characterized by an utter disregard for the truth that is often accompanied, as in Trump’s case, by “primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.” In this instance, Orwell’s “Ignorance is Strength” materializes in the Trump administration’s weaponized attempt not only to rewrite history, but also to obliterate it. Trump’s contemptuous and boisterous claim that he loves the uneducated and his willingness to act on that assertion by flooding the media and the American public with an endless proliferation of peddled falsehoods reveal his contempt for intellect, reason and truth. As the master of phony stories, Trump is not only at war with historical remembrance, science and rationality, he also wages a demolition campaign against democratic ideals by unapologetically embracing humiliation, racism and exclusion for those he labels as criminals, terrorists and losers, categories equated with Muslims, Mexicans, women, the disabled — the list only grows. As John Wight observes, Trump’s language of hate “is redolent of the demonization suffered by Jewish people in Germany in the 1930s, which echoes a warning from history.”
All governments lie
Orwell’s point about duplicitous language was that all governments lie. The rhetorical manipulation definitive of Orwellian language is not distinctive to the Trump administration, though it has taken on an unapologetic register in redefining it and deploying it with reckless abandon. The draconian use of lies, propaganda, misinformation and falsification has a long legacy in the United States, with other recent examples evident under the presidency of George W. Bush. Under the Bush-Cheney administration, for example, “doublethink” and “doublespeak” became normalized as state-sponsored torture was shamelessly renamed as “enhanced interrogation.” Barbaric state practices such as sending prisoners to countries where there were no limits on torture were framed in the innocuous language of “rendition.” Such language made a mockery of policy discourse and eroded public engagement. It also contributed to the transformation of institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect citizens from the excesses of the market and state violence into something like their opposite.
But the attack on reason, dissent and truth itself finds its Orwellian apogee in Team Trump’s endless proliferation of lies: including claims that China is responsible for climate change, former President Obama was not born in the United States and voter fraud prevented Trump from winning the popular vote for the presidency. Such lies, big and small, don’t function simply as mystification; they offer justification for aggressive immigration crackdowns, for effectively silencing the EPA and for upending Obamacare. Too often the relentless fabrications serve to distract the press, focusing its energies on exposing the untrustworthiness of the person and not on the symbolic, legal and material violence that such pronouncements and harsh policies invariably unleash.
Once he was elected to the presidency, Trump took ownership of the notion of “fake news,” inverting its original usage and redeploying it as a pejorative label aimed at journalists who criticized his policies. Even Trump’s inaugural address was filled with lies about rising crime rates and the claim of unchecked carnage in America, though crime rates are at historical lows. His blatant disregard for the truth reached another high point soon afterwards with his nonsensical and false claim that the mainstream media lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, or more recently his assertion that the leaks involving his national security adviser were “real” but the news about them was “fake.”
Trump’s penchant for lying and his irrepressible urge to tell them are more than what Gopnik calls “Big Brother crude” and the expression of a “pure raging authoritarian id,” they also speak to an effort to undermine freedom of speech and truthfulness as core democratic values. Trump’s endless threats, fabrications, outrages and “orchestrated chaos,” produced with a “dizzying velocity,” also point to a strategy for asserting power, while encouraging if not emboldening his followers to think the unthinkable ethically and politically. While it may be true that all administrations lie, what is unique to the Trump administration as Charles Sykes, a former conservative radio host, observes “is an attack on credibility itself.”
Market driven politics
There can be little doubt about the ideological direction of the Trump administration given his appointment of billionaires, generals, white supremacists, representatives of the corporate elite and general incompetents to the highest levels of government. Public spheres that once offered at least the glimmer of progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, non-commodified values and critical dialogue and exchange have and will be increasingly commercialized — or replaced by private spaces and corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins.
What we are witnessing under the Trump administration is more than an aesthetics of vulgarity as the mainstream media sometimes suggest. Instead, we are observing a politics fueled by a market-driven view of society that has turned its back on the very idea that social values, public trust and communal relations are fundamental to a democratic society. It is to Orwell’s credit that in his dystopian view of society, he opened a door for all to see a “nightmarish future” in which everyday life becomes harsh, an object of state surveillance and control — a society in which the slogan “Ignorance is Strength” morphs into a guiding principle of the highest levels of government, mainstream media, education and the popular culture.
How else to explain a US president calling journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” going so far as to claim that critical media are “the enemy of the American people.” These are ominous and alarming comments that not only suggests that journalists can be tried with treason but also echo previous totalitarian regimes which waged war on both the press and democracy itself. As Roger Cohen observes:
“Enemy of the people,” is a phrase with a near-perfect totalitarian pedigree deployed with refinements by the Nazis…. For Goebbels, writing in 1941, every Jew was “a sworn enemy of the German people.” Here the “people” are an aroused mob imbued with some mythical essence of nationhood or goodness by a charismatic leader. The enemy is everyone else. Citizenship, with its shared rights and responsibilities, has ceased to be.
A public shaped by manufactured ignorance and indifferent to the task of discerning the truth from lies largely applauded this expression of totalitarian bravado, especially when it incites hatred and violence. Trump’s call to build a wall between the United States and Mexico and his consideration of using the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants arouses applause among his followers. As does Trump’s penchant for disparaging all critics as losers reminiscent of the ways failed contestants were treated on his reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” Dissenting journalists and others are refused access to government officials, derided as purveyors of fake news, become objects of retribution while being told to shut up, and, in the course of being symbolically fired, are relegated to zones of terminal exclusion.
The resistance is mobilizing
Democracy in the US is under siege, but the forces of resistance are mobilizing around a renewed consciousness in which civic courage and the ethical imagination are being realized through mass demonstrations in which individuals are putting their bodies on the line once again, refusing Trump’s machinery of misogyny, nativism and white supremacy. Airports are being occupied, people are demonstrating in the streets of major cities, town halls have become sites of resistance, universities are being transformed into sanctuaries to protect undocumented students, and liberal and progressive politicians are speaking out against the emerging authoritarianism. Democracy may be in exile in the US and imperiled in Europe and other parts of the globe, but the spirit that animates it is far from defeated. Once again the public memory of prophecy is in the air echoing Martin Luther King Jr’s call “to make real the promise of democracy.”
There is no choice but to stop Trump’s machinery of civil and social death from functioning. It has to be brought to an end in every space, landscape and institution in which it tries to shut down the foundations of democracy. Understanding how “the possible triumph in America of a fascist-tinged authoritarian regime” is poised to destroy “a fragile liberal democracy” is the first step towards a viable and sustained resistance. What cannot be forgotten is that this an authoritarian regime that draws from a fascist history that unleashed nothing short of large-scale terror, violence and the death of civic imagination.
At the same time, any confrontation with the current historical moment has to be contoured with a sense of hope and possibility so that intellectuals, artists, workers, educators and young people can imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise. Fortunately, diverse groups, extending from union members and women’s movements to other progressively oriented social formations such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the Moral Monday Movement, the block the pipelines campaigns, along with growing resistance by teachers, actors and artists are organizing to protest Trump’s neo-fascist ideology and policies.
Optimism and sanity are in the air, and the urgency of mass action and collective power of resistance has a taken on a renewed relevance. The Women’s March on Washington was a hopeful symbol of collective opposition. Thousands of scientists have rallied against the attacks on scientific inquiry, the perils of climate change, and other forms of evidence-based research, and they are planning further marches in 2017. A number of big city mayors are refusing to allow their cities to become pale imitations of the previous authoritarian regimes. Demonstrations are taking place every day throughout the country, students are mobilizing on campuses and all over the globe women are marching to protect their rights.
What we are witnessing is a massive broad-based struggle intent on producing ongoing forms of non-violent resistance at all levels of society. Accordingly, it is important to heed Rabbi Michael Lerner’s insistence that a democracy minded public, workers and activists of various stripes need a new language of critique and possibility, one that embraces a movement for a world of love, courage and justice while being committed to a mode of nonviolence in which the means are as ethical as the ends sought by such struggles. Such a call is as historically mindful as it is insightful, drawing upon legacies of non-violent resistance by renowned activists as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Saul Alinsky, Paulo Freire and Martin Luther King Jr. Despite their diverse projects and methods, these voices for change all shared a commitment to a collective and fearless struggle in which nonviolent strategies rejected passivity and compromise for powerful expressions of opposition.
To be successful, such struggles have to be coordinated, focused and relentless. The age of fractured politics among progressives has to come to an end. Single-issue movements will have to join with others in supporting both a comprehensive politics and a mass collective movement. We would do well to heed the words of the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who argues:
It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced…. If there is no struggle, there is no progress…Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
We live at a time in which totalitarian forms are with us again. Hopefully, rage and anger will move beyond condemnation and demonstrations and develop into a movement whose power will be on the side of justice not injustice, bridges not walls, dignity not disrespect and compassion not hate. Let’s hope it develops into a worldwide movement capable of dispelling Orwell’s nightmarish vision of the future in our own time. The dark shadow of authoritarianism may be spreading, but it can be stopped. And that prospect raises serious questions about what educators, artists, youth, intellectuals and others are going to do today to make sure that they do not succumb to the authoritarian forces circling American society and other parts of the globe, waiting for the resistance to stop and for the lights to go out. My friend, the late Howard Zinn rightly insisted that hope is the willingness “to hold out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.” To add to this eloquent plea, I would say, collective opposition is no longer an option, it is a necessity.America's home ownership rate, after holding steady for a while, took a pretty big plunge in Q4, from 66.9 percent to 66.5 percent. That's down from the 2004 peak of 69.2 percent and the lowest level since 1998.
Homeownership is falling at an alarming pace, despite the fact that home prices have fallen, affordability is much improved and inventories of new and existing homes are still running quite high.
Bargains abound, but few are interested or eligible to take advantage.
More concerning than the home ownership rate is the vacancy rate. The Census tables don't tell the entire story, but they tell a lot of it. Of the nearly 131 million housing units in this country, 112.5 million are occupied. 74.8 million are owned, and that's only dropped by about 30 thousand in the past year. 38 million are rented, but that's up by over a million year over year. That means more new households are choosing to rent.
Now to vacancies. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the U.S. in Q4 '10 (11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round), which is actually an improvement of 427,000 from a year ago, but not for the reasons you'd think.
The number of vacant homes for rent fell by 493 thousand, as rental demand rose. 471,000 homes are listed as "Held off Market" about half for temporary use, but the other half are likely foreclosures. And no, the shadow inventory isn't just 200,000, it's far higher than that.
So think about it. Eleven percent of the houses in America are empty. This as builders start to get more bullish, and renting apartments becomes ever more popular. Vacancies in the apartment sector have been falling steadily and dramatically, why? Because we're still recovering emotionally from the toll of the housing crash.
Younger Americans have seen what home ownership has done to their friends and families, and many want no part of it. Credit has become very nearly elitist. Home prices, whatever your particular data provider preference might be, are still falling.
Banks, Fannie and Freddie are holding on to hundreds of thousands of properties, and we don't know exactly when or how they'll sell them.
Questions? Comments? RealtyCheck@cnbc.comAnd follow me on Twitter @Diana_OlickWhere to Stream: Up in the Air
More Options
Wondering what your favorite streaming services are adding to their offerings each month? Decider’s got you covered. Stay tuned for our reports on everything coming to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, Showtime, Starz, Sundance Now, and more, plus a look at the top titles from all of them.
Cord cutters, rejoice: as the summer gets into the swing of things, so is the quality of your streaming content. Amazon Prime Video has everything you need to get through the sweltering season, from the latest seasons of your favorite series to classic films you’d almost forgotten about. Is it hot in here? Because I think Amazon’s July slate just turned up the heat.
For those who missed the Oscar flicks and recent seasons of television from this last year, riveting drama The Salesman and dark series Mr. Robot are heading your way. Craving some classic comedy? The First Wives Club has you covered. Amazon’s latest original series The Last Tycoon is also hitting the platform at the end of the month, and its jazzy period setting will certainly charm you. Amazon is known for their delivery services, and the same goes for their streaming – so don’t hesitate. Here’s what’s on Prime Video this July.
Available July 1
1 Dead Party (2014)
14 Women (2007)
18 Swirling Riders (1977)
The 28th Day: Wrath of Steph (2010)
48 Hrs.
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag
Abolition (2013)
Agent Cody Banks
Air: The Musical (2010)
All American Zombie Drugs (2013)
Amnesiac (2013)
Another 48 Hrs.
Appetite (1998)
Area 51
The Artworks (2003)
Assassin of the Tsar (1991)
Bandits
BigFoot Wars (2014)
Blind Heat (2000)
Blood Moon Rising (2010)
Blood Reaper (2004)
Boomerang
Boricua (2004)
Braveheart
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Bull Durham
Bumblef**k, USA (2013)
Bunnyman Massacre (2014)
Carne: The Taco Maker (2014)
Carnies (2010)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
Clear and Present Danger
Cold Mountain
The Corrupted (2013)
Crystal River (2008)
Cutthroat Island
Day We Met (1990)
Dead Evidence (2001)
Death Wish IV: The Crackdown
Destination Vegas (1995)
Dilemma (1997)
Dirt Merchant (1999)
Dragonblade (2004)
Dream a Little Dream
Drunk Wedding
The Eagle and the Hawk
Eight Men Out
Elephant (1989)
The First Wives Club
There’s never a bad time to watch this classic comedy, and if you’ve never seen it, you’re in for a treat. Starring Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton, this spin on the revenge comedy finds three spurned ex-wives reunited by the death of a close friend. Tired of being bogged down by the men who wronged them, they decide to get even. Packed with snappy one-liners and perfect performances, The First Wives Club will have you singing “You Don’t Own Me” all month long.
[Stream The First Wives Club on Prime Video]
Flashdance
Flipping (1997)
Fly Me to the Moon
Foreign Fields (2000)
Frankenstein Reborn (2014)
Free Money
Frozen Kiss (2009)
G Men from Hell (2000)
Gene-Fusion (2011)
The General (1998)
Get Well Soon
Ghost Bride (2014)
Godsend
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Gunshy (1998)
Hazard Jack (2014)
Hobgoblins (1988)
House of the Dead
House of the Dead 2
The Hunt For Red October
Intimate Affairs (2001)
Into the Fire (2005)
Jack in the Box (2012)
Jezebeth (2013)
Jingles the Clown (2013)
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker
Johnny Guitar
Killing Ariel (2008)
Killing Zoe
Kingpin
The Last Word
Lazarus: Day of the Living Dead (2014)
The Letter
The Little Kidnappers (1991)
Little Red Devil (2011)
Lost in Siberia (1991)
Lovin Molly (1974)
The Lucky Ones
Manhattan
Married to the Mob
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Meeting Spencer (2010)
Metamorphosis (2007)
The Midnight Meat Train
Model Behaviour (2013)
Morning Glory (1993)
Mortem (2013)
Moscow Heat (2004)
My Bloody Wedding (2013)
Nerve
New Order (2013)
Night Train (1998)
On the Q.T. (1999)
Paradise Lost (1998)
Payback
The Peacemaker
Phil The Alien (2004)
Pi
Players (2003)
Poliwood (2009)
Pootie Tang
Postmortem (1998)
The Presidio
Princess Juliet (2013)
Private Lessons (1981)
Prophet’s Game (2000)
Reasonable Doubt
Red Tide (2013)
Redball (1999)
Relative Evil (2004)
Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings (2013)
Rescue Dawn
Rosemary’s Baby
Sample People (2000)
Sanctuary (1998)
Scrooged
Shunned House (2003)
Silent Youth (2013)
Silo Killer 2 (2010)
Slip & Fall (2011)
Smoke N’ |
ceans, but seem to be more common in much colder waters.
Sponges
Xenophyophores
I can't remember when it was that I first learned of these humble little creatures, but
I've yet to fully overcome the shock of their existence, and by now, I'm sure you know
that this is saying quite a bit. Liesurely creeping along the muck of the sea floor,
these gelatinous globules collect tiny fragments of shells, sponges and other animal
remains to build a hollow casing or "test" (what we see in these photos) around their
delicate bodies. Different species favor different building materials, and many form
tests of their own hardened excrement. They secrete a blanket of mucus as they sift
for tiny particles of food in the surrounding mud, engulfing it in one more amorphous
pseudopodia.
So, where's the shocking part? With some species reaching the size of a human fist,
Xenophyophores are, by an immense margin, the world's largest single-celled
organisms. They are protozoans, related to the amoeba.
Giant germs that wear their feces are as high a note as I could ever end on, so with
that, I'll bring this crappy little e-tour to a close. Every year, science is surprised anew
by what we dredge up from these stygian pits, and we can no doubt look forward to
ever-weirder zoological discoveries in our lifetimes.
Echinodermata
A flesh-eating beast you are unlikely to find in a pineapple, the surface of this innocuous-looking
deep-sea organism functions as a sort of flypaper for small crustaceans, entangling their jointed
limbs in a velcro-like pattern of microscopic hooks. Special cells in the sponge's body migrate
around the prey to form a temporary orifice, where its lipid content is absorbed and carried to
the sponge's core.
Many other sponges feed in a similar fashion, but Chondrochladia lampadiglobus, pictured here,
is one of the most visually striking. Nearly all are found in the deep-sea abyss, arctic waters and
underwater caves where sunlight and plankton are relatively scarce.I recorded these bird sounds California in Orange County!
Driving for about 20 minutes outside of our apartment in Costa Mesa you will find yourself in a truly hidden gem! The Red Rock Canyon! It is not so easy to find this place but if you come here there are two access points where you can park and start! Get your sound equipment and follow the road from, Portola Pkwy or Santiago Canyon. Besides birds, you can find in this wilderness other animals from a snake to a mountain Lyon!
But for now, I present you two different bird sounds! I drove around the Red Rock Canyon and honestly, it was so hard to find a quiet spot and if you find something then you have an airplane or the freeway sound in the background!
I know these are not my best recordings but I still like to share it with all of you and who knows maybe somebody can still use it!
I combine two recordings in one wave file! In the first two minutes, you can hear the birds and two dogs barking in the background! These dogs stopping at the same point and you have the birds and a little bit of traffic noise in the next part.
If you curious where I did this recording, here is the exact spot!
After this, I drove down to the Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary what was already closed! I walked along the way and did some field recording but nothing is usable! They have some really cool woodpeckers but somebody decided to clean his car and the woodpeckers stopped picking!
At the South Coast Plaza Mall!
The second bird sound was not on purpose! I always carry my Zoom with me because you never know what could happen! We stopped at the South Coast Plaza to get some Yoga Pants at Lulu Lemon! Anyway, all that I was interested in was this bird sound and first I didn’t know where to look because I couldn’t see the birds until I stand right next to them! They have a huge nest right in the Parking Lot Area and they didn’t stop talking! I made a six-minute recording only on the Zoom H6!
The exact location is here!
“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach”. Henry Beston
…and now I invite you to download two bird sounds from California! One more month and we heading back to Iowa and Vietnam! I promise to get some better bird sounds from there! If you have friends and you feel like they could benefit from this sound as well, please share this post!
Bird Sounds California at Red Rock Canyon
Download File
Bird sounds California at South Coast Plaza
Download File
Bird Sounds California Orange County was last modified: by
RelatedThe long march of women towards equality has barely started in music. At a debate on Feb 12 at Shoreditch House entitled Girls Allowed: Women in Contemporary Music we learned that when it comes to entrenched gender stereotyping, things are still really bad. And it turns out that classical music, jazz and pop are all as bad as each other. Gillian Moore, Head of Classical Music at the Southbank Centre, reminded us about the Russian male conductor who recently announced that women conductors are “against nature”. Pop star, songwriter and recording entrepreneur Little Boots (aka Victoria Hesketh), poured some entertaining sarcasm on male record producers who want women artists to be decorative on stage, and leave the important stuff like software programming and mixing to the men.
We heard quite a few statistics too, about how low the proportion of female players is to males in orchestras, how few women composers are commissioned for the Proms, and how few orchestras have female chief conductors (you could count them on the fingers of one hand). I could have added a few stories myself of the casual sexism even distinguished figures have to contend with. When that wonderful jazz pianist and composer Carla Bley started to tour as a bandleader in the Eighties, beer bottles and fruit were hurled at her, along with shouts of “Get back to the kitchen!”
It was a combative evening, as befits a debate held under the auspices of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for gender equality. By the end a number of key problems had been identified. One was the suffocating resistance to change from men of a certain age, all squatting in positions of power until their pensions mature. “We’ve just got to wait for them all to die off,” said radio presenter Ruth Barnes, with a mixture of exasperation and embarrassment that she had to voice such a brutal sentiment.
Another problem, whose cause was harder to pin down, was a lack of confidence among talented young women. Research on classroom behaviour shows that girls often make a bold start when they’re young, then lose confidence in their teens. Girls just aren’t good at pushing themselves forward. They lack the swagger that allows the boys to shoulder their way into the record company with a half-finished demo, or mount the conductor’s podium before they’ve actually learned the piece properly. “Girls always have to be twice as good as the boys,” was a constant refrain.
So what's to be done? Some thought a degree of positive discrimination was necessary, but not in terms of setting quotas. It was, said Susanna Eastburn (CEO of Sound & Music), more a question of bucking the system. If you want to showcase late 19th-century music, the system offers you all those composers who were published at that time, who were almost all male.
It won’t offer you the interesting female composer whose music only exists in manuscript copies, stored in a private house somewhere in the country. If you need a conductor for a dance project, agents will only offer you men. To bring women conductors into the frame means tracking them down.
All these things take time but it's worth the effort to create a level playing field. My feeling is that schemes like these are fine, as you long as you have a plan for bringing them to an end. Otherwise they’ll become the musical equivalent of the Barnett Formula, that temporary expedient for subsidising Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by England that’s turned out to be permanent.
One question that didn’t come up was whether there’s such a thing as a female musical aesthetic. It’s a foolhardy man that ventures into territory so richly sown with feminist landmines. However I will point out one striking thing. There was a time when women composers could only get a hearing by writing conventionally feminine music. They had to stick to salon pieces, and those who struck out into more ambitious territory, like Clara Schumann, were felt to be not quite “natural”.
In more recent times, as the social restrictions on women have loosened, so the range of women’s musical expression has widened. The interesting thing is that this process hasn’t obliterated those characteristics that music by female composers was always meant to have: a dislike of extremes, and a focus on intimate states of feeling and softer sounds. But their distribution is interestingly patchy. Some composers, like the American Ruth Crawford Seeger, the doughty English modernist Elizabeth Lutyens or the young British composer Shiva Feshareki (played during the event) almost go the other way. On a blind test, I would guess their music was written by a male. With the gently tonal music of Dobrinka Tabakova, another young British composer, and the meditative, soft-edged music of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, I’d bet the other way.
It’s hard to know what conclusion to draw from this. Does it mean that Ruth Crawford Seeger’s music is “less feminine” than Saariaho’s? Or does it mean that “femininity” has shrunk to something purely personal, a quality that some women (and some men) may have, while others don’t? If it’s the latter, it’s hard to know why we should call it “feminine” at all. This is the problem with liberating human personality from traditional roles. You emerge into the sunlight, dazzled and blinking, enjoying the sense of freedom and lightness. Then you find you’ve lost your bearings.
Some vital statistics
Of the top 22 orchestras in the US, only one has a female conductor. No British orchestra has a female Music Director.
Among British pop festivals, the percentage of acts containing women artists was 34 per cent at Glastonbury, 21 per cent at Bestival, and a mere 17 per cent at Leeds and Reading.
In 2010, only 4.1 per cent of commissions for new works was awarded to women composers.
Percentage of women players in orchestras in 2012: All US orchestras: over 40 per cent; UK orchestras: 29 per cent; Dresden Staatskapelle: 28 per cent; Russian National Orchestra: 36 per cent; Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera: 7 per cent.
Women in Music, a two-day festival of music by women composers, takes place at the Royal College of Music London SW7 on 1 & 2 July
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Follow @TelegraphOperaIf something appears too good to be true … Julian Wessel/JWAstronomy
Last week, a seemingly spectacular astronomy video went viral. It was created by a German astrophotographer named Julian Wessel, and it showed the International Space Station passing directly in front of Saturn. I saw links to it all over Twitter and Facebook, and no wonder: Catching such an event takes an extraordinary amount of skill and planning. Plus, it’s just cool.
There’s only one problem: It wasn’t real.
Wessel used images from different observing sessions and composited them together to make the video and the image. Under some circumstances this is OK—for example, when different telescopes are used, or when you’re reconstructing a scene (like the Earthrise image taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter). But in any case, the important bit is to note that it’s a composite.
Wessel didn’t do this; on his website he said, “I managed it [sic] to photograph the ISS in front of a planet again. In this case it was the Lord of the Rings: Saturn.” He also wrote, “Fortunately everything happened as planned and I could make the capture… You can see the Video of the Event on my YouTube… This is a great effort for me as an astrophotographer. It takes time, patience, preperation and a little bit of luck to get a shot like this, but at the end the hard work pays off!” That certainly makes it sound like he got footage of the actual event. He also submitted it to the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, which ran it (though, after review, they have since taken it down).
The video was convincing enough that it got past a lot of people. When I first saw it, I was amazed, but it also set my skeptic sense tingling. It bugged me that he happened to catch the ISS directly in front of Saturn in one frame of the video; the odds of that are pretty low. And it all looked too crisp and clean, but that wasn’t enough for me to declare it a fake.
However, not long after the video became public, a whole bunch of amateur astronomers were on the case. My friend Stephen Ramsden (who does solar observing) sent me a note letting me know that people were buzzing over some serious issues with the video. Also, Christopher Go, who is a phenomenal planetary astrophotographer, also pointed out many problems with the video. As a few examples:
The ISS should have been about twice as big as the disk of Saturn, yet they’re the same size in the video.
ISS is far brighter than Saturn, but they appear equally well-exposed.
Saturn should have been grainy looking, noisy, due to the very short exposure.
At the time Wessel claimed to have taken the video, the Sun had just risen. The sky should have been very bright, and Saturn would have been extremely low contrast, almost washed out by the bright sky. Saturn was also very low in the sky, and atmospheric distortion should have made it look very fuzzy.
It was very cloudy that morning at the location Wessel claims to have taken the video.
I could list many more issues; most are pretty technical and circumstantial, but it’s a long list.
Zoom on the actual transit portion of the photo. Note that the ISS should be twice as big as Saturn, and there are too many details in the image given the conditions at the time the photo was claimed to be taken. Julian Wessel/JWAstronomy
I sent Wessel an email asking him some specific questions, but I did not hear back. Not long after that, he removed the entry about the video from his site and Facebook, and removed the video from YouTube (which is why I didn’t embed it in this post). He also posted to an astrophotography forum, saying the image was a composite, but that doesn’t jibe with the claims he made earlier, which purport it to depict the actual event.
I don’t know what Wessel’s motivations are, and I won’t speculate. I will note that others are looking at some of his previous work and calling foul on that as well. Update, Jan. 26, 2016: Wessel has posted in the APOD message board apologizing for what he did.
But I’m writing about this because I think it’s important to note that it’s easy to get fooled. Software is so good that stuff like this can be created pretty easily, and it can be good enough to fool people passingly familiar with astrophotography, at least at first (though generally not for long, as we’ve seen here). But for people who don’t know much about it, this kind of stuff gets believed, and passed around social media rapidly.
That bugs me for a couple of reasons. One is simply about the nature of truth: People shouldn’t create fakes and then claim they’re real, and if they do then it should be called out. But more, it diminishes the actual photographs, the actual videos, and the very very hard work astrophotographers put into their craft.
For me, I love to share the joy and wonder of the Universe, and when artwork or fakes or computer simulations get passed around as the real thing, it diminishes what’s really going on around us. I prefer to appreciate things as they are.
A lot of fake astrophotographs get shared on social media (especially by those spammy Twitter feeds with handles like SciencePorn and UberFacts, and usually with no links or credit to the original creator). I know a lot of people love seeing these pictures, but I think it’s important to separate fact from fiction. The Universe is actually and truly a stupendously gorgeous and astonishing thing all on its own. We can appreciate artwork depicting it, but we should also understand what’s real and what isn’t.
And here’s some irony for you. As I was drafting up this article, I got a note that Szabolcs Nagy was in fact able to catch ISS transiting Saturn on Monday in Gran Canaria! Here’s the video:
Yes, I checked, and this one looks real! It is possible to get this sort of thing on video. Like I said, it takes patience and planning, and maybe a bit of luck, too. See? Astronomy is really cool.
I suggest following FakeAstropix and PicPedant on Twitter to see if that viral pic you saw on Facebook is real or not.
I’ve also written about fake pictures many times. Here’s a selection:
But sometimes they are real:My trip to Italy last year was the first time I’d ever been overseas. Most of the trip was spent walking across Tuscany and Umbria. We’d stop in a small town, grab a bite to eat, explore and then continue walking to our destination that evening.
For me, the trip revitalized my love of photography. It’s a hobby that I enjoy, but between work and my own projects it always seems to take a back seat. The exception, of course, is when I’m traveling.
Like my photography? Consider following me on Instagram.
Flowers neatly line the staircase to a home in Assisi.
From the time we landed in Rome I was overcome with an odd obsession—the doors.
It’s impossible not to have some sort of curiosity towards the doors of Italy. Each one is different. Some have ornate designs, while others have a spartan-like minimalism. Some are surrounded by flowers, others by stone.
This photography project shows off some of my favorite entrances. I don’t remember where many of these were taken, and I regret not taking the time to write down the addresses or more about each place. If you recognize one of these, please get in touch.
The door to a Pinacoteca in Bevagna.
A small side entrance to the incredible Castello Di Spaltenna in Chianti.
A red scooter parked outside of the Hotel IL Palazzo in Assisi.
A large, spartan door in Bevagna.
A yellow door on a small building on the outskirts of Radda.
A flower-covered doorway in Montefalco.
A door against a white wall in Cortona.
A vine grows along a door in Bevagna.
Doorway to the University of Georgia’s Cortona Campus.
Minimal Doorway in Montefalco.
A small door not far from the courtyard in Vertine.
Door to the Museo Civico di San Francesco in Montefalco.
A small door in the corner of the courtyard at Castello di Spaltenna.
Doorway to a Cortona home decorated with flowers.
The incredible entrance to The Santuario di San Michele Arcangelo in Bevagna.
A flower-covered doorway in Bevagna.Lhamo was enthroned in February 1940 at Potala Palace. He was soon inducted as a monk and given the name Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso. He was sent to be educated at a monastery while the Regent maintained political control over Tibet.In 1949-50, Mao Zedong’s Chinese troops invaded Tibet and tried to incorporate it into China. In 1950, the Dalai Lama assumed political power over Tibet and began to attempt peace negotiations with China.In 1959, the same year that the Dalai Lama finished his final exams and earned the equivalent of a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy, Tibetans revolted against Zedong's army and many protesters were killed. The 24-year-old Dalai Lama left the country to become political leader-in-exile; thousands of Tibetans followed.Once in exile, the Dalai Lama worked tirelessly to promote the principles of Buddhist philosophy and work toward a free Tibe t. He began working with the United Nations to help protect the people of Tibet in exile and drafted a constitution for Tibetans in exile that focused on freedom of speech, belief and assembly.In 1987, he presented his Five Point Peace Plan for Tibet in an effort to map out a workable strategy to ending the conflict in the country. The plan included transforming Tibet into a place of peace, stopping China's population transfer policies, protecting the environment of Tibet, stopping nuclear weapons production in the country, and starting real negotiations between Tibet and China to reach a peaceful resolution. The Dalai Lama has also been a promoter of a “middle way” in which Tibet could become an autonomous entity within China.He has toured the world promoting peace through non-violent means. In 1989, the 14th Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace In his Nobel lecture, he declared, “Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.”Last Updated: March 17, 2009. This page is no longer being maintained. Please see the 2010 version.
I’ve decided to take a cue from MLB Trade Rumors and make this free agent list a permanent page. Here you’ll find a list of all the Japanese-league players who are eligible after the 2008 season.
Read on, or jump to the list of impending international or domestic free agents.
NPB Free Agency Explained
NPB free agency is a little different from MLB free agency. Starting this year, there are two categories of free agency: domestic and international. NPB players qualifying for domestic free agency can only move to other NPB teams, while players qualifying for international free agency are free to try their luck abroad as well.
Players drafted prior to 2007 must reach 8 years of service time to qualify for domestic free agency, while players drafted from 2007 onward only require 7 years of service. International free agency requires 9 years of service time for all players. One year of service time is defined as 145 days on the team’s top roster. Time spent on the farm time or injured list does not count as service time toward free agency. This is why guys like Kenshin Kawakami and Koji Uehara won’t be free agents until after this year despite having started their careers in the late 90’s.
NPB teams signing NPB free agents are required to compensate the player’s former team with either money or players. The system is changing considerably for the 2008/9 off season. I’ve written about this in a little more detail in an earlier post. MLB teams do not pay compensation to NPB teams when signing NPB free agents.
Unlike MLB, it is not uncommon for NPB players to forgo their right to declare free agency and remain with their previous team. In fact, exercising free agency rights seems to be more the exception than the norm in NPB. This makes the common MLB practice of trading impending free agents as rentals non-existent in Japan. One tactic Japanese teams will employ is posting obviously MLB-bound players a year before they hit free agency.
International Free Agents
Koji Uehara (P, Yomiuri Giants): Of the current crop of upcoming free agents, Uehara is the most outspoken about his desire to play in MLB. I’ve profiled him and ranked him against Kawakami and Iwase. Final Update: signed with Baltimore.
Kenshin Kawakami (SP, Chunichi Dragons): Chunichi’s top starter is also likely to bolt for MLB. Get a closer look at him here. Final Update: signed with Atlanta.
Hitoki Iwase (RP, Chunichi Dragons): The Dragons’ veteran lefty closer is a free agent again this year. We’ll see if he hangs around or decides to try his hand at MLB. I’ve profiled him here. Update Nov 1: Iwase will decline free agency and remain with Chunichi.
Tomohiro Nioka (SS, Yomiuri Giants): I’m not sure if Nioka will rack up the service time he needs to move internationally by the end of the season. He’s gotten some negative publicity over his extra-marital flirtation with a TV newscaster this season, so the Giants may be ready to move on from him. Update Nov 1: My gut feeling is that the Giants are done with Nioka. Nippon Ham is interested. Update Nov 23: Traded to Nippon Ham, will play in Hokkaido next season.
Masahiro Araki (2B, Chunichi Dragons): Araki has hinted at trying the free agent market, but I would be surprised if he signed elsewhere. Update Sept 9: Staying put.
Hirokazu Ibata (SS, Chunichi Dragons): Nikkei Sports reports that Ibata will remain with Chunichi and “has no interest in filing for free agency.” Update Nov 1: Staying put.
Ryoji Aikawa (C, Yokohama BayStars): I don’t see him leaving Yokohama. Aikawa comments on his free agency: “when I joined the team I didn’t think I could do this. I’ll consider what to do after the season.” Update Oct 25: Aikawa has already announced his intent to declare free agency, with a move to MLB a possibility. He’s taken in some MLB playoff action and intends to participate in tryouts as a winter league invitee, but I don’t see him getting more than a minor league contract. Back in NPB, Yakult is interested in acquiring Aikawa to fill starting catcher role that no one has claimed since the retirement of the great Atsuya Furuta. Update Nov 23: Definitely leaving Yokohama, Yakult remains the most interested. Final Update: signed with Yakult.
Tatsuhiko Kinjoh (CF, Yokohama BayStars): According to Sponichi, Kinjoh is not planning on declaring free agency and will stay with the BayStars, at least for another year.
Naoyuki Ohmura (CF, Softbank Hawks): Ohmura has stated publicly that he wants to try his hand at MLB. “I want to go,” says Ohmura, “life is short and you only get one chance at it.” Ohmura is a contact hitter with zero power. He can probably start for an NPB team that gets power from other positions, or be possibly be a 4th outfielder type in MLB. Think So Taguchi. Update Nov 1: Traded to Orix, missed qualifying for free agency by 13 days.
Norihiro Nakamura (3B, Chunichi Dragons): “Not interested in other teams” were his exact words. Has had two MLB flirtations and drama at Kintetsu/Orix before finally settling into a groove with Chunichi. I can’t see him anywhere else. Update Nov 23: did a 180 and filed for free agency because Chunichi wanted to move him off third and give him a one-year contract. Looks set to join Rakuten. Dec 14: Did indeed move to Rakuten.
Masafumi Hirai (RP, Chunichi Dragons): Qualified for free agency last year, but elected to sign a one year contract with Chunichi. Having a bad season. Kind of an MLB sleeper type. Update, Oct 21: not filing for free agency; will attempt to regain his form with Chunichi. “If I had put up really great results this year I probably would have thought about it,” said Hirai.
Atsunori Inaba (OF, Nippon Ham Fighters): Inaba’s contract is up, but he’s unlikely to move. Inaba had looked to play in America when he originally qualified for free agency, but was only offered minor league contracts. Update Nov 1: As expected, will remain with Nippon Ham.
Daisuke Miura (SP, Yokohama BayStars): Miura is finishing up a six-year contract with Yokohama. Hanshin is already gearing up to make a play for him. Update Nov 1: Hanshin is preparing to offer Miura a 4-year/12-oku yen ($12M) contract. Miura says he wants another shot at a title. Final Update: re-signed with Yokohama.
Kim Dong-Ju (3B, Doosan (Korea)): Orix is looking at Kim as their third baseman for next year. EastWindup Chronicle has his numbers and some analysis. Final Update: staying in Korea.
Tasuku Hashimoto (C, Chiba Lotte Marines): Hashimoto feels like he can start, but is stuck behind all-star Tomoya Satozaki, so I think he’ll be likely to try his fortunes somewhere else. A number of teams are rumored to be interested after his strong 2008 season (.311, 11hr off the bench), but Hanshin is expected to make the biggest play to sign him. Current Tigers catcher Akihiro Yano won’t last forever, and there’s no internal heir apparent. Update, Nov 23: Staying with Lotte.
Saburo (OF, Chiba Lotte Marines): Saburo’s two-year contract is coming to an end, and he’s considering his options, which includemoving to MLB. Saburo is quoted as saying, “I’ve compared myself to the major league rightfielders that I see on TV, and if I’m going to go now is my only chance.” Saburo is coming off a solid offensive season (.289/.359/.416) and has won Gold Gloves in 2005 and 2007, but he still profiles as a 4th outfielder on most teams. Update, Nov 23: Staying with Lotte, after initially saying he’d try MLB.
Tyrone Woods (1B, Chunichi Dragons): Yahoo (via Daily Sports) reported that Tyrone Woods is going toleave Chunichi after the season ends. Woods put up another strong season in the Central League despite turning 39 in August, and should attract plenty of interest around NPB if he chooses to stay. I could see him moving to MLB too — if Darryl Ward can stick for the whole year on the 97-game winning Cubs, I have to think there’s a place for Woods somewhere. Final Update: doesn’t have a contract going in to the 2009 NPB season. Retired?
Hiram Bocachica (OF, Saitama Seibu Lions): Like most foreign players in Japan, Bocachica is playing for Seibu on a one-year contract. Though he played only 78 games, Bocachica hit a surprising 20 home runs this season. This blogger wants his Marines to go after him this offseason, but Hiram told Deanna that he wasn’t sure about staying in NPB. Update, Nov 23: Staying with Seibu.
Ken Takahashi (SP, Hiroshima Carp): Takahashi is coming off a resurgent season with Carp, and there’s a chance he’ll opt for free agency. It looks like teammate Hiroki Kuroda inspired this: “I’m interested in seeing what American baseball is like. The image of Kuroda has had a big impact. I’m struggling (with the decision)”. Takahashi is a lifelong Carp and 40 at the beginning of next season. I think it’s either Hiroshima or America for him. Update, Nov 23: wants to try MLB, will draw some limited interest. Final Update: signed minor league deal with Toronto.
Colby Lewis (SP, Hiroshima Carp): Lewis put up a great year for the Carp, and has already re-signed and should be Hiroshima’s opening day starter next year.
Hiroshi Shibahara (CF, Softbank Hawks): Sponichi reports that Rakuten is targetting Shibahara as the first free agent acquisition in the team’s four year history. Shibahara is still a useful player and would fill a veteran role for the team. Update, Nov 23: Nothing in the news on this guy, but apparently didn’t file for free agency.
NPB-only Free Agents
Ryota Igarashi (RP, Yakult Swallows): The hard-throwing reliever will carefully think over his options in the off-season. He’s eligible for domestic free agency, and he’s in his first year back from Tommy John surgery. Update Nov 1: Staying with Yakult for now, with an eventual eye to the majors.
Akihiro Higashide (2B, Hiroshima Carp): Higashide made some comments that you don’t typically hear from Japanese players: “I’ve worked hard to reach free agency. This is the result of year after year of fighting to be my best. I have to put good results in this kind of year.” True to his words, Higashide is in the midst of a break-out season, third in the Central League with a.334 BA (career BA:.255). It looks like he’s qualified for domestic free agency; there is speculation that he could draw interest from Hanshin, Yomiuri, and Chunichi. I would hate to see Hiroshima lose yet another star. Update, Oct 25: Yokohama is showing interest. Update Nov 23: signed a four-year deal to stay with Hiroshima.
Hisanori Takahashi (SP, Yomiuri Giants): Takahashi just recently qualified. “I’ve got this season on my mind and right now I don’t have the luxury of thinking about it,” said Takahashi, adding “it’s a milestone, and a personal reward. I want to think about what to do as an individual baseball player.” Update Nov 23: signed a one-year deal to stay with the Giants.
Naoyuki Shimizu (SP, Chiba Lotte Marines): Shimizu was set to be a hot commodity among NPB teams this winter, drawing rumored interested from Hanshin, Rakuten, Yakult, Yokohama and the Giants, but has recently revealed that he intends to pass on free agency this year with an eye toward the majors later on.
Shingo Ono (SP, Chiba Lotte Marines): After a little indecision, Ono appears to be leaning towards free agency. “I feel like would like to remain with Lotte, but they’re developing good young pitchers and I have to think about moving. I have confidence that I can play for another team.” Yokohama is rumored to be interested in his services. Update, Nov 23: staying with Lotte.
Hidetaka Kawagoe (RP, Orix Buffaloes): Reportedly ready to move after being offered a pay cut by Orix. (Thanks to reader Jeff B for the tip). Update Nov 23: re-signed with Orix after all.Medals and decorations are a soldier’s story, telling of times and places and actions.
From the row of medals on the chest of a man allegedly masquerading as a senior non-commissioned officer of the Royal Canadian Regiment during the national Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa, the story is one of long service, and repeated peacekeeping missions, and some display of selflessness and courage.
From left, a closer look:
Medal of Bravery
Recognizing acts of bravery in hazardous circumstances, this is one of three high honours that can be awarded to military and civilians alike, and ranks behind the Cross of Valour and Star of Courage. Established in 1972, it has been presented to 3,029 people for risking their lives to come to the aid of others. The circular silver medal carries a maple leaf surrounded by a wreath of laurel on its face, or obverse, and the Royal Cipher and Crown and inscription BRAVERY. BRAVOURE. on its reverse. Recipients are listed on the Governor General’s website (the name of the alleged impostor does not appear there). All are entitled to use the letters MB after their name.
Special Service Medal
Frequently seen on dress occasions — nearly 77,000 were presented from 1984 to June 2012 — this medal recognizes Canadian Forces members who have served under exceptional circumstances in defined locations. It is always issued with a bar specifying the service being recognized — in this case a tour while posted to a NATO unit or a Canadian unit under control of a NATO headquarters. Other bars may say ALERT, PAKISTAN, HUMANITAS, RANGER, EXPEDITION or PEACE. Formed from copper and zinc alloy, the medal bears a maple leaf within a laurel leaf on the obverse and the Royal Crown and Cypher and inscription SPECIAL SERVICE SPÉCIAL on the reverse.
Canadian Peacekeeping Service Medal
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to all UN peacekeepers in 1988 inspired the creation of this medal to acknowledge the contributions of Canadian peacekeepers since 1947. That group now numbers 125,000, the most of any nation. On the face of the round medal are three figures of unarmed observers and the words PEACEKEEPING and SERVICE DE LA PAIX; on the reverse are the Queen’s Cypher on a maple leaf and the word CANADA. The ribbon’s central stripe is the official blue of the United Nations. The green represents service, the white is the colour of peace and the red signifies blood shed in the service of peace. Some 75,000 peacekeeping medals have been awarded.
NATO Medal for Kosovo
Canadians who served between October 1998 and December 2002 in the NATO mission in Kosovo, a breakaway province of the former Yugoslav Federal Republic, are eligible for this bronze medal. Suspended from its ribbon by a large ring, the medal bears the NATO star set in a wreath of olive leaves on its obverse and the words North Atlantic Treaty Organization and In the service of peace and freedom in English and French on the reserve. It is always issued with a bar inscribed KOSOVO |
of growth. Not this quarter. Not the next quarter. Or the next. Or the next.
"We are not planning for any kind of a pick-up in the back half of the year," de Aguiar said. "Everything that we're planning for is for a tough economic environment in 2001. A little tougher than actually we've seen in 2000."
It's not the sort of rah-rah speech executives typically deliver on analyst calls. But de Aguiar said he hopes the straight talk will earn the company some credibility points on Wall Street.
That credibility took a hit this year with a string of earnings revisions that had analysts and the company predicting a profit for the year of $2.40 a share and then $1.70 and then $1.35 and then 51 cents and then a loss of $1. The final numbers: a loss of $2.61 a share.
"We all recognize that it's critical that we meet or beat this plan, because our credibility is on the line," de Aguiar said.
Maybe more than the company's credibility. Eric Beder, an analyst with Ladenburg Thalmann, last month dropped his rating on Ames to "long-term hold" and lowered his 18-month target for the stock from $18 a share to $5.
"The concept isn't broken," Beder said. "It's just going to take a significant amount of time to prove that it works."
Does Ames have that time? Beder said the company should survive 2001, even with flat earnings. The company in January struck a new $800 million credit deal with GE Capital, and buoyed by that cushion, vendors still have faith.
But if Ames bleeds red ink like it did last year?
"2000, in some respects, was just a complete disaster," Beder said. "Can they withstand another year like they had and still stay above water? That's very iffy."
And that's reflected in Ames rags-to-riches-to-rags stock price. In the past five years, shares of Ames stock went from $2 a share to nearly $50 a share -- before falling back down to $2 a share.
How did things get so bad?
Ames executives blame a year-long streak of horrifically bad luck, saying they were burned by relentlessly unfavorable weather, a spike in fuel costs and a broadly weaker economy.
Season after season, it was either too cold or too hot or too wet or too snowy to lure customers. And while the economic downturn cut across socio-economic levels, Ames customers have been especially hard hit by the surge in gas prices.
But beyond that, Ames' recent history has given some investors a frightful sense of deja vu.
In the 1980s, Ames was a solid regional chain with stores dotted throughout mid-Atlantic and New England states. Figuring bigger is better, executives in 1988 decided to take one giant leap by swallowing the failing Zayre chain of stores. Overnight, Ames more than doubled in size.
But Zayre turned out to be a bad fit for Ames, and sales lagged. When the recession hit, Ames couldn't carry the staggering debt load from the Zayre purchase. And the company's vision of a nationwide reach devolved into a depressing march to bankruptcy court.
The Zayre deal may be the official cautionary tale of the Ames Department Stores chain. Which is why many eyebrows lifted when Ettore announced in late 1998 that the company would buy the huge, struggling Hill's Department Stores chain, a $330 million deal that increased Ames' store count by 50 percent.
Ames converted the stores in 1999.
And then the economy went south.
"They bought Hills, and they haven't had a day of luck since," said Kurt Barnard, publisher of the Barnard Retail Trend Report.
Ettore said he does not regret the Hills deal, and he bristles at comparisons to the Zayre chain. He says Ames bought Hills for barely more than the value of its inventory, meaning the stores were nearly free.
"We wound up stealing the company," he said.
Ettore says that when energy prices come down and the economy recovers, Ames will recover, too. He dismisses any suggestion that Ames' basic business model -- promotion-heavy selling aimed below Wal-Mart or Kmart -- is flawed.
"As for our strategy, I don't think we got stupid overnight," Ettore said, pointing out that before the economy soured, Ames was soaring. "I keep looking at the nuts and bolts of our strategy, and it works."
He said keeping the faith with that strategy will be critical to Ames' survival. Bradlees -- and Caldor before it -- both stumbled by trying to move upscale, a move that confused customers and invited powerful competition.
Ettore says Ames has long co-existed in the shadow of scores of Wal-Marts, and sees no threat from two of retail's fastest-growing success stories: Kohl's and Target. Both chains, he says, appeal to significantly more upscale customers.Morph Issues
This is a list of all the morphs and combos that have known issues associated with them. Below the table is further detail on each morph or combo.
Morph Issue Spider Wobble Woma Wobble Hidden Gene Woma Wobble Champagne Wobble Super Sable Wobble Powerball Wobble Black Head x Spider Masks the Spider's wobble Sable x Spider Difficult to hatch, severe wobble Champagne x Hidden Gene Woma Severe wobble Champagne x Spider Lethal Pearl Normally Lethal Super Champagne Lethal Super Spider Lethal Desert Female fertility issues Caramel Albino Kinking and female sub-fertility Super Cinnamon/Super Black Pastel Duckbill & rare kinking Super Lesser Platinum/Super Butter Bug eyes Lesser Platinum x Piedbald Small Eyes Banana/Coral Glow Gene resides on a sex chromosome
Wobble/Neuro
A condition present in quite a few morphs is what we call "The Wobble". It is known to appear in Spider, Woma, Hidden Gene Woma, Champagne, Super Sable, and Powerball. It also shows in Jaguar Carpet Pythons. An even more severe wobble is known to appear in Sable x Spider, and Champagne x Hidden Gene Woma combos. For the purpose of this article, I'm going to refer to the following morphs as "Wobblers". This was orginally written with the Spider gene in mind, but can apply to the other Wobblers.
Anyone who owns one of the Wobblers or seen one in person, most likely already knows what I'm talking about when I refer to "The Wobble". Wobblers have an apparent neurological issue. Which I think the best way to describe it is that they essentially lose their equilibrium, moving in directions they normally wouldn't move in. You may not even see it, it can be a subtle as them just tilting their head once in a while, shaking in their head. It can be as bad as them corkscrewing their body in the air almost uncontrollably. It could only happen during feedings or other potentially exciting situations for the snake or it could just be a constant occurrence. The snake could have no signs as a baby and show it as an adult or have it as a baby and grow out of it.
What I am getting at is, this is very variable, every Wobbler is different.
Search "Spider ball python wobble" on Youtube and you can see some of the extreme cases of the wobble. Now it must be clarified that most Wobblers are nowhere near as badly afflicted as those you will see online. Don't let those select few deter you from these morphs. The majority are subtle and won't exhibit a extreme wobble.
The wobble is linked to the gene. The normals that come out of the same clutch as a Wobbler don't have the wobble, the condition is only present in Wobblers. Anything with a Wobbler gene in it, whether it be a Bumblebee or one of NERD's crazy creations, will all have the wobble. Breeding a low wobble Wobbler can result in some offspring with a bad wobble. Breeding a Wobbler with a bad wobble can result in low wobble offspring. There appears to be no way to selectively breed it out.
I have herd a myth that inbreeding may cause the wobble. I will be bold and say the Spider is the most out-crossed morph (meaning breeding unrelated animals) in the ball python world. There is no proven Super Spider, so Spider x Spider breeding are very rare today. So the myth is false, it is in no way related to inbreeding.
A question often asked is "What if my snake can't eat because of the wobble?" The combos with the severe wobble can have this problem. As for the other Wobblers, in all of my research, I have only found 1 person that made a claim that they had a baby with a wobble that was so bad, it could not eat. One Spider out of the multiple-thousands of Wobblers out there. With that said if one pops up that cannot eat, by design it will not be around. But besides that one case, they all eat, poop, breed, and live healthy lives in captivity.
Some of you may be asking "Why would you breed a snake with a defect?" There is actually a small debate on the ethics of breeding Wobblers. Here is my personal opinion on the matter. We breed them because it's a morph, in truth every morph is a "defect". People have brought up the arguement that they would not fair well in the wild. My response would be, they are only going to remain in captivity and they eat, poop, breed, live healthy lives just like any other ball python in captivity. The Spider morph has been doing great in the ball python world since 1999 and is considered a staple morph by most hobbyists for any collection.
Now I will also share a theory based a some limited animals I have interacted with.
I don't believe the wobble is going to be seperated from these morphs. There is too much evidence it is linked directly to the gene, but I think it can be reduced. I see stress levels might play a factor in the amount of wobble the Spider's show. As stated before, every snake is different, but I have personally seen how changing homes can bring a minimal wobble, to horrible wobble, to minimal wobble again. Many people report only seeing signs of it while only feeding, or only while being handled. I feel this strengthens the idea that stress or excitement can elevate the condition.
I know this may be a touchy subject for some Wobbler owners whose snakes exhibit a particularly bad wobble. They may feel like i'm saying their not taking care of their snake correctly. I will say if your snake is eating and living a healthy life, you are doing a great job, there may be Wobblers that will always have the bad wobble, but also it may need extra accommodations beyond the normal to feel less stressed (ex. extra hide, more foliage, less direct light, ect). Yes, I am suggesting the 2 hide, water bowl, cookie cutter setup may not be right for every ball python in general and the Wobblers just shows it. I have talked this over with many people and online and I think it all comes to the same conclusion that it's near impossible to test this theory. Some people have stories that strengthen the theory and some have stories that 100% conflict with it. So take it as you wish. If you have any input on this feel free to contect me, it would be great to hear what you have to say.
Black Head x Spider
We have rescently found out that the Black Head gene appears to mask the wobble when paired with Spider. This doesn't cure the wobble, as Spider offspring will still have a wobble, but it is reported that Spider Black Head combos do not wobble. It is unknown if this works with any other morphs.
Sable x Spider
Along with the severe wobble issue, the Sable x Spider combo has issues even thriving in the first place.
Spider Champagne
t is reported that this combo does not live very long after hatching.
Pearl
Pearls that are alive display a sereve wobble and do not thrive for long. Known to be Lethal. However, there was a snake that is thought to be a Soulsucker Pearl (Homozygous Hidden Gene Woma, Heterozygous Lesser) that not only thrives, it displays no wobble at all. Hopefully there will be more information soon.
Super Champagne
So far two have been hatched and did not thrive very long at all. Appears to be homozygous lethal.
Super Spider
There was a long running debate about the Super Spider that can be concluded as being homozygous lethal, the explination gets its own page here.
Desert
There is significant evidence that Desert females are not able to produce viable eggs. There are many reports of females becoming egg bound and when they do lay, all slug eggs. One theory was that the females can not thermoregulate their eggs correctly and cook them. So a few have kept their females in a cooler cage in hopes of good eggs and so far they have all still laid slugs. Many are trying different methods to see if they can get the females to lay viable eggs, but so far have been unsucessful.
Caramel Albino
Caramel Albinos are known for having a very high kink rate. This means they can be born with a deformed spine. The kinks may or may not be an issue with the animal's ability to thrive. Also Caramel Albino Females are known for having what we call sub-fertility issues. They can lay viable eggs, just there seem to be extreamly high rate of slugs for many. Now with that said, I have talked to a few breeders who have zero issues with the morph on both accounts and claim they do not do anything out of the ordinary. Hopefully more information can come out about this gorgeous morph.
Super Cinnamon & Super Black Pastel
Super Cinnamons/Black Pastels sometimes have an issue called a duckbill. They can have a narrowed nose near their eyes, making the end of their nose look wider, giving the illision they have a bill. I have read of a few cases where the deformity was too great for the animal to eat, but most of the time, it does not seem to effect their eating or cause any other issues, they just look different. There are also reports of having a higher than normal kink rate, while it still appears to be pretty rare.
Super Lesser Platinum & Super Butter
Super Lesser Platinums/Butters are known for sometimes having bug eyes. All this means is their eye ball sticks out farther from their head than a normal ball python would. Besides looking different, there are no issues with the bug eyes.
Lesser Platinum x Piebald
It is repoted many Lesser Platinum x Piebald have smaller than normal eyes, it does not appear to affect them.
Banana & Coral Glow
Since it was proven by Warren Booth that pythons and boas have XY chromosomes, we can now explain what we see with the Banana/Coral Glow as a sex linked gene, that has frequent crossing over events.We’ll never have Paris here in New York. But we could have... if not for Aaron Burr.
The Manhattan we know today is laid out on a great rectilinear street grid conjured up two centuries ago: hundreds of parallel streets crossed at right angles by a dozen or so parallel avenues. Many grid users love its predictability, its rational, orderly power. Essayist Phillip Lopate calls the grid “a thing impossible to overpraise.”
The grid inspired Mondrian, thrilled Corbusier, and architect Rem Koolhaas pronounced it “the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization.”
Others see a dull, repetitive, unbeautiful, un-green, congestion-inducing act. Columbia’s Peter Marcuse: “one of the worst city plans of any major city in the developed countries of the world.”
Edgar Allan Poe was horrified: “In some thirty years every noble cliff will be a pier, and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous facades of brown-stone.” That was in 1844, when the grid plan had been reducing naturalistically varied Manhattan to a right-angled flatland.
But it would not have been that way if Joseph Francois Mangin had gotten his way.
In 1797, Mangin, a French-born surveyor-architect and protégé of Alexander Hamilton, got a contract (with a partner, Casimir Goerck, who soon died) from the city to make its first accurate map since the Revolution. New York then was a haphazard town of 60,000 people packed south of Chambers Street on mostly Colonial-era streets.
When another surveyor asked to have a look at Mangin’s progress, Mangin refused, with the incredible assertion that he was making “not the plan of the City such as it is, but such as it is to be.”
That wasn’t what Mangin had been hired to do. Nevertheless, when he presented his map — six feet square, handsomely engraved — to the city government in February 1803, it was immediately and officially considered “the New Map of this City.”
Mangin’s map — formally, the Mangin-Goerck plan — did two remarkable things. In the settled part of the city, Mangin straightened and widened streets and envisioned new ones on river landfill. Out in the country, up to what today is about 22nd Street, Mangin laid out a pastiche of grids, of varying densities, at acute angles to each other, sensitive to natural contours.
In the irregular meetings of the grid segments were countless opportunities for small parks, prominent buildings or other urban display and public space. It was a layered picture of order and ornament, urban function and natural form: the complexity and grace of a European capital adapted to the limits of a narrow island. It was, one might say, beautiful.
And it was not to be.
In late 1802, Mangin (with a partner) had won the design competition for what is our now landmark City Hall. Mangin was not supposed to win. English-born, Philadelphia-based and future “Father of American Architecture” Benjamin Latrobe was. His competition sponsor had guaranteed it. His sponsor was the dominant force in city politics and the nation’s vice president, Aaron Burr.
Mangin’s design was better, but Latrobe was furious, and Burr was vengeful. Conveniently, the city’s top (and only) street official was one Joseph Browne, recently appointed through the influence of Burr. Oh, and Browne was Burr’s brother-in-law and willing partner in a lifetime of schemes. By November 1803, after relentless trashing by Browne, Mangin’s “New Map of this City” was the discarded map of the future city.
Then, wistful, the city government realized that having a plan for the future was actually a good idea. A three-person commission was appointed in 1807, dominated by cranky Founding Father Gouverneur Morris, owner of the vast country estate that is now the Morrisania section of The Bronx. Morris was a practical man, who wanted “Convenience and Utility,” without “supposed Improvements by Circles, Ovals, and Stars.”
Morris got exactly what he wanted: “A City... to be composed principally of... strait sided and right-angled Houses [that] are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in.”
Adapted from “City on a Grid: How New York became New York” by Gerard Koeppel. Reprinted courtesy of Da Capo Press. Koeppel will appear at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Museum of the City of New York for a Q&A and book signing.Wood Group Wins 5 Year BP Deal
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Wood Group have won a five year contract with oil and gas supermajor BP that, worth a total $500 million and, and due to create around 200 jobs.
“Wood Group has a 40 year history of working with BP across their global assets and this new contract award is reflective of the strong relationship we maintain with this key client, built on collaboration and continued excellence and assurance in our service delivery.” said David Buchan, from Wood Group PSN.
Wood Group Wins 5 Year BP Deal
The contract will see Wood Group deliver engineering, procurement and construction management services (EPCM), across eight BP facilities offshore Azerbaijan.
The facilities include the Chirag platform; the Central Azeri Platform’s – Production Drilling Quarters, Compression and Water Processing; the East Azeri Platform’s Production Drilling Quarters; the West Azeri Platform’s – Production Drilling Quarters; the Deep Water Gunashli platform’s – Drilling & Utility Quarters, Pressure Compression and Water Utilities; and the Shah Deniz Stage 1.
This latest contract builds on Wood Group’s continued support of BP-operated projects offshore Azerbaijan.
Wood Group & BP
Wood Group Kenny is already providing subsea engineering services to these eight platforms under a multi-million dollar contract announced in October 2015, which also includes support of BP’s existing subsea infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico, UK and Norwegian continental shelves.
“Our focus is on leveraging our knowledge across this portfolio of assets and our expertise in engineering, procurement and construction, to ensure their efficient, effective and safe productivity.” continued Buchan.
“We are committed to hiring and developing local personnel, building partnerships and supporting supply chain companies in the communities where we operate.”
“This is reflected on this contract where more than 50 per cent of the workforce will be from the region with a focus on increasing local employment opportunities further, as the contract progresses.”Copyright © Subtropic Productions LLC
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Posts: 201 OfflineJoined: Sep 2009Posts: 201
Vinter said:
NirvashTypeM0E said:
for that money im sure mio could have bought some much superior sony headphones
AKG makes good stuff.
Unlike Sony, sound is all they do. Companies with focus are almost always higher quality then those who try to do everything.
Exception to confirm the rule are Yamaha keyboards. They're awesome. AKG makes good stuff.Unlike Sony, sound is all they do. Companies with focus are almost always higher quality then those who try to do everything.Exception to confirm the rule are Yamaha keyboards. They're awesome.
AKG have much more experience in acoustics than Sony and they are specialized in this category. AKG comes from Acoustics, Sony comes from Electronics, in terms of sound, music, AKG is above Sony. AKG have much more experience in acoustics than Sony and they are specialized in this category. AKG comes from Acoustics, Sony comes from Electronics, in terms of sound, music, AKG is above Sony. BBCodeJames Milner was delighted to see Liverpool show 'a different side' in battling to three points against Leicester City at Anfield.
The Reds came into this afternoon's fixture full of confidence having beaten Swansea City 5-0 on Boxing Day, but fell behind after just three minutes as Jamie Vardy ruthlessly punished a loose pass.
Mohamed Salah's brace turned the scoreline on its head in the second half, but the visitors refused to lie down, subjecting Jürgen Klopp's side to an aerial barrage aimed at Islam Slimani and Shinji Okazaki as time wore on.
And it is the manner in which the hosts dealt with that threat that made the three points particularly pleasing for Milner.
"We showed a different side today, which is pleasing, obviously," he told Liverpoolfc.com.
"You've seen it enough this year where we're attacking teams and playing good football but there are games in the Premier League where you have to dig in, grind it out.
"It was never going to be a free-flowing game. They're a good side, they're well organised, they've got some great defenders and a really good attitude as well so it was always going to be tough.
"But we kept patient, kept playing the right way, didn't get anxious, kept doing the right things and got the rewards.
"That's obviously taken a lot of effort today and showing that other side, the defensive side, the steel [against] long throw-ins, [like] Raggy [Klavan] with the late header and clearances from the six-yard box.
"You need that all through the season [and] especially this time of year; it's cold and windy and not that easy.
"[So we're] delighted with that result today, because it's a different sort of result to that we have been getting."
LFCTV GO: Watch the best of the Leicester clash
Liverpool's hectic festive schedule continues with a second game in just 48 hours when they face Burnley at Turf Moor on Monday.
Milner insists he would be happy to see another 'ugly' win in Lancashire, with points, not style, the priority during such a busy period.
"The amount of games, it's so important that you get results this time of year," he added.
"The league table changes so much because there are so many games in a short space of time so win at all costs, it doesn't matter how the results come.
"You want to play nice football and win 3-0 or 4-0, keep a clean sheet, and everyone say you've had a really good performance.
"But ultimately, nobody really cares as long as you get the three points, especially this time of year and we want to keep this momentum going."
The No.7 also took time to praise the Reds' goalscorer Salah.
In netting twice against Leicester, the Egyptian took his tally for the campaign to 23 - the most any Reds player has scored in a season prior to New Year.
Milner continued: "It's so impressive, what he's been doing and keeps doing. We have to keep giving him them chances and hopefully he'll keep putting them away.
"He's been brilliant for us [but] it's all the boys up there as well, he couldn't do it without [them].
"Bobby does so much unselfish work and is getting his goals as well, Phil putting the balls through, Sadio as well.
"We're lucky to have such good players but hopefully with Mo he can keep providing the goods."We are happy to announce the availability of the second BETA release of Sylius! This long-awaited release finalizes the core functionality of the platform and adds the foundations for plugin development.
This release of Sylius is based on the huge amount of feedback from the first BETA release back in December. Almost 400 people have joined our Slack and provided us with plenty of bug reports, feature requests and support questions, which resulted in a much more complete codebase and documentation.
It is a result of over 1750 commits from 30 contributors. So, what is new in this release?
Complete Admin REST API
Thanks to the work of Łukasz, Ania and other amazing contributors, our REST API for admins is much more complete and allows managing products, taxons and store configurations. It also enables the API client to perform a full checkout process on multiple channels. This opens exciting opportunities for integrations with other systems, like ERPs, CRMs, PIMs and more. What is more, this API can be consumed by any device.
But stay tuned, we are working on the official plugin, which also adds a dedicated Shop API, which will make the development of mobile eCommerce applications and progressive web apps a breeze! We hope to release its MVP in the coming weeks.
Plugins
One of our main areas of focus for this release was providing a foundation for plugin development. The reason is simple, we can’t have all the features and integrations in the core.
The biggest improvement is the new template events system, which will make upgrades much easier as you no longer need to override core templates to add something to the UI. If you like that feature, you should thank Grzesiu and Kamil!
Thanks to the fact that we are based on Symfony, which is the best PHP framework for web applications, we already had a powerful plugin system in place. We just needed to provide extension points in Sylius itself and document them. So far, you have the following extension points:
Template events, which allow you to modify the Sylius built-in interface with blocks;
You can provide traits, which extend the models;
You can override/decorate all services, including repositories;
You can use State Machine callbacks to customize the business logic;
You can hook into our HTTP events, to override/customize responses/redirects or intercept certain actions;
You can use events to modify menus;
You can reconfigure grids & routings;
And much more!
Sylius plugins are different from WordPress plugins or PrestaShop modules, they are not “click to install”. They are Composer packages & Symfony bundles, which you install like and other library in your project. You can read more in our official plugin development guide and we will be following-up with blog posts and tutorials.
Documentation
Magda has been continuing her amazing work on our documentation, which consists of the following parts:
The Book, which will teach you about Sylius’ architecture, installation process and core concepts, like Product Catalog, Taxation, Shipping, Promotions and more;
The Customization Guide, which describes the process of modifying Sylius core, extending it with new features both in your project and a plugin;
The REST API Reference, which covers all the available endpoints, request & response formats for the admin API;
The Cookbook, which contains concrete solutions to concrete problems, wondering “How to send a custom e-mail”? That’s the place to look for an answer;
The Behat Guide, which documents our BDD approach and way of using Behat;
Symfony Bundles & PHP Components, which covers our standalone packages;
The Contribution Guide, which will get you up to speed with our internal development process;
We hope that all this work will help you in building your next eCommerce application with Sylius! 😉
Other Major Improvements & New Features
We have been working hard on completing the core feature set and improving the DX of Sylius!
YARN instead of NPM
Due to performance reasons and lack of version locking mechanism, we switched to Yarn for the frontend package management. Don’t worry, your package.json and Gulp files will still work.
Fully Translatable Product Catalog
We have completed the work on making the catalog translatable, and now all related data can be translated to multiple languages. That now also includes product attributes and associations. For proper SEO, the locale code has been added to the shop URLs.
Sorting in Admin
You can now sort shipping methods, taxons and products within taxons from the admin panel. This has been a much requested feature and now it is available for core entities. Can also be easily added to your custom models.
Race Conditions
We have also added mechanism to prevent various race conditions in the checkout process and inventory. This solution is quite generic and can be used in your custom code as well.
Optimization & Autocompletes
All admin pages, which use taxons or products have been equipped with autocompletes, which prevent from too much data being loaded, hence allowing for larger product catalogs. We have also taken time to optimize the most important queries, which will result in much better performance. Arek and Jasiek have been working hard on this. Oh, did I mention we now have the ajax tree view for taxons?
UI Configuration for Payment Gateways
Thanks to the work of Mateusz & Maksim from Payum, you now can configure the gateways in the admin panel, without the need to redeploy the application. Also, the configurations are encrypted for security reasons.
BC Policy & Upgrades
No breaking changes will be done since this release, unless absolutely necessary. This applies (contrary to the previous BETA release) to all levels of the Sylius cake, including the REST API.
Only critical bugs or security issues will be considered valid reasons for breaking the BC and everything will be documented in the UPGRADE file.
Demo
You can access our online demo here. Give it a try and let us know what do you think!
Installation
You can install and try the latest Sylius by running the following commands:
$ composer create-project -s beta sylius/sylius-standard project $ cd project $ yarn install $ yarn run gulp $ bin/console sylius:install $ bin/console server:start $ open http://127.0.0.1:8000
Feedback & Support
We need your feedback. Our Slack & Facebook Group are growing and there are more and more questions on StackOverflow, which is a tremendous amount of learning for us. If you want to work with Sylius, make sure to join us there!
What is Next?
We are starting a new project called Wild Bug Hunt, which aims to identify and fix as many bugs as possible during this BETA period. As soon as we identify and fix enough critical issues and bugs, we can declare Sylius stable! Your help is needed now more than ever! 😉
Thank You!
Big thanks to the Sylius dev team and also to all contributors. Every issue, bug report, feature request is super important to us. There is plenty of new people in the community, patching small typos and bugs. Our daily installations have doubled, which means there is a lot of projects in the works, keep up the good work guys! We will make sure to give you the best eCommerce framework in the world! 🙂 See you on GitHub!By Maurice Obstfeld, Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, and Rabah Arezki
Versions in عربي (Arabic), 中文 (Chinese), Français (French),
日本語 (Japanese), Русский (Russian), Español (Spanish)
Oil prices have been persistently low for well over a year and a half now, but as the April 2016 World Economic Outlook will document, the widely anticipated “shot in the arm” for the global economy has yet to materialize. We argue that, paradoxically, global benefits from low prices will likely appear only after prices have recovered somewhat, and advanced economies have made more progress surmounting the current low interest rate environment.
Since June 2014 oil prices have dropped about 65 percent in U.S. dollar terms (about $70) as growth has progressively slowed across a broad range of countries. Even taking into account the 20 percent dollar appreciation during this period (in nominal effective terms), the decline in oil prices in local currency has been on average over $60. This outcome has puzzled many observers including us at the Fund, who had believed that oil-price declines would be a net plus for the world economy, obviously hurting exporters but delivering more-than-offsetting gains to importers. The key assumption behind that belief is a specific difference in saving behavior between oil importers and oil exporters: consumers in oil importing regions such as Europe have a higher marginal propensity to consume out of income than those in exporters such as Saudi Arabia.
World equity markets have clearly not subscribed to this theory. Over the past six months or more, equity markets have tended to fall when oil prices fall—not what we would expect if lower oil prices help the world economy on balance. Indeed, since August 2015 the simple correlation between equity and oil prices has not only been positive (Chart 1), it has doubled in comparison to an earlier period starting in August 2014 (though not to an unprecedented level).
Past episodes of sharp changes in oil prices have tended to have visible countercyclical effects—for example, slower world growth after big increases. Is this time different? Several factors affect the relation between oil prices and growth, but we will argue that a big difference from previous episodes is that many advanced economies have nominal interest rates at or near zero.
Supply versus demand
One obvious problem in predicting the effects of oil-price movements is that a fall in the world price can result either from an increase in global supply or a decrease in global demand. But in the latter case, we would expect to see exactly the same pattern as in recent quarters—falling prices accompanied by slowing global growth, with lower oil prices cushioning, but likely not reversing, the growth slowdown.
Slowing demand is no doubt part of the story, but the evidence suggests that increased supply is at least as important. More generally, oil supply has been strong owing to record high output from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) including, now, exports from Iran, as well as from some non-OPEC countries. In addition, the U.S. supply of shale oil initially proved surprisingly resilient in the face of lower prices. Chart 2 shows how OPEC output has recently continued to grow as prices have fallen, unlike in some previous cycles.
Moreover, even in the United States, a net oil importer where demand has been fairly strong, cheap oil seems not to have given a substantial fillip to growth. Econometric and other studies suggest that only part of the recent decline in oil is due to slowing demand—somewhere between a half and a third—with the balance accounted for by increasing supply.
So there remains a puzzle: where in the world can the positive effects of lower oil prices be seen?
To address this question, the forthcoming April 2016 World Economic Outlook compares 2015 domestic demand growth in oil importers and oil exporters to what we expected in April 2015—after the first substantial decline in oil prices. The lion’s share of the downward revision for global demand comes from oil exporters—despite their relatively small share of global GDP (about 12 percent). But domestic demand in oil importers was also no better than we had forecast, despite a fall in oil prices that was bigger than anticipated.
Understanding why the naked eye cannot detect positive spending effects requires a closer look at the composition of demand in oil exporters and importers.
Domestic demand in oil exporters
In 2015, domestic demand in oil exporters was indeed much weaker than we had forecast a year before. This negative surprise reflected both weaker consumption and especially weaker investment. Rich oil exporters can draw on their reserves or sovereign wealth |
there’s a certain aggression under the surface—a sense that they aren’t just defending their territory, but that atheist voices are dangerous wherever they are heard. To the extent that they believe atheists have usurped part of the public forum, the aggression in responses intensifies.
So, I'll have to agree with my critics that there really isn't an unassailable answer to the original question, at least the way I phrased it. Lack of "reason and tolerance" is a problem for both sides, and in retrospect I don't think "reason" or "tolerance" are defining elements of the debate. In such a heated battle, both of those elements get tossed aside so frequently that we may as well call it a wash. Don't get me wrong -- plenty of individual debaters are more reasonable and more tolerant than their counterparts, but those instances are peppered across a sea of bile.
Probably more interesting, and definitely more entertaining, than those observations are the responses I personally received for even asking the question. Here are a few (shortened for sake of post length):
“Why would you ask such a breathtakingly stupid question?”
“Nice troll.”
“You’re basically trying to create a Jerry Springer episode.”
“Who cares? Whoever said tolerance was a virtue?”
“This is the sort of question asked by morons for morons to answer.”
“Are you kidding? Why ask such a dumb question?”
More importantly, I’d like to point out that the question did generate some great discussion in the comments section of the original post. Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond and provide genuinely interesting feedback.Editor's note: Roland Martin is a syndicated columnist and author of "The First: President Barack Obama's Road to the White House." He is a commentator for the TV One cable network and host/managing editor of its Sunday morning news show, "Washington Watch with Roland Martin."
(CNN) -- While a lot of the focus after Thursday's Republican debate was on Newt Gingrich snapping at Fox News Channel's Chris Wallace for asking "gotcha" and "Mickey Mouse" questions, what I found the most offensive one of the night was Byron York questioning Rep. Michelle Bachmann with regards to submission.
As someone who didn't find the sexism in the Newsweek cover photo flap, I believe there is no doubt that the reason York only questioned Bachmann on submission had everything to do with her gender.
York's question was: "In 2006, when you were running for Congress, you described a moment in your life when your husband said you should study for a degree in tax law. You said you hated the idea. And then you explained, "But the Lord said, 'Be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands.' "
"As president, would you be submissive to your husband?"
Bachmann answered, in part: "Marcus and I will be married for 33 years this September 10th. I'm in love with him. I'm so proud of him. And both he and I -- what submission means to us, if that's what your question is, it means respect.
"I respect my husband. He's a wonderful, godly man, and a great father. And he respects me as his wife."
Belief Blog: Bachmann faces theological question
Some of my Twitter and Facebook followers say the question was appropriate because Bachmann has touted her Christian faith throughout her presidential run, and has spoken publicly about submitting to her husband.
Yet former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum tried his best to imitate former GOP presidential candidate, the Rev. Pat Robertson, and no one questioned him specifically about whether he loves his wife like Christ loved the church (that's in the same section of Ephesians 5 as Scripture discussing wives submitting to their husband).
Gov. Rick Perry just held a large prayer rally. Will he be questioned specifically about tenets of his faith? Will Herman Cain be asked whether he curses (the Bible speaks to that)?
When we look at many of the vital issues facing this country -- a rough economy, massive unemployment, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a continuing battle against terrorism, a fierce climate change debate, and a battle to get the nation's debt under control -- who in their right mind would waste time during a nationally-televised debate asking the only female GOP candidate about whether she would submit to her husband in the White House?
From a religious standpoint, I understand and get submission, even writing about it in my book, "Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith."
For me, submission begins with me as a husband. When my wife knows that I'm willing to seek God's direction for my life, she knows that I'm not making crazy decisions. So she is willing to trust my judgment on various matters. And in doing so, I'm willing to trust that God has put me with the right woman, and I can trust her decisions, and that she will do what's best for both of us. This has nothing to do with losing your own mind as a woman. It is about following what Ephesians 5:21 says: "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ."
It really is an issue that has to be fully explained to people and not taken as, "I tell you what to do, and you follow what I say."
That seems to be what York was trying to insinuate. The notion of submission can be seen in many different forms. Already, Bachmann is taking heat because she sees submission as respect. One of the best books I've read on the topic is P.B. Wilson's "Liberated Through Submission: God's Design for Freedom in All Relationships." If you desire to learn more on the issue, by all means, read, study, and listen. But don't think for a second you can fully address the issue in a presidential debate with others on the stage.
But the most important thing that folks must accept is that submission is a personal part of someone's faith. If York was trying to get at whether Bachmann would follow the advice of her husband on all matters, he needs to understand that if she was president, that role is her job. And on her job, she has final say-so. The only oath that a president is sworn to uphold is the one in the U.S. Constitution.
I don't think for a second that a woman questioner would ask such a question in a presidential debate.
What York and others must understand that if you're unwilling to question a man about tenets of his faith, then don't have a different standard for a female candidate.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roland S. Martin.OTTAWA – Via Rail Canada Inc. is looking for funding in the March 22 federal budget for a new fleet of cars costing upwards of $1.3 billion that would go with a dedicated Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal passenger rail corridor that could be operational in fall 2019 with the government’s blessing.
Via chief executive Yves Desjardins-Siciliano told the Ottawa Citizen the rail carrier also wants the federal government to allow it to proceed with plans to have large pension funds invest in the $2-billion construction of the corridor, a move that requires a cabinet order.
Any budget dollars for a new fleet of Via cars for the corridor could be a potential boon to Bombardier Inc., which is looking for some federal financial aid and whose rail division could produce the passenger trains the Crown corporation wants.
Channelling federal dollars and powers to separate freight and passenger rail networks to allow for a dedicated Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto corridor was a key recommendation from a sweeping review of Canada’s transportation system, was tabled last week by the Liberal government.
On Monday, Desjardins-Siciliano said Via’s hopes for a dedicated passenger rail corridor fits nicely with the Liberal government’s plans to invest billions of dollars in large infrastructure projects that generate jobs, long-term economic growth and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“We believe it is a transformational project and it certainly meets a lot of the policy objectives we’ve been hearing about from the new government,” Desjardins-Siciliano said in a phone interview.
Via’s present operations in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor continue to be hampered by slow speeds and limited access to track that is owned by Canadian National Railway Co., whose freight trains run on the same track and are given priority over passenger rail. Via uses CN’s track for much of its service and also pays CN and Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. for track access.
“It’s an economic absurdity that we’re asking a privately funded operation to agree with it, so that’s why the time has come to make both freight and passenger railways more efficient in their operations. And the only way to make them efficient is to uncouple them,” he said.
The Crown corporation is targeting large public sector pension funds for the approximately $2 billion it would cost to build the track and signalling infrastructure for a dedicated Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal passenger rail network.
Via is looking for the new Liberal government to announce funding in the budget for a rolling stock renewal of its rail cars in the corridor, which is a 1970s fleet undergoing its third refurbishment.
A renewed stock of diesel cars, like those currently in use, would cost just over $1 billion, while electric cars would cost approximately $1.3 billion.
Should the federal government proceed with the electric option, another $850 million would be added to the cost for an electrical infrastructure grid, bringing the total project price tag to around $4 billion.
“We’re hoping that fleet will be renewed earlier rather than later because cars are coming to end of life over the next decade,” Desjardins-Siciliano said.
He assumes the federal government would invest in the electric project over the diesel option because of its focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Via would repurpose existing rail beds or rail lines in a corridor that is already secured.
Via would put the rail cars out to tender if it snares federal funding, potentially a huge opportunity for battered Bombardier, which is looking to the Liberal government for help.
Federal Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi and Transport Minister Marc Garneau were unavailable for comment Monday.
Should Via get a federal funding commitment for rail cars, it would be the impetus for the carrier to go to the markets and solicit investment from pension funds for track infrastructure.
“A decision now means we would build in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and it would be ready by summer or fall 2019,” Desjardins-Siciliano said.
A dedicated track for Via would substantially increase speeds and reduce travel times between stops, something the Crown corporation believes would help dramatically increase ridership.
Currently, Via’s average speed in the shared corridor is 103 kilometres per hour, but a dedicated track for passenger rail would see the average speed increase to between 145 km/h and 153 km/h, with a top speed of 177 km/h, Desjardins-Siciliano said.
Via expects a dedicated track in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor could increase its annual passenger load from 2.1 million, currently, to 6.8 million within 15 years.
Via’s status as a Crown corporation currently forbids it from borrowing or raising capital. However, it would simply need a cabinet order to proceed with plans to have public pension plans invest in the dedicated passenger corridor.
In return for their investment, the pension funds would receive a minority stake in a separate Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal unit of Via, with the federal government retaining majority control.
Via expects the route would turn a profit and ultimately eliminate the taxpayer-funded subsidy for the railway’s operations in the corridor.
The current total annual operating subsidy of Via Rail is $234 million, with the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor representing about $130 million of that. Eliminating the subsidy for the route would reduce Via’s total annual operating deficit to just over $100 million.
“It’s also a way to dig ourselves out of a growing operating deficit that is a drain on the public purse,” Desjardins-Siciliano said.
Via is also touting the potential economic and environmental benefits that would come from the proposed project, which would make it an attractive option for the Liberal government.
The railway expects construction would represent 26,000 person-years of work for a build-out over three construction seasons.
As well, Via says the greater mobility of people would generate broader “economic velocity” in the corridor, which would ultimately contribute to nearly 300,000 jobs being created.
It’s estimated about 10.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide would be eliminated by moving five million car trips a year to the rail network.
Ottawa Citizen
jfekete@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/jasonfekete¶There are new restrictions on when card companies can increase the interest rate on balances you’ve already run up. The bill says that banks generally must wait until you’re 60 days late in making the minimum payment before applying a penalty interest rate to your existing debt.
While an earlier bill in the House of Representatives suggested less strict rules, House members have agreed to adopt the Senate version and intend to vote on it on Wednesday. On Tuesday, senators voted 90-5 in favor of the measure.
¶Card companies will have to give 45 days’ notice before raising their interest rates. There’s also a notice requirement for any significant change to a card’s terms, which may keep companies from surprising customers who have been saving their loyalty points for years with huge alterations in rewards programs.
¶Banks must send out your bill no later than 21 days before the due date. They cannot send it with, say, 14 days to go, hoping that you won’t get a check to the bank in time to avoid a late fee.
¶If the card company gets your payment by 5 p.m. on the due date, it’s on time, according to the new rules. No more of this early morning deadline nonsense, which led to late fees for payments that arrived with the afternoon mail. Also, no more late fees if the due date is a Sunday or holiday and your payment doesn’t arrive until a day later.
¶Let’s say you’re paying different interest rates on the debt on a single card — one for a cash advance, another for a balance transfer and a third for new purchases. Now, when you make a payment over the minimum balance, banks will have to apply it to the highest-interest debt first. I bet you can guess how some banks used to handle this sort of situation.
¶Banks will need your permission before allowing you the “privilege” of spending more than your credit limit and paying a fat $39 fee for that privilege. The card companies should be ashamed that they needed a law to make this “opt in” requirement a reality.
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¶If you’re a student, it will become harder to get a credit card. No one under 21 can have a card unless a parent, legal guardian or spouse is the primary cardholder. Students with their own income can submit proof and ask for an exception to the co-signer requirement.
The senators, in an apparent endorsement of helicopter parenting, also require written permission from the parent, guardian or spousal co-signer for any increase in a card’s credit line. You can read all the gory details through links to the Senate bill.
¶Hate gift cards? Me, too. There will be some helpful new rules regarding those absurd dormancy fees, which punish people who let the cards sit around before using them.
Under the Senate’s rule, retailers and others that issue Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover gift cards or certificates will have to print explicit dormancy fee information on the card. Sellers of the cards will also have to inform the buyer of the fee. That’s a smart twist, since the gift giver can then become aware of the noxious nature of the fee — and elect to give cash or some other gift.
The bill also bans expiration dates on gift cards and certificates any sooner than five years after the card’s original issue date. And the retailer or card issuer will have to print the terms of any expiration date in capital letters in at least 10-point type. Call it the fine print rule.
It will be fascinating to see which retailer or card issuer has the nerve, after having free use of your money for five years, to tell you it will lose the money altogether if you don’t use up their gift card. I dare them to try.
So will credit card companies kill reward programs or drastically scale most of them back? Of course not.
“If you strip away the reward component of a credit card, it’s essentially a commodity,” said Rick Ferguson, editorial director at the loyalty marketing company LoyaltyOne. “The reward is what gives it its personality. It works from a branding perspective as well as a mechanism to influence customer behavior and consolidate spending on a particular card.”
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That last part is crucial. People who spend a ton generate fees galore from merchants, and that money helps the card company stay in business. So you may soon see card companies giving away more goodies or lowering annual fees for people who hit certain spending thresholds each year. American Express already does this on a number of cards.
Also, keep in mind that you may have more control over what the card companies do to you than you may think.
If you don’t like the new fees and other things that banks will soon be testing as they grapple with their new economic reality, then make some noise. Send a note to me at rlieber@nytimes.com, so I can write about the latest foolishness — or consumer-friendly twist. At the very least, all of our complaints to the higher-ups at the banks may help persuade the companies to head in another direction.
“Work your way up the chain,” said Dennis C. Moroney, research director for bank cards at TowerGroup, a MasterCard-owned financial services consultant. After all, it may cost less to appease you than it would to replace you.A few days ago, LT Joe Thomas was the only member of the Cleveland Browns to be named to the AP's 2014 NFL All-Pro team. Today, Pro Football Focus unveiled their All-Pro team for the 2014 season, and Thomas only received an honorable mention. Fear not, though, as the Browns weren't shut out: rookie LG Joel Bitonio was labeled as one of their first-team All-Pros:
It’s not often a rookie linemen will swoop in and earn a first-team spot, but the excellent Bitonio was just that guy. He proved to be a home run hit from Week 1 and a legit Offensive Rookie of the Year contender.
Thomas was likely an early favorite to make PFF's first-team list, but his end-of-the-performance slide, as little as it may have been, allowed Jason Peters and Andrew Whitworth to pass him up:
It hurts to leave one out after Peters as Whitworth and Joe Thomas all had remarkable years. In the end, Thomas slowed at the end of the season and that allowed Peters (the most impactful run blocker) and Whitworth (who allowed just nine hurries all year) to win out.
On the defensive side of the ball, the only player who even receiver a mention was Tashaun Gipson, who received an honorable mention at the safety position.Life, the Universe and Everything (1982, ISBN 0-345-39182-9) is the third book in the five-volume Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy science fiction trilogy by British writer Douglas Adams. The title refers to the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The story was originally outlined by Adams as Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen to be a Tom Baker Doctor Who television six-part story, but was rejected by the BBC.[1] It was later considered as a plotline for the second series of the Hitchhiker's TV series, which was never commissioned.
A radio adaptation of Life, the Universe and Everything was recorded in 2003 under the guidance of Dirk Maggs, starring the surviving members of the cast of the original Hitchhiker's radio series. Adams himself, at his own suggestion, makes a cameo appearance; due to his death before production began on the series, this was achieved by sampling his character's dialogue from an audio book of the novel read by Adams that was published in the 1990s. The radio adaptation debuted on BBC Radio 4 in September 2004.
Plot summary [ edit ]
After being stranded on pre-historic Earth after the events in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent is met by his old friend Ford Prefect, who drags him into a space-time eddy, represented by an anachronistic sofa. The two end up at Lord's Cricket Ground two days before the Earth's destruction by the Vogons. Shortly after they arrive, a squad of robots land in a spaceship in the middle of the field and attack the assembled crowd, stealing The Ashes before departing. Another spaceship arrives, the Starship Bistromath, helmed by Slartibartfast, who discovers he is too late and requests Arthur and Ford's help.
As they travel to their next destination, Slartibartfast explains that he is trying to stop the robots from collecting all the components of the Wikkit Gate. Long ago, the peaceful population of the planet of Krikkit, unaware of the rest of the Universe due to a dust cloud that surrounded its solar system, were surprised to find the wreckage of a spacecraft on their planet. Reverse engineering the vessel, they explored past the dust cloud and saw the rest of the Universe, immediately taking a disliking to it and determining it must go. They built a fleet of ships and robots to attack the rest of the Universe in a brutal onslaught known as the Krikkit Wars, but were eventually defeated. Realizing that the Krikkit population would not be satisfied alongside the existence of the rest of the Universe, it was decided to envelop the system in a Slo-Time envelope, allowing Krikkit to survive long after the rest of the universe has ended; the Wikkit Gate was the key to the envelope. (This also explains why Earth is ignored by the rest of the galaxy; any species that would turn a memory of a horrific war into a sport isn't worth bothering with.) However, one ship carrying a troop of robots from Krikkit avoided the Slo-Time envelope, and these robots began to retrieve the pieces of the Gate after they were dispersed about space and time.
Slartibartfast, Arthur, and Ford transport to an airborne party that has lasted numerous generations where another Gate component, the Silver Bail, is to be found, but Arthur finds himself separated from the others and ends up at a Cathedral of Hate created by a being called Agrajag. Agrajag reveals that Arthur has killed him countless times before, each time reincarnating into a new form that is soon killed by Arthur, and now plans to kill Arthur in revenge. However, when he realizes that Arthur has yet to cause his death at a place called Stavromula Beta, Agrajag discovered he took Arthur out of his relative timeline too soon and that killing him now would cause a paradox, but attempts to kill Arthur anyway. In his insanity, Agrajag brings the Cathedral down around them. Arthur manages to escape unharmed, partially due to learning how to fly after falling and missing the ground while catching sight of a piece of luggage he had lost at a Greek airport years before. After collecting the suitcase, Arthur inadvertently comes across the flying party and rejoins his friends. Inside, they find Trillian, but they are too late to stop the robots from stealing the Bail. Arthur, Ford, Trillian, and Slartibartfast return to the Bistromath and try to head off the robots activating the Wikkit Gate.
Meanwhile, the Krikkit robots steal the last piece, the Infinite Improbability Drive core from the spaceship Heart of Gold, capturing Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android at the same time.
The Bistromath arrives too late at the gate to stop the robots, so its occupants transport to the planet to attempt to negotiate with the Krikkit people. To their surprise, they find that the people seem to lack any desire to continue the war, and are directed to the robot and spaceship facilities in orbit about the planet. With Zaphod and Marvin's help, the group is able to infiltrate the facilities. Trillian deduces that the Krikkiters have been manipulated, reasoning that the people of Krikkit could not simultaneously be smart enough to develop their ultimate weapon—a bomb that could destroy every star in the universe—while also being stupid enough not to realize that this weapon would also destroy them.
The characters discover that the true force behind the war has been the supercomputer Hactar. Previously built to serve a war-faring species, Hactar was tasked to build a supernova-bomb that would link the cores of every sun in the Universe together at the press of a button and cause the end of the Universe. Hactar purposely created a dud version of the weapon instead, causing his creators to pulverize him into dust, which thus became the dust cloud around Krikkit. However, Hactar was still able to function, though at a much weaker level. Trillian and Arthur speak to Hactar in a virtual space that he creates for them to explain himself. Hactar reveals that he spent eons creating the spaceship that crashed on Krikkit to inspire their xenophobia and incite them to go to war, also influencing their thoughts. However, when the Slo-Time envelope was activated, his control on the population waned. As he struggles to remain functional, Hactar apologizes to Trillian and Arthur for his actions before they leave for their ship.
With the war over, the group collects the core of the Heart of Gold and the Ashes, the only two components of the Wikkit Gate not destroyed by the robots, and returns Zaphod and Marvin to the Heart of Gold. Returning only moments after the robots' attack at the Lord's Cricket Ground, Arthur attempts to return the Ashes, but is suddenly inspired to bowl one shot at a wicket that is being defended using a cricket ball in his bag. However, in mid-throw, Arthur suddenly realizes that the ball he had was created and placed in his bag by Hactar and is actually the working version of the cosmic-supernova-bomb, and that the defender of the wicket is one of the Krikkit robots, ready to detonate the bomb once thrown, all this causing him to trip, miss the ground, and allow him to fly. Arthur is able to throw the ball aside and disable the robot in mid-swoop.
In the epilogue the characters are taking Arthur to a 'quiet and idyllic planet' when they come across a half-mad journalist. He tells them that he was at a court case and a witness there was given too much of a truth drug and started to tell all truth, which was driving everybody there mad. They go to the courtroom in the hope of learning the question of Life, the Universe and Everything from him. They discover he is finished (there was little truth to tell) and he has forgotten it all, except that knowledge of the Ultimate Question and Ultimate Answer is mutually exclusive. He then attempts to tell Arthur where God's last message to His creation is, though dies seemingly before Arthur is able to memorize the location.
In the end Arthur goes to live on the planet Krikkit where he becomes a more skillful flier and learns bird language.
Origins [ edit ]
The creation of Krikkit originally comes from Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, a film treatment of the Doctor Who series. The treatment did not get far and was eventually scrapped. Elements of Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen were put into Life, the Universe and Everything.[2] According to Nick Webb, the writer of Adams's official biography, he claimed that "Douglas's view of the Krikkitmen would be similar to his view of people who resolutely decline to learn what science can tell us about the universe we inhabit."[3]
References to the sport of cricket [ edit ]
Several of the names and items in the story are references to (or puns on) terms associated with the sport of cricket, with the effect that the sport is jokingly portrayed as having cosmic antiquity and significance. These include the name of the sport itself ("Krikkit"), the wicket with its three pillars and two bails, the ball, and The Ashes.
Censorship [ edit ]
This book is the only one in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series to have been censored in its US edition.[4] The word "asshole" is replaced with the word "kneebiter", and the word "shit" is replaced with "swut". Possibly the most famous example of censorship is in Chapter 22, in which the UK edition mentions that the "Rory" is an award for "The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word 'Fuck' in a Serious Screenplay". In the US edition, this was changed to "Belgium"[5] and the text from the original radio series described "Belgium" as the most offensive word used in the galaxy.[citation needed]
Audiobook adaptations [ edit ]
There have been three audiobook recordings of the novel. The first was an abridged edition, recorded in 1984 by Stephen Moore, best known for playing the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android in the radio series, LP adaptations and in the TV series. In 1990, Adams himself recorded an unabridged edition, later re-released by New Millennium Audio in the United States and available from BBC Audiobooks in the United Kingdom. In 2006, actor Martin Freeman, who had played Arthur Dent in the 2005 movie, recorded a new unabridged edition of the audiobook. Stephen Moore and Douglas Adams used the uncensored UK edition of the text, while both the censored and uncensored versions of the book are available read by Freeman, depending on where they are purchased.Over the past couple of days, several people have reached out to me, asking about whether the JioPhone, the much awaited 4G feature phone announced by Reliance Jio, violates Net Neutrality or not. Two financial research entities (Deutsche Bank and Kotak), have already flagged Net Neutrality concerns, but to be honest, I don’t know if there’s cause for concern just yet.
This is because we don’t have enough information on the phone and how JioPhone(s) may or may not limit users. From an applications and services (i.e. content) perspective, we know that a Rs 153 recharge pack for JioPhone gives user unlimited data, free voice/video calls and a subscription to Jio apps. What we don’t know is whether other applications will be allowed on it or not, whether users can download and run apps from the open Internet, or whether users will be able to flash the ROM and install another operating system and the data plan remains valid. There are unconfirmed reports about an applications store from Jio, who’s Operating System is based on KaiOS (a fork of the Firefox OS) but we don’t know how this will function.
Net Neutrality from a Network perspective
Net Neutrality mandates that networks don’t give a competitive advantage to any particular user: As Prof Ajay Shah pointed out, networks are meant to be exchanges of data, and trust in the functioning of the network remains as long as they remain neutral. Thus, the network must not discriminate.
From a pricing perspective, this is covered with the first part of TRAI’s Differential Pricing ruling (pdf), which states that “No service provider shall offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of content”.
That is clearly not happening in this case, because this tariff is for the device and not the content.
Net Neutrality from a devices perspective
The TRAI’s order also states that “no service provider shall enter into any arrangement, agreement or contract, by whatever name called, with any person, natural or legal, that has the effect of discriminatory tariffs for data services being offered or charged to the consumer on the basis of content.”
Essentially, it means that you cannot do indirectly what you can’t do directly: Limiting a plan to a device that limits content to a specific set determined by Jio would not be allowed, because it would have the same effect as discriminatory tariffs for data services, and would be in violation of the TRAI order.
The only exception to this is in case of a Closed Electronic Communications Network (CECN), in a manner that the services offered are not for the purpose of evading the restriction. Thus Jio will not be able to mirror its online services in a closed electronic communications network, because the same principle (you cannot do indirectly what you can do directly) would be applicable.
It would be unexpected of them to do this, incidentally. In Jio’s Net Neutrality filing earlier this year, it had suggested the following practices to the TRAI as “Non reasonable practices”:
– Throttling of speed of services offered by a competing operator.
– Blanket filters on some kinds of content (say gaming content)
– Giving differential access to applications, content or services to CDN or cache facilities and thereby throttling them
– Blocking or termination practices that are applied at the transit node without user choice.
Only allowing certain apps on a device locked to a network would mean that there’s differential access given to the apps. However, this was only for networks, and not devices.
If they take the indirect approach of differential access/pricing, it will test the TRAI’s resolve to enforce its regulation.
While you’re here, do watch this great testimony by Jason Devitt, especially point two of the last three points he makes.
Questions for Jio
We’ve sent Jio the following questions:
1. Does the JioPhone (or any of the JioPhone models) restrict users to Jio apps only?
2. Does the JioPhone (or any of the JioPhone models) restrict apps on the phone to apps approved by Jio only?
3. Does the JioPhone (or any of the JioPhone models) restrict downloading or installation of apps from the open Internet?
4. Does the bundling plan for JioPhone (or any of the JioPhone models) place any restrictions on a user installing any other operating system on the device?
Jio’s position, historically, has been anti-Net Neutrality
Earlier this year, Jio pitched for Net Neutrality violating principles such as “same service same rule principle”, and “acceptance of specialised and managed services on the same physical broadband medium”, as well as exceptions for enterprise, customer care and financial services, and for looking at Net Neutrality violations on case-by-case basis, even though that would increase compliance costs, and create uncertainty. More on this here.
In 2015, it had been decidedly regressive in its approach: wanting registration for all Internet apps and services, zero rating, price prioritisation for India based OTT apps, as well as differential pricing of content. More on this here.
*
Note: I was a co-founder of the SaveTheInternet campaign for Net Neutrality in India. I’m also a co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation.We are deeply saddened to announce that Ilpo Martikainen, the founder of Genelec and a true pioneer in active audio monitoring has passed away yesterday January 30th 2017, at the age of 69 after struggling with a long-term illness.
During the recent years, Ilpo focused on involving the next generation. His children Juho Martikainen, Mikko Martikainen and Maria Martikainen have grown up as part of the Genelec family. They have been closely involved in developing the company into the leading global brand in active audio monitoring as members of the Genelec Board since 2001. The children will continue in ownership of Genelec together with the other board members Topi Partanen and Ritva Leinonen who have made their lifework with Genelec. Ritva Leinonen continues as the Chairperson of Genelec Board.
We warmly thank Ilpo’s family for supporting him in being an essential part of our lives and journey too. We hope the whole audio and music industry will join us in extending thoughts and prayers to his family.
Even if we greatly miss Ilpo we are privileged and grateful to share in the wonderful memories, passion, humanistic values, love and evolution of the Genelec story that we have experienced with Ilpo. This keeps his memory living in our hearts and deeds. He will continue to live on, through us.
Siamäk Naghian
Managing Director
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During this holiday season, Americans should be grateful for many things, but there is nothing to be thankful for from Conservatives, and especially Republicans. In their attempt to obstruct the Obama Administration and elevate corporations to the ruling class, Republicans are not helping to provide jobs, adequate wages, homes, medical care, or safety nets for older, unemployed or infirmed Americans.
Like the Obama Administration, Liberal groups, and Secular Humanists, Franklin Delano Roosevelt believed that Americans deserved security in their lives, and worked tirelessly to provide the very things that today’s Republicans obstruct and deny for citizens. Republicans fought tooth and nail to stop Social Security for older citizens and it is no different today. Republicans propose the hideous idea that health care, unemployment protection, a living wage, and economic protection are privileges and not an inherent right for being an American citizen.
Roosevelt believed otherwise so strongly, that he proposed a Second Bill of Rights in 1944, and as is happening today, Republicans obstructed and rejected his efforts for no other reason than to favor the corporate and industrial giants so they could continue reaping obscene profits at the expense of hard working Americans.
President Roosevelt’s 2nd Bill of Rights was a simple, five point proposition that every American should support and benefit from. However, like we see today, Republicans manipulated the narrative to block Roosevelt’s efforts at providing security for the working class, poor, and infirmed. As history often reminds us, some things never change, and Republicans never stopped punishing working Americans so the wealthy can prosper.
In the 2nd Bill of Rights, FDR proposed that every American has the right to:
1 A job.
2 An Adequate wage and decent living.
3 A decent home.
4 Medical care.
5 Economic protection during sickness, accident, old age or unemployment.
These five items seem like a no-brainer, and as FDR proposed, seem perfectly acceptable in the richest nation in the world then, and now. Republicans in 1944 didn’t think Americans deserved these rights, and in 2010, Republicans still don’t believe every American deserves any of FDR’s proposed rights.
Republicans have blocked jobs bills because they were supported by President Obama, and in fact, also blocked legislation that would take tax incentives away from companies that outsourced Americans’ jobs. In both cases, Republicans sided with wealthy corporations and claim it is the right of business to deny jobs to Americans so business can reap higher profits and enjoy tax-free status.
In 2010, Republicans are considering abolishing the minimum wage, and are fighting to prohibit workers from joining unions that would enable American |
combe was experimenting with installing panels on a cowshed at a local farm—in the dead of winter. Once plugged in, the panels—surrounded by snow—were still generating.
A girl sweeps snow from solar panels on Grange Farm near Balcombe, January 2015. Image credit: Oliver Rudkin // 10:10
Solar was fast becoming a normal part of local life. By the summer of 2015, instead of guessing the weight of a pig at the village fair, visitors were asked to estimate how much electricity the village’s panels were producing. The co-op installed solar panels on top of two schools, including Balcombe Primary, in the heart of the village.
At the other end of the country, it was Lancashire’s turn to host a summer of anti-fracking protests. Again, local activists eyed the possibility of going solar. Pam Foster of Frack Free Lancashire told The Guardian: “We don’t want to lose this momentum — or our friendships,” adding that they were looking into community solar energy. Tina-Louise Rothery, also from Frack Free Lancashire, later told Repower Balcombe that it had been an incredible inspiration: “We want to use the community that we have built through the anti-fracking activism to create a community renewable energy project like Balcombe in the future.”
All this time, Repower Balcombe had been working on plans for “the big one” — a 20-acre, 18,500-panel solar park at Chiddinglye Farm, in nearby East Grinstead. If successful, it wouldn’t just match the electricity demand of all 760 homes in Balcombe, but of all 500 homes in the nearby village of West Hoathly as well. The little fracking village would soon have electricity to spare.
Large solar schemes like this can be controversial. Seemingly plonked on the landscape without warning, people complain about the view, or that it takes land from food or threatens biodiversity. Repower Balcombe wanted to rise above — it wasn’t just about creating energy without fossil fuels, but caring for the local area and its people, too.
The organizers promised a solar park that’d be good for wildlife, farming, and local residents. The site wasn’t much good for growing crops anyway — it needed continuous spraying with fertilizer to be productive. Beyond that, they hoped to actively create a haven for plants and wildlife. The plans included grassland and managed hedgerows to encourage wildflowers, birds, bats, amphibians, and invertebrates; any boundary fences would let small mammals like badgers or hedgehogs easily come in and forage. Those hedgerows would also act as screens — unless you were in one small part of a neighboring field, the panels would be all but invisible.
Wiltshire Wildlife Community Energy’s solar farm. Image credit: 10:10 //Andy Aitchison
The proposal proved popular. The planning application attracted 69 comments from local people—all of them supportive—and 800 people from across the country wrote to the planning officer voicing support for the project.
But then things took a turn for the worse. In the summer of 2015, the government announced savage cuts to support for renewable energy. Its project would be safe, Repower Balcombe thought, as long as it got planning permission in time, but others like it would be hard to get off the ground. The idea of Balcombe as a tipping point, inspiring hundreds more co-ops, suddenly looked bleak. Only Barton Moss was likely to grow — the feasibility of similar co-ops in Lancashire, Kent, or anywhere else seemed pretty dim.
The planning permission hearing for the solar park was held at Haywards Heath at the start of October 2015. Finally good news: It was unanimously favored. The Repower Balcombe team was absolutely ecstatic, and itching to get started.
It had to get going quickly, too. The cuts had set a tight deadline — the park had to be built, signed off on, and plugged into the grid by the end of March 2016 or the project wouldn’t be viable. The clock was ticking. At the same time, though, there was still some uncertainty — the government had yet to officially approve the timing of the cuts. It was unlikely, but possible, that support would be cut even sooner, making it too financially risky to launch the share offer and start fundraising.
Repower Balcombe was caught in a weird policy bind — having to build as soon as possible but at the same time unable to start. Things were getting tense. Once again Balcombe found itself at the mercy of outside energy policy.
Balcombe residents watch as panels are installed in the local school. Image credit: Malachi Chadwick // 10:10
Then, tragedy struck once more. Another unexpected cut, hidden in an amendment to a finance bill announced at the end of October, reversed a promise made in March for continued support for community renewable energy schemes. After an agonizing meeting between the Repower Balcombe directors that went well into the night, they decided to pull out. The park would still be built, but by a commercial developer. The local people would no longer own it.
As Joe Nixon, now the communications director for Repower Balcombe, said at the time: “We’re still incredibly proud of the work we’ve done, and excited to see the park open next year. But it’s bitterly disappointing that it won’t be a community-run project, because we don’t just need to decarbonise our energy system, we need to give people more of a say in it.”
Still, the solar park is being built. The one-time fracking village is going renewable and will generate enough energy for the village next door, too. The project only happened because of the hard work of local people, determined to do something positive in response to the threat of fracking.
Moreover, since the school installations in the summer of 2015, there’s solar right at the heart of their village, powering the children’s lessons. It’s a powerful thing—solar in schools. Repower Balcombe still hopes to extend its community-owned renewables, albeit on a smaller scale than an entire solar park, with installations at another three local schools in 2016.
Meanwhile, policy change has threatened other schemes in progress in the United Kingdom. Some folded, and some just about made it through. In fact, just before Christmas, in a few short weeks, the British public poured nearly £15 million [$21.65 million] into community energy, helping 24 groups beat the race against the cuts and finance their solar, wind, biomass, and hydroelectric projects.
On the other side of the Atlantic, an indigenous community in Alberta is turning three decades of intensive oil, gas, logging, fracking, and tar sands exploitation on its head with a community solar project, right smack in the tar sands themselves. Community energy is surging in Australia, too. So while Balcombe’s revolution might have been aborted abruptly, the cause of people-powered renewable energy seems hard to halt.
Solar panels walk into Balcombe. Image credit: Malachi Chadwick // 10:10.
Formerly the editor of How We Get To Next until spring 2015, Alice Bell is now the head of campaign communications at 10:10, the climate change charity which supports Repower Balcombe. She is writing here in a personal capacity.This July, at its annual developer conference, Google introduced the full Android Wear SDK and now developers can finally start building awesome smartwatch applications. Want to learn how to make your existing apps work with Android Wear? Then read on!
Unless you've spent the last year on a deserted island, you've probably heard about Android Wear. It's an extension of the Android operating system for wearable devices. Although there should be many different wearable devices in the future, the industry is focused on smartwatches at the moment.
Several big players have already launched their devices that support the Wear SDK - for example LG with its G watch or Samsung with Gear 2. Probably the most anticipated smartwatch, the one we use in visual illustrations for this article, is Moto 360 by Motorola Mobility. Luckily for all of us geeks out there, it should be launched in a few weeks.
If you are a developer, Android Wear gives you a chance to improve mobile experience and make your applications more accessible for users. If you want, you can develop Android Wear applications in the same way you develop smartphone applications, but SDK also allows you to extend your current applications. In this blog post, I will show you how to extend your application notifications to Android Wear and add some cool wear actions.
WHAT ARE WE MODIFYING?
I'll be modifying one of our existing apps called Queueing app. It's available on Google Play if you want to check it out for yourself.
This app was developed for Erste & Steiermärkische Bank and it allows anyone with a smartphone to find the nearest branch office and remotely reserve a spot in the queue. The Queueing app can send a notification when users are next in line so they can head to the bank and grab their spot. If users change their mind, they have an option to delete their ticket and leave the queue. In order to use these features, they need to take out their mobile phones and open the app.
ANDROID WEAR MAKES THINGS A LOT EASIER
With Android wear, we can give our users the ability to use these features without reaching for their phones. We are going to modify the existing application and users with a smartwatch will get a notification on their wrists with information on how many people are in front of them.
Notifications are a cool addition, but we can do better. We will also add two more custom wear actions:
"Snooze" notification - If users swipe the notification to the right, they will be offered the possibility to "snooze" it. For example, if there are 9 people in front of you, you can choose to be reminded when you're 6th in line.
- If users swipe the notification to the right, they will be offered the possibility to "snooze" it. For example, if there are 9 people in front of you, you can choose to be reminded when you're 6th in line. Cancel ticket - By swiping to the right once more, users will be able to cancel their current ticket and remove themselves from the queue.
The main idea behind these actions is to give our users the ability to interact with our application without the need to pull their smartphones out of their pockets. Just bear in mind that users will be able to use these actions only if they are not next in line. If they are, they will only get a notification indicating that there are no more people in front of them.
MODIFYING THE EXISTING APP
Here is what you need to do in order to get the most out of Android Wear notifications:
1. Add the latest support library to your application's build.gradle file
I hope you use Android Studio because the Eclipse is dead.
dependencies { compile'com. android. support : support - v4: 20.0 +'}
2. Add Android wear specific actions to existing notification
We are using NotificationCompat.Builder class because, when building with this class, the system takes care of displaying notifications properly, whether they appear on a phone or smartwatch.
//standard notification code NotificationCompat. Builder mBuilder = new NotificationCompat. Builder ( mContext ). setSmallIcon ( R. drawable. icon_notification_queueing_seethrough ). setContentTitle ( mContext. getString ( R. string. redomat )). setContentText ( message ); //Actions "Snooze" notification and delete ticket (remove from queue) are only available if user is not next in line if (! getIsUserNextInLine ()) { //User click on action triggers broadcast which is received by WearActionReceiver.class //Put notification id and flag WEAR_ACTION. //Using these parameters WearActionReceiver.class will know which action was clicked Intent notifyNextTimeIntent = new Intent ( mContext, WearActionReceiver. class ); notifyNextTimeIntent. putExtra ( WearActionReceiver. NOTIFICATION_ID_STRING, NOTIFICATION_ID ); notifyNextTimeIntent. putExtra ( WearActionReceiver. WEAR_ACTION, WearActionReceiver. SNOOZE_NOTIFICATION ); PendingIntent pendingIntentNotify = PendingIntent. getBroadcast ( mContext, WEAR_REQUEST_CODE, notifyNextTimeIntent, PendingIntent. FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT ); //text shown in notification String notifyAgainText = String. format ( mContext. getString ( R. string. notification_next_in_line ), getNumberInLine ()); //Wear action - this action will be shown only on Android Wear devices //Set action icon, text and pending intent which will be executed on click //When user clicks on this icon he will "snooze" notification NotificationCompat. Action actionNotifyNextTime = new NotificationCompat. Action. Builder ( R. drawable. ic_launcher, notifyAgainText, pendingIntentNotify ). build (); //The same as Intent for "snooze" but this time set another flag Intent cancelTicketIntent = new Intent ( mContext, WearActionReceiver. class ); cancelTicketIntent. putExtra ( WearActionReceiver. NOTIFICATION_ID_STRING, NOTIFICATION_ID ); cancelTicketIntent. putExtra ( WearActionReceiver. WEAR_ACTION, WearActionReceiver. CANCEL_TICKET ); PendingIntent pendingIntentCancel = PendingIntent. getBroadcast ( mContext, WEAR_REQUEST_CODE_2, cancelTicketIntent, PendingIntent. FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT ); //When user clicks on this icon he will cancel his ticket and remove himself from the queue NotificationCompat. Action actionCancel = new NotificationCompat. Action. Builder ( R. drawable. actionbar_icon_delete, mContext. getString ( R. string. cancel_ticket ), pendingIntentCancel ). build (); //Create new WearableExtender object and add actions NotificationCompat. WearableExtender extender = new NotificationCompat. WearableExtender (); extender. addAction ( actionNotifyNextTime ); extender. addAction ( actionCancel ); //Extend Notification builder mBuilder. extend ( extender ); } //Get notification manager NotificationManager mNotificationManager = ( NotificationManager ) mContext. getSystemService ( Context. NOTIFICATION_SERVICE ); //show notification mNotificationManager. notify ( NOTIFICATION_ID, mBuilder. build ());
3. Add Broadcast Receiver
This class will receive the clicked wear action and either "snooze" the notification or remove the user from the queue. It will also dismiss notifications on Android Wear.
public class WearActionReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver { public static final String NOTIFICATION_ID_STRING = "NotificationId" ; public static final String WEAR_ACTION = "WearAction" ; public static final int SNOOZE_NOTIFICATION = 1 ; public static final int CANCEL_TICKET = 2 ; @Override public void onReceive ( Context context, Intent intent ) { if ( intent!= null ) { int notificationId = intent. getIntExtra ( NOTIFICATION_ID_STRING, 0 ); NotificationManager manager = ( NotificationManager ) context. getSystemService ( Context. NOTIFICATION_SERVICE ); manager. cancel ( notificationId ); int action = intent. getIntExtra ( WEAR_ACTION, 0 ); switch ( action ) { case SNOOZE_NOTIFICATION: //Code for notification snooze break ; case CANCEL_TICKET: //code for removing the user from the queue break ; default : break ; } } } }
4. Declare WearActionReceiver in the manifest file
< receiver android: name = "co.infinum.WearActionReceiver" />
UPDATES - MAKE THEM HAPPEN
As you can see, with just a few extra lines of code, we gave our users an option to interact with our application without reaching for their phones. Considering the fact that implementing support for Android Wear is really easy, I believe that every Android dev should be aiming to update their apps as soon as possible.
Maybe now you are thinking; "Heck, why would I do that when the majority of users won't buy a fancy smartwatch?" That's a valid concern, especially when we know that the current generation of smartwatches costs between $200 and $300.
But like with any other technology, the price of Android Wear devices will go down and they will become more widespread. Making sure your app supports this innovative technology is a smart investment for the future.I’ve kept dropping hints about this. It’s time to post some excerpts about the birth of Israel from the Forrestal Diaries– by James V. Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense.
Forrestal is famous of course for tragedy: Not long after these thoughts were set down, Forrestal was sacked by Truman in March 1949 and died two months later, apparently jumping from a high floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he was being treated for depression.
My introduction. 1, know your narrator: James Forrestal was a serious man to the point of humorless, rigid/repressed, intelligent, selfmade.
The son of a contractor, he became a Roaring 20s socialite and a partner at Dillon, Read in New York and was not at all political in the partisan sense. His Quixotic quest as a Truman appointee was to depoliticize the Palestine issue, to get Republicans and Democrats to cut a secret deal not to pander so that the U.S. interest could be sorted out by elected leaders and their aides without political pressure. It’s a crazy quest in a democracy– but then, just as crazy as the idea that one special interest should essentially control policy in this area unto armageddon.
2, One lesson here is that Partition, which the UN Gen’l Assembly approved on Nov. 29, 1947 amid heavy lobbying, was opposed by almost all the wise men whom Truman had assembled to steer the ship of state, and meanwhile pushed by political rabbis, including Clark Clifford and Truman’s former business-partner Eddie Jacobson, and other Zionists or envoys for Zionists who beat a track into Truman’s office. Bear in mind that the ’48 election, with Thomas Dewey challenging Truman, is in the wings;
3, Note that Forrestal meets with two powerful senators from opposing parties, J. Howard McGrath, who heads Democratic campaigns, and Arthur Vandenberg, a key supporter of Dewey for president, and they both essentially say, It’s Chinatown, Jake! The issue is too radioactive in terms of donations for us to go near.
Repeat: Money– not voters.
4, All the pressures we see today to nullify Obama’s policymaking visavis a Palestinian state were there back then, and Forrestal identified them as a lobby. The question I ask again and again on this site is, How stupid are the American media and the people, that an assertion is made by serious people not once but again and again, from Robert Lovett to Forrestal to Rabbi Elmer Berger to Paul Findley to George Ball to Walt and Mearsheimer and David Hirst and Lawrence Wilkerson– asserted again and again over 7 decades, an assertion at the core of our foreign policy today, and the media still won’t touch it?
5, Forrestal was hounded by Zionists. Because of his stance on Israel, columnists Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson smeared him, and exhumed his unhappy marriage, including his role when his glamorous wife was robbed of jewelry on Fifth Avenue 20 years before these events. Speculating about the cause of Forrestal’s tailspin is not my focus. I would only point out the Terrible Pathos/Tragic Arc of being a Defense Secretary who is calling for military support to protect the life of U.N. envoy Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem in summer ’48 and he fails, Bernadotte is killed, and a few months later, he too dies.
And Jerusalem is not internationalized, and Zionist territorial gains well beyond Partition are memorialized. Tragedy. The tragedy of the unfolding of extremist Zionism.
6, The diaries were heavily-edited, and often paraphrased, by editor Walter Millis. (The unredacted original, at Princeton, apparently has even stronger material than what follows.) OK, take it away Mr. Secretary:
29 August 1947 Cabinet
[Under Secretary of State Robert] Lovett reported on [Palestine]…He said that the tendency in the General Assembly toward taking decisions by majority vote could constitute a danger to the United States. There was some indication of a lash-up between the Asiatic peoples and those of the Middle East on a color-versus-white basis. He said that while much emphasis had been placed upon the distress and commotion among the Jews, there was an equal danger of solidifying sentiment among all of the Arabian and Mohammedan peoples against us.
4 September 1947 Cabinet Lunch
At the end of the lunch [Robert] Hannegan [Postmaster General] brought up the question of the President’s making a statement of policy on Palestine, particularly with reference to the entrance of a hundred and fifty thousand Jews into Palestine. He said he didn’t want to press for a decision one way or the other but simply wanted to point out that such a statement would have a very great influence and great effect on the raising of funds for the Democratic National Committee. He said very large sums were obtained a year ago from Jewish contributors and that they would be influenced in either giving or withholding by what the President did on Palestine.
29 September 1947 [Conversation with president]
I asked the President whether it would not be possible to lift the Jewish-Palestine question out of politics. The President said it was worth trying although he obviously was skeptical.. [I said] It was dangerous to let it continue to be a matter of barter between the two parties…
6 October 1947 Cabinet Lunch
Hannegan brought up the question of Palestine. He said many people who had contributed to the Democratic campaign fund in 1944 were pressing hard for assurances from the administration of definitive support for the Jewish position in Palestine. The President said that if they would keep quiet he thought that everything would be all right, but that if they persisted in the endeavor to go beyond the report of the United Nations Commission there was grave danger of wrecking all prospects for settlement.
7 November 1947 Cabinet
[Middle East is a tinder box, warns Secretary of State George Marshall] I repeated my suggestion, made several times previously, that a serious attempt be made to lift the Palestine question out of American partisan politics. I said that there had been general acceptance of the fact that domestic politics ceased at the Atlantic Ocean and that no question was more charged with danger to our security than this particular one.
26 November 1947
Lunch today with Senator McGrath.
[Summary is by Walter Millis, editor of diaries] Forrestal derived several points from McGrath’s conversation. In the first place, Jewish sources were responsible for a substantial part of the contributions to the Democratic National Committee, and many of these contributions were made "with a distinct idea on the part of the givers that they will have an opportunity to express their views and have them seriously considered on such questions as the present Palestine question." There was a feeling among the Jews that the United States was not doing what it should to solicit votes in the U.N. General assembly in favor of the Palestine partition. (To this Forrestal objected that it was "precisely what the State Department wanted to avoid; that we had gone a very long way indeed in supporting partition and that proselytizing for votes and support would add to the already serious alienation of Arabian good will.”) …
[The two men discuss a possible Gallup poll to see if Americans would support use of force to preserve Partition.]
I hoped that Senator McGrath would give a lot of thought to this matter because it involved not merely the Arabs of the Middle East, but also might involve the whole Moslem world with its four hundred millions of people—Egypt, North Africa, India and Afghanistan.
1 December 1947
…Lovett reported on the result of the United Nations action on Palestine over the week end [vote in favor of Partition]. He said he had never in his life been subject to as much pressure as he had been in the three days beginning Thrusday morning and ending Sunday night. [Herbert Bayard] Swope, Robert Nathan, were among those who had importuned him… The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which has a concession in Liberia, reported that it had been telephoned to and asked to transmit a message to their representative in Liberia directing him to bring pressure on the Liberian government to vote in favor of partition. The zeal and activity of the Jews had almost resulted in defeating the objectives they were after.
I remarked that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionists’ pressures for a Jewish state in Palestine, and I also remarked that the New York Times editorial of Sunday morning pointed up those misgivings when it said, “Many of us have long had doubts… concerning the wisdom of erecting a political state on a basis of religious faith." I said I thought the decision was fraught with great danger for the security of this country….
3 December 1947
Lunch today with [former Secretary of State] Jimmy Byrnes. We talked Palestine… He said that David Niles [adviser to Truman, pro-Zionist] and Sam Rosenman were chiefly responsible for the President’s decision [partition]; that both had told the President that Dewey was about to come out with a statement favoring the Zionist position on Palestine, and that they had insisted that unless the President anticipated this movement New York State would be lost to the Democrats. ….
I said I thought it was a most disastrous and regrettable fact that the foreign policy of this country was determined by the contributions a particular bloc of special interests might make to the party funds…
13 December 1947
At the Gridiron Dinner tonight I spoke to Governor Dewey about Palestine and posed to him the question of getting nonpartisan action on this question, which I said was a matter of the deepest concern to me in terms of the security of the nation. The Governor said he agreed in principle but that it was a difficult matter to get results on because of the intemperate attitude of the Jewish people who had taken Palestine as the emotional symbol, because the Democratic Party would not be willing to relinquish the advantages of the Jewish vote….
(…[T]o his [Dewey’s] inquiry as to what we could do now, I said there would inevitably be two things coming up: (1) the arming of the Jews to fight the Arabs (2) unilateral action by the U.S. to enforce the decision of the General Assembly.
At this point Vandenberg interjected to say that on the question of unilateral action he was completely and unequivocably [sic] against such action because it would breed in his opinion a wave of violent anti-Semitism in this country.)
16 January 1948
[Millis writes that Forrestal prepares a paper for Lovett; and that Forrestal] had discussed the question, the paper concluded, “with a number of people of the Jewish faith who hold the view that the present zeal of the Zionists can have the most dangerous consequences, not merely in their divisive effects in American life, but in the long run on the position of the Jews throughout the world.”
[Lovett produced a paper from the State Department, Millis continues] This, as Forrestal paraphrased it, concluded that the U.N. partition plan was “not workable,” adding that the United States was under no commitment to support the plan if it could not be made to work without resort to force; that it was against the American interest to supply arms to the Jews while we were embargoing arms to the Arabs, or to accept unilateral responsibility for carrying out the U.N. decision…
Forrestal [again per Millis] felt that the State Department was “seriously embarrassed and handicapped by the activities of Niles at the White House in going directly to the President on matters involving Palestine.
"… I gave it as my view that the Secretary of State could not avoid grasping the nettle of this issue firmly, and that it was too deeply charged with grave danger to this country to allow it to remain in the realm of domestic politics."
12 February 1948 Meeting-National Security Council
[A]ny serious attempt to implement the General Assembly’s recommendation on Palestine would set in train events that must finally result in at least a partial mobilization of U.S. forces, including recourse to the Selective Service.
3 February 1948
[Discusses idea of depoliticizing it with late president’s son, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr, a storng supporter of Jewish state]
I thought the methods that had been used by people outside of the Executive branch of the government to bring coercion and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely onto scandal. … I said I was forced to repeat to him what I had said to Senator McGrath in response to the latter’s observation that our failure to go along with the Zionists might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California—that I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States. …
Had lunch with B[ernard]. M. Baruch. …
He took the line of advising me not to be active in this particular matter and that I was already identified, to a degree that was not in my own interests, with opposition to the United Nations policy on Palestine. He said he himself did not approve of the Zionists’ actions, but in the next breath said that the Democratic Party could only lose by trying to get our government’s policy reversed….
August 1948…
It was also on the 11th that there came… an urgent request from the State Department for a detail of enlisted men from the Mediterranean Fleet to assist Count Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator…
21 October 1948 National Security Council meeting
[according to an assistant’s note.] “Mr. Forrestal said that actually our Palestine policy had been made for ‘squalid political purposes.’… He hoped that some day he would be able to make his position on this clear.”SABANA GRANDE, Puerto Rico — Although followers of a popular devotion centered on Our Lady of the Rosary were cheerfully celebrating being allowed to attend a public Mass, the bishop planning to celebrate the liturgy warned that their practices continue to be unrecognized by the church.
The group, calling itself Our Lady of the Rosary of the Spring Devotee Association, announced May 2 that Mayaguez Bishop Alvaro Corrada del Rio was “inviting all devotees of the Virgin of the Spring to a Mass that will make history in Puerto Rico.” The group’s press release suggested the bishop was celebrating Mass May 22 specifically as a prelude to the devotees’ anniversary pilgrimage to the Marian shrine in the Rincon area of this southwestern municipality.
The name “Virgin of the Spring” is a popular identifier adopted by devotees after Mary’s supposed apparitions at a spring-puddle in Sabana Grande in 1953. The group maintains that several students from a nearby grade school reported seeing “a beautiful young lady” floating on a cloud above a spring that provided water to the school.
The diocese has said that it has not found the apparent visions as supernatural in nature and has advised the faithful to avoid affiliating with the association.
Local newspapers published the press release May 4 under headlines suggesting that the Mass was specifically for the devotees and that Bishop Corrada was ending his distance from the group. The headlines spurred a social media outbreak, speculating about a policy change on the church’s part.
Ricardo Ramos Pesquera, association president, told Catholic News Service, “We wrote Bishop Corrada requesting to be allowed at the 10 o’clock Mass, and it was the bishop’s initiative not only to allow us there, but also to say the Mass and preach himself.”
The Mayaguez Diocese quickly clarified the church’s position regarding the association in an advance copy of a letter from Bishop Corrada to CNS that was read at all Masses the weekend of May 7-8 and published May 9 by El Visitante, newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Juan.
In the letter, Bishop Corrada acknowledged the devotees’ request and his wish to celebrate Mass “to continue the dialogue I proposed to them in my clarifying letter of September 2014, which I reaffirm.” But he also wrote: “I am going to Sabana Grande as this diocese’s bishop, responding to my pastoral duty to look after a group of Catholic faithful who request the holy Mass; not to celebrate their anniversary.”
He clarified that he will be in Sabana Grande to celebrate the feast of the Holy Trinity. The letter reminded the faithful that there has been no change in the church’s stance regarding the association and its mission and that the 1987 decree dissolving the association remains in force. The bishop also encouraged diocesan and religious order priests not to participate in activities related to the spring and that any priests who celebrates Mass there would be automatically suspended from ministry.
The supposed Marian apparitions at the Sabana Grande Spring lasted from April 23 to May 25, 1953. Hundreds of thousands of faithful from across Puerto Rico packed a sugar cane field near the spring. Several people reported miraculous recoveries from serious illnesses and physical handicaps.
After two ecclesial investigations — one by the Diocese of Ponce, to which the Sabana Grande parish belonged in 1953, and the other by the Diocese of Mayaguez in 1986 — the results were “uniformly negative” and that reports of the apparitions lacked credibility.
The Marian devotion at the spring continued low-key until 1978, when Juan Angel Collado Pinto, one of the children who claimed to see Mary, announced that she had given him a series of messages for the world. At that time, he offered the first message; the most recent, the sixth, was pronounced 2008.
By 1980, a group of devotees had formed, with Collado at the helm, drawing people from throughout the island, including high profile figures from the arts, politics and show business. The resulting association legally incorporated in 1985 as Our Lady of the Spring Mission based in San Juan.
A year later, the mission was approved as a private association by the Puerto Rican bishops’ conference, but specifically without juridic personality, or legal recognition under canon law. However, that approval was vacated in 1987, when the bishops’ conference determined that “from the beginning, the association did not feel bound to the terms and interpretation of the (approval) decree.”
Catholic canon law provides that properly recognized private associations of faithful can receive juridic personality “through a formal decree of the competent ecclesiastical authority” and “are subject to the vigilance of ecclesiastical authority.”
Ramos told CNS his association has “international juridic personality,” being recognized by several bishops in other countries. Church documents available as public records reveal that the association never received juridic personality from its home diocese.
One important problem between the diocese and the devotee association has been the group’s use of several names, including “Association Pro Devotion to the Virgin of the Rosary of the Spring,” an identification they had requested and was denied by the diocese in 1987.
The relationship between the church and the association worsened when the group entered into a mega-project, dubbed The Mystical Mount, to build a resort-type center atop a mountain near the spring.
“That’s what brought them down,” Father Edgardo Acosta Ocasio, diocesan communications director, told CNS. “With time all this was distorted; outside people taking over, new interests created … local humble people, elders, the real devotees — in numbers and quality — saw all this turning into a business and into a corrupted religious element.”
Father Acosta, a native of Sabana Grande, said the distortion was part of a “more serious situation, both on the doctrinal and moral aspect.” Eventually, he said, the church determined no sacrament could be celebrated there, and the association could not be recognized as a Catholic organization.
The association’s image took another turn down in 2005, when claims of divergent practices — among these physical, psychological and sexual abuse — originally surfaced from former “disciples” of Collado.
Father Acosta said the church never opposed the individual, private devotion to the Virgin of the Rosary of the Spring, “especially praying rosary in the manner the church practices it.”
He referred to a 1987 CEP letter to local bishops stating, “every private apparition has a subjective character, hence it cannot be expected to be a teaching for the whole people of God.”
Father Acosta described as “a complex thing” the tension between the diocese and the devotee association.
“Bishop was trying — once again, because he did it before — to cool down tensions of the past,” he said about the association’s recent press release. “As a ‘sabeneno’ (Sabana Grande native), it would be an honor, a reason to be jubilant, if Our Lady had appeared there … but in this case the information has been manipulated.”(ANSA) - Milan, October 23 - An Italian man working in a restaurant in Britain was killed by a gang who accused him of "taking jobs," local media said Wednesday. Joele Leotta, 19, suffered kicks and punches from a gang of about eight men aged 21 to 45 in the town of Maidstone in the county of Kent. Leotta, who may also have been stab...
(ANSA) - Milan, October 23 - An Italian man working in a restaurant in Britain was killed by a gang who accused him of "taking jobs," local media said Wednesday. Joele Leotta, 19, suffered kicks and punches from a gang of about eight men aged 21 to 45 in the town of Maidstone in the county of Kent. Leotta, who may also have been stabbed in the attack, had travelled from his home in the northern town of Nibionno, near the city of Lecco, to Britain 10 days earlier to learn English and find work. A friend of the victim sustained injuries to the neck, head and back that do not threaten his life.
Authorities say Alex Galbiati was being treated in hospital. Leotta's family, informed of the killing on Monday, has travelled to Kent.Brown seems to be the color of choice when it comes to the types of fat cells in our bodies. Brown fat expends energy, while its counterpart, white fat stores it. The danger in white fat cells, along with the increased risk for diabetes and heart disease it poses, seems especially linked to visceral fat. Visceral fat is the build-up of fat around the organs in the belly.
So in the battle against obesity, brown fat appears to be our friend and white fat our foe.
Now a team of researchers led by Jorge Plutzky, MD, director of The Vascular Disease Prevention Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School has discovered a way to turn foe to friend.
By manipulating the metabolic pathways in the body responsible for converting vitamin A-or retinol-into retinoic acid, Plutzky and his colleagues have essentially made white fat take on characteristics of brown fat. Their findings put medical science a step closer in the race to develop novel anti-obesity therapies.
The study will be published online on May 6, 2012 |
to an instant death sentence, and no limits to where that sentence can be carried out. in a January Google Hangout — one of the few other times Obama has even mentioned the drone campaign — he said that targeting decisions were not managed by “a bunch of folks in a room somewhere just making decisions.” Actually, it appears to be something rather close to that.
When Yellin pressed further, asking Obama if he himself made the ultimate decisions about who should live and who should die, Obama demurred, saying, “I’ve got to be careful here. There are classified issues… I can’t get too deeply into how these things work.”
But, as Zenko notes, “that is total BS. The President has the authority to declassify anything. That authority was reaffirmed by the White House in one of its first executive orders,” issued in 2009. If the president felt like talking about the drone approval process, he could. Obama doesn’t have to leave the discussion up to unnamed officials, former subordinates, and authored leakers. He chooses to do so, presumably because the issues involved are so thorny.
Twice in the interview, Obama complained about “misreporting” by the media about the drone campaign. “A lot of what you read in the press that purports to be accurate isn’t always accurate,” Obama said. What he didn’t mention was his own role in perpetuating the confusion.Security forces said on Saturday that nearly 20 Yemeni students were killed and wounded in Saudi airstrikes on a school in Saada province of Yemen.
According to Almasirah news agency, Saudi fighter jets targeted a school in Saada province of Yemen on Saturday, which left dozens of casualties.
“20 Yemeni students were killed and wounded in the airstrikes,” Almasirah reported.
The wounded students were taken to a nearby hospital. According to reports, some of them are in critical conditions and the death toll might rise.
Saudi Arabia launched a military attack against Yemen in March 2015 in order to bring Hadi, the former Yemeni president who fled to Saudi Arabia, back to power and undermine the Ansarullah movement.
Nearly 10,000 people have been killed in the attacks and at least 16,000 others injured since the beginning of the Saudi aggression.
The attacks have also damaged the country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many factories, schools, and hospitals.
International concerns are rising due to the increased number of attacks inside Yemen after the UN peace negotiations in Kuwait between representatives of the former government and Ansarullah movement failed and the ceasefire was broken.Foto: Hina, Screenshot: Facebook
NAKON što je nekoliko tjedana trajala borba za spašavanje ministra Hasanbegovića, Plenković je jučer ipak otkrio karte iz kojih je jasno da ne računa više na usluge kontroverznog ministra. Umjesto njega, na zgražanje brojnih veteranskih udruga odjednom zabrinutih za događanja u kulturi, novi šef HDZ-a imenovat će Ninu Obuljen za ministricu kulture.
Hasanbegović je zvijezda desnog krila HDZ-a i ekstremne desnice uopće. Pa iako će brojni njegovi poklonici reći da ga cijene zbog njegovog ukidanja potpore neprofitnim medijima i sličnih stvari, prava je istina zapravo da ga hrvatska desnica glorificira zbog njegovih "antifašizam je floskula" stavova kao i zbog koketiranja s ustaštvom u mladosti.
A da simpatizeri bivšeg ministra kulture i nisu ljudi od kulture dokazuju i njihove objave na društvenim mrežama. Naime, od jučer popodne, od kad je objavljeno da Hasanbegović više neće biti ministar, na Facebooku ispoljavaju toliko mržnje, zla i gadosti da kraj toga uvrede SDP-ovaca na račun Aleksandre Kolarić prije par tjedana izgledaju kao bonton.
"Gospodine Plenkoviću, vi ste jedna obična marioneta. Niste ispoštovali volju naroda. Narod je glasao za gospodina Hasangeovića koji je trebao ostati ministar. Dok ne zauzmete stav da branite hrvatske interese u volju naroda ja vas ne priznajem kao premijera Republike Hrvatske", napisao je jedan nezadovoljni Hasanbegovićev fan iz BiH. Naravno, u maniri najboljih internet balkanskih nacionalista, u pisanju se poslužio Caps Lockom.
"Glasovao sam za HDZ, ne za Plenkovića", kaže jedan drugi HDZ-ovac nezadovoljan Plenkovićem.
"Bilo je jasno od prvog dana... kada te lovrićka i pupovac hvale, znaš odmah koliko je sati. No, lako je za Hasana, tek slijedi briselizacija, pa migranti, pa lgbt prava, pa udruge, pa pomoć našim saveznicima al nusra i isis. No sve to HDZ-u neće priskrbit niti jedan novi glas sa ljevice, a desnica će i dalje glasati za njih jer nemaju za koga drugoga", Hasanbegovića sa globalnom geopolitikom povezuje jedan drugi internet komentator.
"Nikad više moj i glasovi moje obitelji neče za HDZ", nepismen je jedan treći fan bivšeg ministra kulture.
"Hrvatice i Hrvati,glasali smo da maknemo Milanovićčevu bandu,i što smo dobili.IZDAJA, po neznam koji puta,i što sada pitam ja vas...Zar ne vrijede glasovi koje smo dali našim domoljubima borcima za DOMOVINU iz redova HDZ-a.Hasanbegoviću.Izbacila ga udbaška banda iz redova HDZ,Kao saborski zastupnik izjava Hasanbegovića,bori ću se ZA BOGA I DOMOVINU,a gdje smo mi sada,PLENKOVIĆU POSLAN SI NA...POČETAK KRAJA HDZa.a stim je i tvoj kraj", Plenkovića nevoli jedan HDZ-ovac koji smatra da iza svega stoji Pupovac.
"Pupovac slavi pobjedo.OBULJEN ministrica kulture,osoba koja mrzi HRVATSKUbranitelji prijatelji,zar smo se za to borili,Ovo je početak našeg kraja.Srbija oduševljena,na izboru PLENKOVIČA pogledajte srpske portale oni slave proglašenje nove ministrice,A mi....šutimo do kada", dodao je korisnik Facebooka.
Tekst se nastavlja ispod oglasa
"nina pobuljen je orjunašica 20 god je bila u minsitarstvu anije clan hdz-a za nju su lobirlai pusicka glavasevic d ali je plenkovic normalan ili je izdajni", piše jedan treći simpatizer Hasanbegovića koji je, kad se u školi učio pravopis, valjda bio na saboru omiljene stranke.
"Plenkoviču nabijem te na ovaj mali Hrvatski penis i sve one koji su bili zato da se Zlatka Hasanbegoviča smjeni jebo vam svima pupovac mamu u ladna usta", sklonosti prema seksu s muškarcima pokazuje izvjesni Zdravko. Dodao je da je Plenković "obično govno" te da će iskidati člansku iskaznicu zbog izdaje "Hrvatskih nacijonalnih" interesa.
"to je za streljanje jebem vam pokoljenje prodano kokardaško dabog da da vas otmu vanzemaljci i jebu vam sve po redu do danas sam bijo jedan od onih koji su bili članovi od početka a od danas vidim da ste vi govna prodana. marš u tri pizde materine bando jedna", nakon seksa s muškarcima HDZ-ovac razmišlja i o seksu s vanzemaljcima.
"i general krstičević je orjuna, bio je u JNA najžešći jugoslav u napadu na vukovar. Dakle, Plenković nam je dovukao orjunu udbu na vlast", otkriva na Facebooku jedan od stotina ljutih komentatora.
"Branitelji i Domoljubi nisu ljuti nego bijesni, SPREMNI da pobiju gamad udbašku. Čekamo poziv naših istinskih Generala i časnika", kraj silnih vrijeđanja našla se i pokoja prijetnja.
"Nina Obuljan je sljednik sotonizma. zato amerikanci inzistiraju na njezinoj nominaciji za min. kulture", da State Department stoji iza imenovanja hrvatske ministrice kulture smatra izvjesni Ante. Njegova prijateljica Ivana zaključila je kako "plenkovića zatuć treba".by Brett Stevens on July 29, 2016
We do not live in tolerant times. As in the former Soviet Union or today’s Cuba, there is an official Correct Way to think and those who fail to think this way, even if they do not explicitly disagree with it, find themselves excluded from opportunities and social groups.
Despite that, a brave group of arts community members are trying to bridge the divide. Later this year, they will launch an exhibit named Neoreaction, which is ‘an open [conference for] open minded progressives’ that explores Neoreactionary and Reactionary thought. This will be a short conference of talks and screenings on the subject of neoreactionary philosophy and politics, which the presenters view as one of the most interesting discursive spaces online in current times.
Hosted at a gallery in East London, the conference will be metaphorically playing with (ideological) fire, since Neoreaction and Reactionary thought are in opposition to modernity, liberalism and in fact every political assumption widely held in Western societies today. Already two members of the team, fearing for the loss of social and economic opportunities, have had to drop out, but the rest are soldiering on.
If you wish to attend, or are from the media and wish a press pass, please email conference@amerika.org which forwards to the organizers, who will remain anonymous until they are able to verify your good faith participation.
Tags: conference, liberalism, libertarianism, neoreaction, open-minded progressives, reaction, reactionary
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.The Science Behind Gratitude (and How It Can Change Your Life)
The benefits of practicing gratitude are nearly endless. People who regularly practice gratitude by taking time to notice and reflect upon the things they're thankful for experience more positive emotions, feel more alive, sleep better, express more compassion and kindness, and even have stronger immune systems. And gratitude doesn't need to be reserved only for momentous occasions: Sure, you might express gratitude after receiving a promotion at work, but you can also be thankful for something as simple as a delicious piece of pie. Research by UC Davis psychologist Robert Emmons, author of Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, shows that simply keeping a gratitude journal—regularly writing brief reflections on moments for which we’re thankful—can significantly increase well-being and life satisfaction.
You’d think that just one of these findings is compelling enough to motivate an ingrate into action. But if you’re anything like me, this motivation lasts about three days until writing in my gratitude journal every evening loses out to watching stand-up comics on Netflix.
Here are a few keys I’ve discovered—and research supports—that help not only to start a gratitude practice, but to maintain it for the long haul.
Freshen Up Your Thanks
The best way to reap the benefits of gratitude is to notice new things you’re grateful for every day. Gratitude journaling works because it slowly changes the way we perceive situations by adjusting what we focus on. While you might always be thankful for your great family, just writing “I’m grateful for my family” week after week doesn’t keep your brain on alert for fresh grateful moments. Get specific by writing “Today my husband gave me a shoulder rub when he knew I was really stressed” or "My sister invited me over for dinner so I didn't have to cook after a long day." And be sure to stretch yourself beyond the great stuff right in front of you. Opening your eyes to more of the world around you can deeply enhance your gratitude practice. Make a game out of noticing new things each day.
Get Real About Your Gratitude Practice
Being excited about the benefits of gratitude can be a great thing because it gives us the kick we need to start making changes. But if our excitement about sleeping better because of our newfound gratitude keeps us from anticipating how tired we’ll be tomorrow night when we attempt to journal, we’re likely to fumble and lose momentum. When we want to achieve a goal, using the technique of mental contrasting—being optimistic about the benefits of a new habit while also being realistic about how difficult building the habit may be – leads us to exert more effort. Recognize and plan for the obstacles that may get in the way. For instance, if you tend to be exhausted at night, accept that it might not be the best time to focus for a few extra minutes and schedule your gratitude in the morning instead.
Make Thankfulness Fun By Mixing It Up
University of Rochester partners in crime Edward Deci and Richard Ryan study intrinsic motivation, which is the deep desire from within to persist on a task. One of the biggest determinants is autonomy, the ability to do things the way we want. So don’t limit yourself—if journaling is feeling stale, try out new and creative ways to track your grateful moments. (Happify offers an endless variety of gratitude activities to choose from.) My fiancée Michaela decided to create a gratitude jar this year. Any time she experiences a poignant moment of gratitude, she writes it on a piece of paper and puts it in a jar. On New Year’s Eve, she’ll empty the jar and review everything she wrote. When a good thing happens, she now exclaims, “That’s one for the gratitude jar!” It immediately makes the moment more meaningful and keeps us on the lookout for more.
Be Social About Your Gratitude Practice
Our relationships with others are the greatest determinant of our happiness. So it makes sense to think of other people as we build our gratitude. Robert Emmons suggests that focusing our gratitude on people for whom we’re thankful rather than circumstances or material items will enhance the benefits we experience. And while you’re at it, why not include others directly into your expression of gratitude? One Happify activity involves writing a gratitude letter to someone who had an impact on you whom you’ve never properly thanked. You could also share the day’s grateful moments around the dinner table. The conversations that follow may give you even more reasons to give thanks.
Incorporating gratitude into your life is easy—and fun—with Happify's activities and games: Sign up today!
Derrick Carpenter, MAPP, coaches individuals on living engaged and inspired lives, runs experiential corporate leadership programs, and trains US Army personnel on resilience. He's researched what makes people great in psychology labs at Harvard, Yale, and UPenn, where he received his Master of Applied Positive Psychology.
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INFOGRAPHIC: The Science of Giving: Why Being Generous is Good for YouSometimes stories come by that make you pause, then dig in a bit more because THAT’S JUST TOO WEIRD to be true yet… it seems to have happened. I had to check out this exploding artichoke story.
Italian woman stunned by exploding artichoke.
An Italian woman was left shaken but otherwise unhurt by an exploding artichoke, La Repubblica reports. The unnamed victim bought some fresh artichokes from her local supermarket in Olginate, some 40km northeast of Milan. When she laid into one with a knife, it went bang. Initially struck dumb by the shock, the poor woman appealed to her husband and daughter for assistance, and when they saw the leaves were “damaged and burnt”, they called in the cops. However, it appears a chemical reaction provoked by fertilisers may be the explanation, rather than a chilling suicide-bombing Day of the Triffids scenario.
The explanation in the piece was less than satisfying. There had to be more to this. I had also found that it had happened before, in 2003, but I’m not so clear on this since it was reported in Ananova which I can no longer confirm and was likely reported in Italian since it took place also in Italy. The same story about cutting resulting in a bang was repeated verbatim in several places.
So, what is this all about? I contacted the California Artichoke Advisory Board where the Artichoke Queen, Pat Harper, checked her sources since SHE had never heard of such a thing after 20 years in the ‘choke biz. But she had gotten a similar report from a consumer late last year who also saw a spark that resulted in a black mark on the knife.
It is not common with the normal type of artichoke but one grower noted that it has been observed in fast growing annuals. A wound from insect damage to the plant can secrete resin which, when cut, might cause this condition.
Weird. But the “exploding” part is exaggerated. More like a pop. No injuries and it’s still OK to eat.
Artichoke is a species of thistle that is wonderfully delicious. Don’t be afraid of them even though they look weird and are known to rarely give you a jolt. As the Queen says, they more often explode with flavor.A Pallet Projects for Kitchen is all approximately the use the wood. Like there are so many storage cabinets made of the wood. A big middle table again made from the wood. Auxiliary there are shelves to display beautiful cutlery. So a massive use age of wooden. Consequently now Pallet Projects for Kitchen is there a good way to use and keep your wooden. The timber shelves within the pallet kitchen can now be created so without difficulty. All you need to do is to apply the timber pallets and cut them into the shape of the cabinet, and now beautify the front with the color you selected to apply. Secondly the cabinets can be created everywhere in the kitchen to create an increasing number of space. Right here you may use the wood made panels or pallets to stick over the walls or to make another holder which will preserve kitchen things in it. Pallet wood may be recycled and reused in special Pallet Projects for kitchen. And this will be painted and embellished in any manner you need. So simply pass for the usage of the pallet wooden, as there is lot creativity in the use of it rather than a simple wooden.
Pallet Kitchen cabinet:
The use of pallet wood in developing pallet kitchen cabinet styles includes fewer molds and also takes in less time. If you color the pallet timber units with shiny and strong shades then it will give eye-catching and wonderful look. It is better to let the different shades of pallet timber without any color as they will look wonderful.
Pallet Kitchen shelf:
Make your own kitchen shelf with used pallet and ensure it all by yourself. You can get pallet from your store room and make your kitchen more structured. Now you can cook tasty food and enjoy with your family and friends when you get ease in your kitchen area with recycled pallets.As a food critic, I know that people love the negative reviews and that it’s more fun to read and write about the bad meals than the good ones
Where restaurant criticism is concerned it is hate that springs eternal. Sure, people may enjoy restaurant reviews in general, but what they really love are the takedowns. Pete Wells of the New York Times is undoubtedly well read, but it was his 2012 review of cable TV star Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen and Bar, phrased as a few dozen questions – “Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu …?” – which became a national talking point. Times restaurant reviews tend to attract a few dozen comments; the Fieri review garnered over a thousand.
I had a taste of that a couple of weeks ago. My somewhat negative review of Beast, an unintentionally hilarious steak and king crab place in London, went viral. It may have had something to do with my suggestion that the beef was so expensive they should, for the price, install the animal “under the table so it can pleasure me while I eat”. Usually my reviews are shared a few hundred times on Facebook. This one has been shared 17,500 times and has been viewed around 10 times more than any other.
Certainly, when I decided to produce an eBook of my reviews I realised there was little point including all the positive ones. However I might wish it otherwise I knew nobody really wanted to read those. As a result My Dining Hell contains 20 of my most negative assessments, with a bit of commentary. It has since spawned a live show – think of it as “these are a few of my most hated things” – which I’m performing all over the UK and now bringing to Brooklyn.
Hurrah for me; there’s clearly a buck to be made from being negative. Not that I ever seek out bad experiences. Sure, I like my columns to be read as much as the next narcissistic hack, but I like a good dinner even more. Bad restaurants are, like colds and car crashes, things that just happen to me. The question is, why do people like reading about them?
Beast in London. Photograph: Sophia Evans/Observer
Partly I think it’s to do with the language. As bleak as it may sound, the story of good times is simply less compelling than those of bad. As the late Nora Ephron once said, if you describe a cake as “light as a feather” you have nowhere left to go. You are into the language of watering mouths and baby’s kisses and silken sheets. A restaurant review should not make you feel sickly. Unfortunately the positive ones risk doing just that.
Negative narratives, however are a different matter. The vocabulary of the bad is just that much more enthralling. Critics may pretend that it’s not easier to write a slating. They’re lying. The negative toolbag is full to bursting. They are literary freeway pileups, complete with a license to rubberneck. And that’s the point. When a critic takes aim at a lousy restaurant there is a sense that they are exacting revenge for all of us on every bad experience we’ve ever had: we paid good money; we had a terrible time; now someone else is paying the price.
And then there’s what psychologists call social comparison theory. We are constantly trying to work out how we’re doing in life, to feel better about ourselves. If, one morning over a weekend, we get up and read a lousy review of a terrible restaurant we immediately know that whatever else is going on, we’re probably having a better day than the poor sap of a chef who cooked that meal. Are such reviews kind? Probably not. Are they subtle? Rarely. But are they entertaining? Oh yes, and a damn sight more so than the meals which inspired them.
Jay Rayner’s one-man show My Dining Hell, is at Union Hall, Brooklyn on 13 November at 8pm. Details here
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The links are powered by Skimlinks. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that Skimlinks cookies will be set. More information.We knew the New England Revolution would be participating in the Desert Diamond Cup and now we have the full schedule.
For the fifth straight year, the Revs will travel to Tucson, AZ for a preseason tournament. This year they will be joined by the Colorado Rapids, Houston Dynamo, Real Salt Lake, Sporting Kansas City, and Columbus Crew SC as well as USL clubs Swope Park Rangers and AZ United and PDL side FC Tucson. The tournament will run from Feb. 17 until Feb. 27.
Here is the complete schedule:
Wednesday, 17 February 2016
Colorado Rapids vs. Swope Park Rangers--5:30 PM MST--North Stadium
Sporting Kansas City vs. Columbus Crew SC--6:00 PM MST--Grandstand Field
New England Revolution vs. Real Salt Lake--8:00 PM MST--North Stadium
Saturday, 20 February 2016
AZ United vs. Swope Park Rangers--4:30 PM MST--Grandstand Field
Columbus Crew SC vs. Real Salt Lake--5:00 PM MST--North Stadium
Colorado Rapids vs. Houston Dynamo--7:00 PM MST--Grandstand Field
Sporting Kansas City vs. New England Revolution--7:30 PM MST--North Stadium
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
New England Revolution vs. Houston Dynamo--5:30 PM MST--North Stadium
Swope Park Rangers vs. Columbus Crew SC--6:00 PM MST--Grandstand Field
Colorado Rapids vs. Sporting Kansas City --8:00 PM MST--North Stadium
Saturday, 27 February 2016
Swope Park Rangers vs. FC Tucson--4:00 PM MST--Grandstand Field
AZ United vs. TBA--4:30 PM MST--North Stadium
TBA vs. TBA--6:30 PM MST--Grandstand Field
TBA vs. TBA--7:00 PM MST--North StadiumIn the final lecture of Princeton’s Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Online Course, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Arvind Narayanan covered what may happen with Bitcoin over the next few decades. Although it’s nearly impossible for anyone to figure out where this technology will go next, Narayanan discussed different applications, platforms, and centralized entities that could eventually be decentralized via Bitcoin.
Below are nine of the most-promising Bitcoin-powered moves towards decentralization discussed by Narayanan during his lecture.
1. Name Mapping
When he went through the various platforms that could be decentralized with Bitcoin, Narayanan started with “purely digital things.” He explained the simplicity of using a blockchain to decentralize the name mapping process:
“As long as you have something that’s purely digital, it’s a simple matter to use consensus technologies so that different participants can enter new values into the system, change values, or read values back. And the blockchain can be used as a record of the current state of that mapping.”
The Princeton professor also pointed to Namecoin as a good example of a decentralized name-mapping system.
2. File Storage
Although many have heard of the current StorJ implementation that is under development through the use of an appcoin, Narayanan described an earlier version of the idea introduced by Bitcoin Core Developer Gregory Maxwell some years ago.
This early StorJ concept was described as an “agent” that lives in the cloud and is able to decide some things for itself. This agent would be able to store files for users for a certain period of time, although there is no guarantee of file storage in this version of the proposal. In other words, users will still have to make sure than an agent is reputable before they decide to trust them with their files.
The idea is that StorJ could be a decentralized replacement for current cloud storage providers such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
3. Random Number Generation and Lotteries
Decentralized random number generation is basically an unintended side effect of Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention of the Bitcoin blockchain. As Narayanan explained:
“Using Bitcoin as a beacon -- a beacon is something that ahead of time nobody should be able to predict. Once the beacon value has been generated, everybody should be convinced that the value was generated truly randomly.”
Narayanan also noted that this decentralized version of random number generation can be used to create decentralized lotteries -- as long as the lottery is denominated in the currency of the blockchain. Some centralized gambling websites already use the Bitcoin blockchain to show that their gambling systems are provably fair.
More details on how these systems work can be found on the Satoshi Dice website.
4. Zerocoin
One of the more controversial proposals for Bitcoin in the past has been Zerocoin. This addition to Bitcoin would essentially create a decentralized mixing service through the use of an altcoin and atomic trading.
A more recent version of this proposal is known as zerocash, and it’s possible that it could eventually be implemented as a sidechain to Bitcoin. These proposals are a form of complete disintermediation where a centralized entity is no longer needed to perform the action of mixing. Current Bitcoin mixing applications are available, but they come with fees and require users to trust that the mixing service will not simply run away with their coins.
5. Currencies, Stocks, and Other Real-World Assets
The Bitcoin blockchain can also bring quasi-decentralization to real world assets. Narayanan used Colored Coins as an example for the issuance of real world assets on a blockchain, which would allow these assets to move in the same censorship-resistant manner as bitcoin.
Of course, it’s important to remember that these non-native assets also come with counterparty risk. For example, if someone issues gold-backed colored coins on the blockchain, then everyone would have to trust that the issuer has some gold in a vault somewhere.
6. Property Ownership
The idea of decentralized property ownership is a concept that is talked about throughout Narayanan’s entire lecture. Through the use of smart property, individuals may be able to prove ownership of cars, homes, computers, and other pieces of property through the use of a blockchain. The smart property can also be traded for bitcoin atomically, which technically means that there is no longer a need for car titles or property deeds.
It should be noted that this sort of decentralization could also create new problems. What happens if someone loses the private key associated with their car? What if the property rights to a home are transferred to the wrong Bitcoin address? Narayanan concludes that real-world enforcement is still needed for these sorts of activities.
7. Crowd Funding
A decentralized version of Kickstarter or Indiegogo can also be built on top of a blockchain, and we’ve seen action on this concept from Bitcoin Core Developer Mike Hearn’s Lighthouse project. These decentralized crowdfunding platforms are somewhat simple contracts where a certain amount of money is released to a particular party after a specific amount of money has been raised. More complex versions of these platforms may be helpful in eventually solving the public goods problem in a decentralized manner.
8. Financial Derivatives
There are a variety of projects already developing software in the decentralized financial derivatives space, and such a platform already exists in the form of Reggie Middleton’s Veritaseum. These sorts of platforms allow users to hold the value of any real-world asset in a smart contract.
As a simple example, two parties could lock 10 bitcoins each into a smart contract, and the redistribution of those bitcoins back to the two parties would be decided by a data feed of the US dollar price. This essentially allows someone to hold US dollar value in a Bitcoin smart contract. In other words, it’s similar to the Colored Coins proposal mentioned above without the counterparty risk.
9. Data Feeds
On a related note, the data feeds required for blockchain-based financial derivative platforms to work can also be decentralized. One such proposal is known as Truthcoin, which allows users to vote on the outcome of real-world events. The correct outcome is then put onto the blockchain, so it can be used to settle bets -- or even create new assets.
These and other decentralized applications are described in more detail in the video of Arvind Narayanan’s lecture below:A new report from the TaxPayers’ Alliance and Institute of Directors claims that those disagree with them are suffering from “sexual jealousy”. The publication makes the case for an extension of austerity to the year 2020, followed by tax cuts for the rich.
But the report 417-page tome, edited by City AM editor Allister Heath (pictured above with sexy ladies), drifts off into bonkers evolutionary psychology by page 91:
“It was still the same in early agricultural societies: the man with the most corn or cattle had the most wives or concubines. And it is still true today … the man with the most money still gets more sexual opportunities than the man with the least money”
Apparently, the liberal intelligentisa object to large tax cuts because they can no longer “flirt with the best women”. We are not making this up.
“So no wonder we dislike inequality. No wonder we want tax to take that money off a Vanderbilt before he grabs all the best women.”
Pursuing the likes of TPA director Matthew Elliott evidently doesn’t leave much time to do any work: just one of their 19 commissioners is female.Bizman bashed for overtaking BJP MP's convoy
DNMUM334930 | 5/11/2015 | Author : Imran Fazal | WC :351
Mumbai: A 50-year-old businessman from Nalasopara has alleged that he was assaulted by BJP MP from Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Natubhai Gomanbhai Patel, for overtaking his cavalcade on the Mumbai-Ahmadabad Highway on late Friday night. The alleged victim, Girish Panchal, was travelling along with family in his SUV to attend a wedding ceremony in Gujarat when the incident occurred.
According to Panchal, he was driving in normal speed when at around 10.30 pm three cars belonging to the entourage of Patel stopped him near Kasa on the Mumbai-Ahmadabad Highway.
"When they started slapping me, my wife Hansa, 42, son Rahul, 20, and daughter Neha, 15, tried to stop them, following which they too were assaulted. They also smashed
Read full story Mumbai: A 50-year-old businessman from Nalasopara has alleged that he was assaulted by BJP MP from Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Natubhai Gomanbhai Patel, for overtaking his cavalcade on the Mumbai-Ahmadabad Highway on late Friday night. The alleged victim, Girish Panchal, was travelling along with family in his SUV to attend a wedding ceremony in Gujarat when the incident occurred.According to Panchal, he was driving in normal speed when at around 10.30 pm three cars belonging to the entourage of Patel stopped him near Kasa on the Mumbai-Ahmadabad Highway."When they started slapping me, my wife Hansa, 42, son Rahul, 20, and daughter Neha, 15, tried to stop them, following which they too were assaulted. They also smashed
the car's windshield," he said.
Panchal said that Patel was travelling in a BMW 7 series car, while other two vehicles in his cavalcade had police officials.
"BMW sported a red beacon, which made me take note of the vehicle number and identify that it was Patel's," he said adding that "it was for sure that they, including the MP, were all drunk".
"I didn't mean any mischief, and didn't break any rules in overtaking those vehicles. But soon the two escort vehicles stopped me and the security personnel came rushing to me. They started smashing my vehicle windows and windshield when the MP, Natubhai Patel, himself stepped out and slapped me," said Panchal.
"Since my wife and kids too were assaulted, I was left with no other option but to file a complaint with Kasa police, following which medical examinations were conducted and our statements were taken," he said.
"We were shocked when the police personnel vandalised our vehicle and we started calling out for help. Soon a crowd gathered there, but it didn't make them stop attacking us, said Rahul, son of complainant.
"We have registered a case under section 341 (wrongful restraint), 323 (voluntarily causing grievous hurt) and 427 (mischief causing damage) of the Indian Penal Code against the driver of the vehicle and are investigating further," said Ravindra Magar, in-charge of Kasa police station.
Copyright restricted. Under license from www.dnasyndication.comAnyone with children, or young relatives, will know that dining out with little ones can be a frustrating experience.
If they're not running around the entire restaurant or asking to go to the toilet as soon as the food arrives, then they're throwing a tantrum or refusing to eat their meal.
But now a Maryland restaurant has created a hilarious and very helpful children's menu that all parents will relate to because it translates common phrases such as 'I don't know what I want' and 'I'm not hungry' into meals you can order for them.
From fries for when they say 'I don't want that,' to a grilled peanut butter sandwich for when they say they don't 'care' what they eat, the menu is a godsend for any parent of fussy eaters who know what a struggle mealtimes can be.
Fager's Island restaurant in Ocean City has a children's menu which translates common phrases youngsters say at mealtimes into dishes parents can order for them
The hilarious menu is from Fager's Island, a restaurant in Ocean City, and a picture of it was posted on Reddit.
In its 'Kid Friendlies' section, its children |
2017 Ironmen team. Greg’s dynamic play and refined talent will make an instant impact to the Ironmen’s performance next year. I personally am very happy to have Greg wearing the shield again, and cannot wait to watch Greg’s and the Ironmen’s success in 2017.” – Billy Wing
Follow Greg Siewers on Instagram @gregsiewers14 and The Ironmen @teamironmen
ABOUT DYE PRECISION: Born in 1994 with one product and an athlete’s vision, Dye Precision, founded By Dave DeHaan, has grown and evolved over the past 20+ years into an industry leading company with production, design, and manufacturing warehouse facilities on 3 continents.
DYE Precision is a sports technology driven company with a wide range of industry leading products focused in Paintball and Snow Industries. Our company is known for pushing the boundaries and for unyielding quality with both product and partnerships, and has been aggressive in diversifying our product line and creative reach.
Greg Siewers, formerly of Houston Heat, Edmonton Impact, LA Infamous, LA Ironmen, XSV, Explicit, Chicago Aftershock, Aftermath, Bushwackers, Oakland Blast, NYX (and probably other teams too) has OFFICIALLY joined the LA Ironmen.
Trustworthy sources (unlike those untrustworthy ones that say Infamous) say that Greg Siewers will indeed return to the LA Ironmen in 2017. I reached out to Greg to confirm it, but he won't release a confirmation until Christmas Eve. However, I was able to confirm it directly with Dye.
This should reunite Greg with former teammate Bobby Aviles and former coach Todd Martinez.
So what do you think? Is this a good move for Greg? Greg Siewers, formerly of Houston Heat, Edmonton Impact, LA Infamous, LA Ironmen, XSV, Explicit, Chicago Aftershock, Aftermath, Bushwackers, Oakland Blast, NYX (and probably other teams too) has OFFICIALLY joined the LA Ironmen.Trustworthy sources (unlike those untrustworthy ones that say Infamous) say that Greg Siewers will indeed return to the LA Ironmen in 2017. I reached out to Greg to confirm it, but he won't release a confirmation until Christmas Eve. However, I was able to confirm it directly with Dye.This should reunite Greg with former teammate Bobby Aviles and former coach Todd Martinez.So what do you think? Is this a good move for Greg?
Your questions are answered in the PbNation FAQ. Ask a Mod.
We deserve better villains.
"I have not seen an automag shot in anger in 10 years." Tom Cole
Most of my current guns. | Pro Player Jersey Sale. | 3rd Party Services. __________________Monday afternoon, CNN released a statement in response to the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) ultimatum. In a letter to both NBC and CNN, RNC Chair Reince Priebus said that the Party will not allow either network to host primary debates if they go ahead with planned projects surrounding Hillary Clinton. In its statement, CNN said they will not cancel the planned documentary and that it would be a “disservice to voters” for the RNC not to partner with them for the debates:
CNN Films, a division of CNN Worldwide, commissioned a documentary about Hillary Clinton earlier this year. It is expected to premiere in 2014 with a theatrical run prior to airing on CNN. This documentary will be a non-fiction look at the life of a former First Lady and Secretary of State. Instead of making premature decisions about a project that is in the very early stages of development and months from completion, we would encourage the members of the Republican National Committee to reserve judgment until they know more. Should they decide not to participate in debates on CNN, we would find it curious, as limiting their debate participation seems to be the ultimate disservice to voters.
As far as CNN’s claim about a “disservice to voters,” one wonders which voters CNN is talking about. Certainly not Republican voters. For years now, and for very good reason, Republican voters have seen CNN as just another branch of the Democrat Party.
During the 2012 election, many Republicans were infuriated and questioned the judgment of an RNC that willingly allowed our candidates to have their futures put in the hands of a network that was and is so obviously enamored with Obama and the left. It was a suicide run, when these debates should be used by the RNC to help our candidates shine.
CNN was even worse during the actual presidential debates when CNN’s Candy Crowley violated the debate rules, tried to save Barack Obama from a Mitt Romney attack, and got her facts horribly wrong. This is one of the biggest gaffes in all of presidential debate history, but this one was committed by the moderator.
Earlier today, NBC News responded with the claim it had nothing to do with the network’s planned miniseries about Clinton, that will star Academy Award-nominee Diane Lane.
It is unlikely that Priebus and the RNC expected either network to back down. So the news here is all good.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNCIf the election were today, whom would you vote for, for president? FLORIDA Clinton 60% 58% 53% 30% 29% 28% Trump SEP OCT NOV ARIZONA Clinton 67% 68% 66% Trump 18% 18% 18% SEP OCT NOV NEVADA 72% Clinton 65% 65% Trump 19% 20% 19% SEP OCT NOV In the crucial swing states of Arizona and Nevada, Clinton would garner the Hispanic vote, beating Trump by an overwhelming margin. In Florida the margin is two-to-one. If the election were today, whom would you vote for, for president? FLORIDA Clinton 60% 58% 53% 30% 29% 28% Trump SEP OCT NOV ARIZONA Clinton 67% 68% 66% Trump 18% 18% 18% SEP OCT NOV NEVADA 72% Clinton 65% 65% Trump 19% 20% 19% SEP OCT NOV In the crucial swing states of Arizona and Nevada, Clinton would garner the Hispanic vote, beating Trump by an overwhelming margin. In Florida the margin is two-to-one. If the election were today, whom would you vote for, for president? FLORIDA ARIZONA Clinton Clinton 67% 60% 68% 66% 58% 53% 30% 29% 28% Trump Trump 18% 18% 18% SEP OCT NOV SEP OCT NOV NEVADA In the crucial swing states of Arizona and Nevada, Clinton would garner the Hispanic vote, beating Trump by an overwhelming margin. In Florida the margin is two-to-one. 72% Clinton 65% 65% Trump 19% 20% 19% SEP OCT NOV
The race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is red-hot in a dozen tightly contested states. And in at least two of them, Nevada and Arizona, Clinton is set to win the Hispanic vote by an overwhelming majority while she'll likely win it in Florida by a two-to-one margin, according to an exclusive new poll by Univision Noticias. The poll gives Clinton a resounding 72 percent of the Latino vote in Nevada, against 19 percent for Trump, and a 67-18 percent edge in Arizona. It also indicates the Democratic candidate would receive 60 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida while the Republican would receive 30 percent. Both candidates are making frantic last-minute efforts to capture the Florida votes.
If the election were today, who would be your choice for the Senate? FLORIDA 50% 44% Patrick Murphy Marco Rubio ARIZONA 56% 36% Ann Kirkpatrick John McCain NEVADA 67% 20% Catherine Cortez Masto Joe Heck Democratic candidates to the Senate in these three swing states are winning more Hispanic votes than their Republican rivals, including two nationally-known figures: John McCain y Marco Rubio. If the election were today, who would be your choice for the Senate? FLORIDA 50% 44% Patrick Murphy Marco Rubio ARIZONA 56% 36% Ann Kirkpatrick John McCain NEVADA 67% 20% Catherine Cortez Masto Joe Heck Democratic candidates to the Senate in these three swing states are winning more Hispanic votes than their Republican rivals, including two nationally-known figures: John McCain y Marco Rubio. If the election were today, who would be your choice for the Senate? FLORIDA ARIZONA 56% 50% 44% 36% Patrick Murphy Marco Rubio Ann Kirkpatrick John McCain NEVADA 67% Democratic candidates to the Senate in these three swing states are winning more Hispanic votes than their Republican rivals, including two nationally-known figures: John McCain y Marco Rubio. 20% Catherine Cortez Masto Joe Heck
Clinton's good standing with Hispanic voters also is favoring the three Democratic candidates to the Senate in the crucial states. The Univision Noticias poll shows the three are winning the Hispanic vote over their Republican opponents, including incumbents John McCain and Marco Rubio. If the elections were held today, Ann Kirkpatrick would win 56 percent of the Hispanic vote in Arizona and McCain would win 36 percent. Catherine Cortez Masto, hoping to become the first Hispanic woman in the senate, would win 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in Nevada and John Heck would win 20 percent. Both are running for the seat vacated by Harry Reid, a Democrat. In Florida, Patrick Murphy would win 50 percent of the Hispanic vote while Rubio, a Cuban American Republican, would win 44 percent.
If the elections in your district were today, would you support the Democratic candidate, the Republican, or some other candidate? FL AZ NV 57% 68% 67% The Democrat 32% 20% 20% The Republican 4% 4% 3% Another 7% 8% 10% Don’t know In elections for the United States House of Representatives, Hispanics in the three swing states will mostly vote for Democratic candidates. If the elections in your district were today, would you support the Democratic candidate, the Republican, or some other candidate? FL AZ NV 57% 68% 67% The Democrat 32% 20% 20% The Republican 4% 4% 3% Another 7% 8% 10% Don’t know In elections for the United States House of Representatives, Hispanics in the three swing states will mostly vote for Democratic candidates. If the elections in your district were today, would you support the Democratic candidate, the Republican, or some other candidate? FL AZ NV In elections for the United States House of Representatives, Hispanics in the three swing states will mostly vote for Democratic candidates. 57% 68% 67% The Democrat 32% 20% 20% The Republican 3% 4% 4% Another 7% 8% 10% Don’t know
In the races for the House of Representatives, a majority of the Hispanic voters in the three swing states also indicated that they will vote for Democratic candidates. That's what 57 percent said in Florida, 68 percent said in Arizona and 67 percent said in Nevada.
Which candidate is better qualified to be president? FL AZ NV 65% 66% 70% Clinton 24% 11% 12% Trump 4% 9% 8% Johnson 1% 2% 1% Stein 6% 7% 5% Don’t know Hispanic voters in the three swing states consider that Clinton is better qualified than Trump to be president. Which candidate is better qualified to be president? FL AZ NV 65% 66% 70% Clinton 24% 11% 12% Trump 4% 9% 8% Johnson 1% 2% 1% Stein 6% 7% 5% Don’t know Hispanic voters in the three swing states consider that Clinton is better qualified than Trump to be president. Which candidate is better qualified to be president? FL AZ NV Hispanic voters in the three swing states consider that Clinton is better qualified than Trump to be president. 65% 66% 70% Clinton 24% 11% 12% Trump 4% 9% 8% Johnson 1% 2% 1% Stein 6% 7% 5% Don’t know
Hispanic voters in the three swing states say Clinton has a better temperament and personality and is better prepared to be president. That's the opinion of 65 percent in Florida, 66 percent in Arizona and 70 percent in Nevada. In that category, Trump gets an anemic 11 percent and 12 percent in Arizona and Nevada, respectively, and a slightly better 24 percent in Florida.
Which candidate for president has more actively tried to win Hispanic votes? FL AZ NV 73% 81% 83% Clinton 18% 10% 10% Trump 1% 2% 1% Johnson 1% 1% 1% Stein 7% 6% 5% Don’t know Hispanic voters recognize, by a broad margin, that Clinton has more actively cultivated the Latin vote during this campaign. Which candidate for president has more actively tried to win Hispanic votes? FL AZ NV 73% 81% 83% Clinton 18% 10% 10% Trump 1% 2% 1% Johnson 1% 1% 1% Stein 7% 6% 5% Don’t know Hispanic voters recognize, by a broad margin, that Clinton has more actively cultivated the Latin vote during this campaign. Which candidate for president has more actively tried to win Hispanic votes? FL AZ NV Hispanic voters recognize, by a broad margin, that Clinton has more actively cultivated the Latin vote during this campaign. 73% 81% 83% Clinton 18% 10% 10% Trump 1% 2% 1% Johnson 1% 1% 1% Stein 7% 6% 5% Don’t know
One factor that contributed to Clinton's better image among Hispanics was her constant courting of their votes during the current campaign. Asked which of the two candidates had been most actively tried to win their votes, the overwhelming majority of respondents in all three states pointed to the Democrat.
Will the presidential election be impartial and accurate, or will it be rigged in favor of one of the candidates? FL AZ NV Impartial and accurate 68% 64% 66% Rigged for one candidate 23% 24% 23% Don’t know 9% 12% 11% Disagreeing with the claims of Donald Trump, Hispanic voters in these crucial states believe that the elections will be impartial and accurate. Will the presidential election be impartial and accurate, or will it be rigged in favor of one of the candidates? FL AZ NV Impartial and accurate 68% 64% 66% Rigged for one candidate 23% 24% 23% Don’t know 9% 12% 11% Disagreeing with the claims of Donald Trump, Hispanic voters in these crucial states believe that the elections will be impartial and accurate. Will the presidential election be impartial and accurate, or will it be rigged in favor of one of the candidates? FL AZ NV Disagreeing with the claims of Donald Trump, Hispanic voters in these crucial states believe that the elections will be impartial and accurate. Impartial and accurate 68% 64% 66% Rigged for one candidate 23% 24% 23% Don’t know 9% 12% 11%
In contrast to Trump's repeated complaints, the majority of the Hispanic voters surveyed in the three states also said they do not believe that the balloting next week will be “rigged.” Asked if the balloting will be impartial and honest, 68 percent in Florida, 64 percent in Arizona and 66 percent in Nevada said YES.
Are you in favor of or against the amendment regulating the use of marihuana in Arizona? In favor Against 48% 48% Don’t know 4% In Arizona, Hispanics are divided as to whether the use of marihuana should be authorized in that state. Are you in favor or against the amendment regulating the use of marihuana in Nevada? In favor Against 55% 40% Don’t know 5% By contrast, a clear majority will vote in favor of its regulated use in Nevada. Are you in favor or against the medicinal use of marihuana in Florida? In favor Against 66% 30% Don’t know 4% And almost seven out of every 10 will vote in favor of its medicinal use in Florida. Are you in favor of or against the amendment regulating the use of marihuana in Arizona? In favor Against 48% 48% Don’t know 4% In Arizona, Hispanics are divided as to whether the use of marihuana should be authorized in that state. Are you in favor or against the amendment regulating the use of marihuana in Nevada? In favor Against 55% 40% Don’t know 5% By contrast, a clear majority will vote in favor of its regulated use in Nevada. Are you in favor or against the medicinal use of marihuana in Florida? In favor Against 66% 30% Don’t know 4% And almost seven out of every 10 will vote in favor of its medicinal use in Florida. Are you in favor of or against the amendment regulating the use of marihuana in Arizona? In Arizona, Hispanics are divided as to whether the use of marihuana should be authorized in that state. In favor Against 48% 48% Don’t know 4% Are you in favor or against the amendment regulating the use of marihuana in Nevada? By contrast, a clear majority will vote in favor of its regulated use in Nevada. In favor Against 55% 40% Don’t know 5% Are you in favor or against the medicinal use of marihuana in Florida? And almost seven out of every 10 will vote in favor of its medicinal use in Florida. In favor Against 66% 30% Don’t know 4%
The poll also surveyed Hispanic voters in the three states on ballot proposals to legalize the recreational or medicinal use of marijuana. Voters in Arizona were evenly split, 48-48, on their marijuana proposal, with 4 percent undecided. Nevada voters favored a proposal there 55-40 percent, with 5 percent undecided. And in Florida, an overwhelming 66 percent of Hispanic voters favored approving the medicinal use of marijuana. Only 30 percent opposed the measure and 4 percent remain undecided.
How likely is it that a Hispanic person will be elected President of the US in the next 20 years? FL AZ NV Likely 85% 83% 84% Unlikely 10% 13% 11% Don’t know 5% 4% 5% Hispanic voters in these key states feel highly optimistic that a Hispanic person will be elected president in the next 20 years. How likely is it that a Hispanic person will be elected President of the US in the next 20 years? FL AZ NV Likely 85% 83% 84% Unlikely 10% 13% 11% Don’t know 5% 4% 5% Hispanic voters in these key states feel highly optimistic that a Hispanic person will be elected president in the next 20 years. How likely is it that a Hispanic person will be elected President of the US in the next 20 years? FL AZ NV Hispanic voters in these key states feel highly optimistic that a Hispanic person will be elected president in the next 20 years. Likely 85% 83% 84% Unlikely 10% 13% 11% Don’t know 5% 4% 5%
The United States elected its first African American president in 2008, and now Clinton is hoping to become the first woman president. So it's not hard to understand why many Hispanic voters in Florida, Arizona and Nevada are optimistic that the first Hispanic president will be elected in the next 20 years. That was the hope of 85 percent of the Hispanics in Florida, 84 percent in Nevada and 83 percent in Arizona.
The exclusive survey was carried out by the Democratic polling firm Bendixen & Amandi and the Republican polling firm The Tarrance Group for Univision Noticias and the Washington Post between Oct. 26 and 30. They polled 800 registered Hispanic voters in Florida, 600 in Arizona and another 600 in Nevada. The margin of error was 3.5 percent for the Florida results and 4 percent for the results in the two other states.You’ve made it into Harvard Law. The hard part is over. In a packed Memorial Hall, Dean Martha Minow recites the remarkable and diverse achievements of your peers. The future, you are told, will be even brighter.
But fast forward just a few months and the mood is hardly optimistic. Overwhelmingly, students say that they “have to“ work at a corporate law firm. That they are afraid of unemployment. That they will never pay off their loans. That the legal market, that their parents, that that that.
Can anything explain this violent shift? Was Harvard insincere in promising a world of professional opportunity, or is the 1L experience of desperation, pressure and job scarcity entirely contrived?
If Dean Minow spoke with hopeful assurance at orientation, the Office of Career Services quickly retorted with fear. As early as November, every 1L began to receive two kinds of emails from OCS: alarmist ones (“In the professional jungle, you won’t be helping your career very much by putting your head in the sand and avoiding these events.” November 3, 2011) and normative, culture-shifting ones (“You’ve decided that you’re going to participate in EIP… Now what?” March 19).
No wonder it didn’t feel like much of a decision.
In just a few months, the change in messaging was loud and clear. Your impressions of a legal career were naïve. Your time of passionate and inspiring work has passed. Harvard Law students join big firms. And they join them promptly.
A group of us began meeting regularly to discuss this silent transformation—silent because students refuse to ask their peers why they’ve changed their minds so quickly. Recognizing that we suffer as a community from such self-censorship, and heartened by more senior students, we decided to start a broader dialogue.
We began with posters that highlighted some of the empty rationales students employ to justify their enrollment in EIP: I don’t really want to, I’m just doing it to pay off my loans; just for a few years, then I’ll do what I really want to do; I’m just doing it because I heard they have a great training program. Such statements, frequently heard, but infrequently challenged, capture the desperation that contrasts so starkly with Dean Minow’s buoyant reception.
Our first event, “Real Talk Re: EIP,” proved that the lack of conversation is not for lack of interest: we ran out of seats in a 60-person classroom. The lunch event was billed merely as an opportunity for 1Ls to discuss their thoughts and opinions on EIP. To critically evaluate where they get their information about EIP. To ask whether EIP promotes a culture of choice or consent. To ask, in short: what happened between orientation and now?
In the rare event that a thoughtful conversation emerges about EIP, students usually justify their choice to interview by uncritically reciting an established set of reasons for joining a firm. For example, students claim they need to pay off their loans, but HLS has one of the most generous repayment programs in the country. Students also claim they’re joining a firm just for the training—but training for what? Corporate transaction work, years of document review and less courtroom experience than LRW are hardly training for a career outside of corporate law. Otherwise bright and opinionated students make pivotal career decisions based on inaccurate, privately held and therefore unchallenged assumptions.
In light of such information scarcity, recruiting students to sign up for a funneling system after only two semesters of law school—often during their second semester of law school—is coercive. Second semester 1Ls have been locked out of all clinical opportunities and allowed to choose only one elective class. After these students are denied any relevant professional experience, they are told to enroll in a lottery-based interview system for employers and work that they know little about.
By minimizing both relevant experience and volition, HLS has created a process that encourages students to cast aside long-held professional (and personal) aspirations while making premature, uninformed and fear-driven decisions. Similarly, requiring 2Ls to reject all but one firm offer by November 1st—far before most public interest jobs are solidified—unnecessarily exploits the reasonable fear most students have about turning down a job offer.
As firms wrestle to move their recruiting dates earlier and earlier, Harvard Law School must take a stand. It must, if you will, firmly refuse. Refuse to let fear and intimidation pressure students into foreclosing their professional ambitions. Refuse to let firm recruiting overshadow the educational experience of law school. Refuse to ignore the personal, professional and moral about-face that takes place during 1L year. HLS and OCS have a responsibility to respond with more than complicity as, year after year, 1Ls undergo this silent transformation.
Still, the blame for our silent transformation—and our lack of agency—cannot rest solely on the administration’s shoulders. We are willfully blind to the privilege that comes with attending Harvard Law School. And we are all too willing to scalp our sense of agency and morality to the highest bidder. An HLS degree provides incredible personal and professional opportunity. With such opportunity comes a commanding ethical responsibility—one we cannot renounce for a myopic, monetary brand of success.
Given the complexity of these decisions, we are in dire need of a more honest and informed dialogue. When can we discuss whom firms actually defend, why document review is good training or how little time associates spend with their families? When can we acknowledge the silent transformation that takes place during 1L, as students struggle to forget what brought them to law school and come to peace with a life they never pictured living? When can we discuss the coercive, premature and fear-based funneling system called EIP? Can we, at the very least, talk about it?
Firmly Refuse is a campaign initiated by Harvard Law students.
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CommentsPhil Spencer, the president of Xbox, has confirmed that there will be support for Xbox One Scorpio virtual reality, bringing another formerly Playstation-exclusive product to the upcoming 4K Xbox console. However, Spencer has also said that he thinks that the best platform to run virtual reality was the PC.
Spencer, a notable PC gaming fan, probably wouldn’t surprise many people with an assertion like this. PC gamers often assert that the PC is best for gaming due to its modularity and the better potential for state-of-the-art visuals. However, the Playstation VR has begun competition with the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, both of which were PC-exclusive VR headsets.
Whether Microsoft will unveil an Xbox One Scorpio virtual reality headset remains to be seen, but we will get an official unveiling of the Scorpio at this year’s E3, where the console’s price will also be revealed. If anything about an Xbox-specific virtual reality headset comes up, it’ll be there, in June.
Xbox unveiled the Xbox Scorpio specifications on Monday, showing off how powerful the console will be when it releases sometime this holiday. In the meantime, for now all we can do is wait and see how Microsoft gives us more information in the meantime.
Hopefully, with Xbox One Scorpio virtual reality support, the headset that Microsoft comes up with will be just as good as the Playstation VR, if not better. With virtual reality slowly gaining ground in the gaming world, and with the Scorpio being more powerful than both of Playstation’s consoles, virtual reality on the Scorpio has the potential to be some of the best.
Of course, it could also end up being something like the Kinect, which was a good idea in practice but ended up being much maligned by most of the Xbox’s audience. Hopefully it won’t be.This post summarizes the Neon Exchange whitepaper (as of v1.1, 23 Nov 2017 publication) and evaluates the project based on a number of criteria listed below. The details here do not constitute any investment recommendations and is purely for informational purposes. Subscribe below or follow me on Twitter for more of this.
Summary
NEX is a cryptocurrency exchange built on the NEO platform that combines the high performance of a traditional centralized exchange with the trust and security of a decentralized exchange. NEX uses three core components: 1) Provable fair off-chain order matching, 2) Batched on-chain trade commitment, and 3) Token exchange layer. The ultimate vision is to enable decentralized banking by offering not only trading but general secure asset management.
NEO’s “killer” asset exchange DApp
Evaluation
Criteria Score /10 Team 9 Partnerships 5 Technology 8 Economics 9 OVERALL 7.75
Important Dates:
Feb 2018: Open source ICO platform with KYC
Q1 2018: ICO takes place
Team
Co-founders are all CoZ (City of Zion), a talented community of independent NEO developers mostly based in Europe and the US. Canesin and Fast in particular are both active in the NEO communication channels and readily answer questions.
CoZ team with proven record of execution and existing working relationship with NEO core team
Partnerships
NEO — Smart contracts and trade commitments are on the NEO blockchain Fiat processing — Anticipated partnerships for allowing fiat use
No partners announced thus far aside from NEO
Technology
Off-chain Order Matching Dedicated service that handles the order book and order matching Orders are matched using a deterministic algorithm (price-time) Elixir/Erlang stack Uses a network of independent “supervisor services” that monitor the order matching engine, as well as each other, to detect suspicious behavior “Provable fair off-chain matching” — public ledger of orders, deterministic matching algorithm, and reward for proving incorrect matches No fees for liquidity making (resting orders), graduated fees (up to 0.25%, based on activity) for liquidity taking (trades against resting orders)
On-chain Trade Commitments Trades from off-chain order matching are batched and committed to on-chain smart contract Performance can theoretically be up to 100k txs per second
Token Exchange Layer NEO uses UTXO which allows for fast node tx verification but hard for smart contracts to interact with NEO and GAS global on-chain assets; hence need to convert global assets into NEP-5 standard for fast processing Smart contract that exchanges global assets 1:1 with NEP-5 smart contract tokens Users deposit global assets (eg. NEO or GAS) which allows them to trade with equivalent NEP-5 asset (eg. XNEO or XGAS) Users can withdraw as many global assets as they have of the equivalent NEP-5 asset
User account private keys stored encrypted and client-side
Holy grail of trading exchange — performance + trust + security
Economics
50 million NEX tokens
25 million sold to public
Individual cap (initial thoughts $5-10k)
Stake tokens to get a share of revenue; can choose length of staking time for higher return
Simple and straightforward token allocation with staking details to be clarified
Q&A
Q: Off-chain order matcher gets compromised. Trades are executed not according to price-time precedence. User gets to withdraw their assets. How to avoid?
A: A network of “supervisor services” monitor the order matching engine, as well as each other, to detect suspicious behavior
Q: How do NEX internal NEP-5 equivalents of outside global assets get supported?
A: NEP-4 allows for dynamic calling of undefined smart contracts, so any trading pair can be declared if valid
Q: Presale?
A: There is no pre-sale, we only are accepting partnerships with business that have licenses to do fiat to crypto pairs in main crypto markets.
Q: How to buy?
A: Fiat pairs will be launched together with the open source of the fiat system right before the ICO time, NEX itself will not do the fiat, we will have an innovative technology using partnerships and smart contracts.
Q: ICO caps?
A: ICO will happen, there will be an individual cap, it will be low for ICO standards and the goal is to have the most people we can participating.
Like this post? Upvote on Steem to keep ‘em coming
Tip jar for my personal NEX fund:Ultra Music Festival Miami 2016 (UMF) gathered yet another enthusiastic crowd this year ready to get their party on with a lineup of the world’s greatest DJs to kick off the start of festival season. UMF Miami is known for awesome live performances, and gives attendants a first listen to a ton of new track premieres.
Listen To Live Sets From Ultra Music Festival Miami 2016 Day 3
With all the killer sets jam packed into three days its hard to pick a top favorite list; we know! So we took a shot, and made a list of our favorites for all you guys to enjoy. Here is our handpicked top 5 sets from Ultra Music Festival Miami 2016.
Martin Garrix
Martin Garrix was honored to close the Ultra main stage day 1 Friday night (March 18). It’s hard to believe this rising young talent is only 19, and continues to accomplish great things is dance music. A long way come since when he first burst onto the scene with “Animals” in 2013. Garrix’s hyped up the arrival of his set, and met that hype when he played tons of new music that we are hoping will be IDed very soon (Martin Garrix UMF IDs). Garrix had an incredible production vision to display during his live set through lights and visuals that would continuously change thorough his set to match the tone of the music. The crowd soaked up every minute of his set, and so were everyone at home who tuned into the #UltraLive stream making his set a must add to our top 5 picks.
Zedd
Boy oh boy did Zedd play a spectacular set at the Ultra main stage day 3 Sunday night (March 20). Opening with his 2012 original “Spectrum” drew in the crowd to prepare for a musical adventure as he ventured through an amazing mixture between a Clarity of True Colors and hit singles. Zedd brought the energy with hits from True Colors like “Beautiful Now” and oldies but goodies like “Stay The Night” that had the crowd singing along from front to back. He event dropped his new release “Candyman” featuring Aloe Blacc that was a crowd pleaser. You will be sure to enjoy this one.
Slander
LA duo Slander spread #GudVibrations throughout Ultra worldwide stage day 1 on Friday night (March 18) as they filled the air with an electrifying trap set that set the crowd on fire. The even brought their homie NGHTMARE out on stage to drop a couple hits with them. Slander posted on their social media that performing at Ultra was a dream of theirs for a while now that finally came true making it a surreal and life-changing moment they will always be thankful for the support they received. Rock out with Slander as you replay their live set that absolutely played the worldwide stage.
Alison Wonderland
Hailing from Australia Alison Wonderland took the Ultra worldwide stage day 1 on Friday night (March 18) for the next inspirational trap set of the night that absolutely rocked the house. Hot off her debut album release Run in 2015 Alison Wonderland has been blasting her way to the top of the dance music scene with originals that express her emotions and free spirit in the form of infectious beats and groovy rhythms like “Already Gone” featuring Brave & Lido and “U Don’t Know” featuring Wayne Coyne. It was a great moment to see Alison Wonderland drop to her knees mid set to give her thanks for the positive energy the crowd was feeding her as she looked out to take in the draw-dropping moment. If you haven’t heard her before check her out here, and after listening just go ahead and mark yourself down as a new fan.
https://soundcloud.com/ultra2016/alison-wonderland-live-ultra-music-festival-2016-day-1?in=umf_2015/sets/ultra-music-festival-2016-day
Julian Jordan
Dutch DJ/producer Julian Jordan is a must watch rising new talent who is creating his own hype within the dance music scene. Welcoming Julian Jordan for the first time to the Ultra main stage day one Friday (March 18) he brought an incredible live performance for his set that continued to evolve with layers of sounds and beats that gathered an impressive day crowd to his set. He is a free spirit within the industry releasing tracks on various labels as he explores them all, and is also good friends with Martin Garrix where you will find some of his originals released to Garrix’s new label as well. Garrix played a collaboration the two of them work working on during his set… Can you ID which one it is? Listen to Julian Jordan’s live set that brings a fresh spin to dance music as we know it, and continue to listen to him blow up the scene in the coming future.
BONUS SET: Knife Party B2B Pendulum
Ultra goes hard all the way till the very last set. Closing out the third and final day of Ultra on the main stage on Sunday night (March 20) was Knife Party B2B with Pendulum who performed an 80 minute set to bring the festival to a full throttle close. If you don’t know, Knife Party is an Australian duo consisting of two members Rob Swire and Gareth McGrillen who are originally members from the drum and bass band Pendulum. Anticipations were met when Pendulum arrived to begin their set by opening with their classic 2010 track “The Island” that filled the hearts of many with a live original performance. They even brought out Deadmau5 to perform his 2004 hit “Ghost n’ Stuff” featuring Rob Swire on the vocals. The ultimate throwback moments. Here is a closing set that will go down in Ultra history. Way to save the best for last Ultra.
https://soundcloud.com/tm-radio-mixes/sets/ultra-music-festival-miami-2
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consider the gold foil an obstruction.
One of them, Madam Sally Lee, 53, said: "It's aesthetically pleasing and it's something new."
Mr Quinn Lum, 24, an art, design and media student from Nanyang Technological University, visited the site over two days to document the work by capturing photos of people who visited the golden staircase.
He said: "This is a great opportunity for the art scene to prosper and it's quite phenomenal. I like how it provokes conversation and encourages artists to express themselves."
Miss Ho Si Hui, 21, a member of Band of Doodlers, a local group of artists, thought the concept was creative.
She said: "I don't necessarily define this act as art or vandalism. If it's to offend, it's vandalism. But art is when you show off anything that's beautiful."A long-awaited UN report has detailed horrific abuses committed in Sri Lanka's civil war and said the country needed international help to probe the crimes to enable reconciliation.
"A purely domestic court procedure will have no chance of overcoming widespread and justifiable suspicions fuelled by decades of violations, malpractice and broken promises," UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said in a statement, calling for "a hybrid special court, integrating international judges, prosecutors, lawyers and investigators".
Tens of thousands of people went missing in Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war, the UN report said, suggesting "enforced disappearance" was part of a systematic policy.
The UN's human rights agency said "the phenomenon of enforced disappearance has affected tens of thousands of Sri Lankans for decades during all stages of the armed conflict," which ended in 2009.
Justice promised
Sri Lanka promised to deliver justice for the crimes committed during the nation's civil war.
The foreign ministry stopped short, however, of directly addressing the UN's proposal to set up the court to prosecute those from the government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels suspected of atrocities.
"The government of Sri Lanka will ensure dialogue and wide consultations with all stakeholders... in putting in place mechanisms and measures that will facilitate the right to know, right to justice, reparations and guaranteeing non-recurrence with the aim of achieving reconciliation and durable peace," the ministry said in a statement to Reuters news agency.
It also said that the report's recommendations would "receive due attention of the relevant authorities, including the new mechanisms that are envisaged to be set up".We were definitely charmed when Liam Payne and Cheryl Cole gave their baby boy an adorable We were definitely charmed when Liam Payne and Cheryl Cole gave their baby boy an adorable animal-inspired name (which is actually the same one Chef Jamie Oliver opted for) and while it’s somewhat unique, it may become more and more common, as it’s right in line with the current most popular baby naming trend. However, it’ll take a lot to top Zooey Deschanel, who just welcomed a baby boy and gave him a name that is just as animal-inspired as the moniker she gave to her sweet daughter.
Back in 2015, the actress, who had just married film producer Jacob Pechenik, welcomed a baby girl into the world and named her Back in 2015, the actress, who had just married film producer Jacob Pechenik, welcomed a baby girl into the world and named her Elsie Otter. Elsie OTTER. So cute! Honestly, who doesn’t love otters?!
Now that the family has grown again, 37-year-old Zooey (who has her own quirky name, tbh) and her hubby have decided to name their new son Charlie Wolf. Charlie WOLF. So wild!
We have to wonder if he’ll be friends with little Bear Payne. C’mon parents, make this play-date happen ASAP.
What do you think about the animal-inspired baby name trend? Let us know @BritandCo!
(h/t (h/t ET ; photo via Frederick M. Brown/Getty)Kazuchika Okada
Promotion Win % Draw % Loss % AJPW/NJPW 1 (100.00%) 0 (0.00%) 0 (0.00%) CHIKARA 1 (100.00%) 0 (0.00%) 0 (0.00%) CMLL/NJPW 16 (51.61%) 0 (0.00%) 15 (48.39%) JAPW 0 (0.00%) 0 (0.00%) 1 (100.00%) N/A 1 (100.00%) 0 (0.00%) 0 (0.00%) NJPW 422 (40.42%) 7 (0.67%) 615 (58.91%) NJPW/RevPro 1 (25.00%) 0 (0.00%) 3 (75.00%) NOAH 0 (0.00%) 0 (0.00%) 2 (100.00%) NWE 0 (0.00%) 0 (0.00%) 7 (100.00%) RevPro 2 (100.00%) 0 (0.00%) 0 (0.00%) ROH 3 (42.86%) 0 (0.00%) 4 (57.14%) ROH/NJPW 6 (40.00%) 0 (0.00%) 9 (60.00%) TNA 2 (28.57%) 0 (0.00%) 5 (71.43%) TOTAL 455 (40.52%) 7 (0.62%) 661 (58.86%)
Type Win % Draw % Loss % PPV 40 (53.33%) 1 (1.33%) 34 (45.33%) Non-PPV 415 (39.60%) 6 (0.57%) 627 (59.83%)
the Wrestlers with Highest Win Percentages series of record lists.
this page (http://www.profightdb.com/winlossrecord/kazuchika-okada-4866.html)
the Internet Wrestling Database homepage (www.profightdb.com)
When using information on this webpage elsewhere, please include a link to either of the following:Thanks!Does Rupert Murdoch Have Kindle Envy? News Corp. Mulls an E-Book Reader Investment.
Here’s yet another fan of the Kindle, Amazon’s (AMZN) much-hyped e-book reader: News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who likes the device enough that he’s considering investing in a Kindle rival.
At a Q&A at the cable industry’s annual show today, Murdoch waxed on about the Kindle’s qualities, then made a reference to investing in a machine that could be even more attractive–one that boasted a large, full-color screen. I was covering the event live [original story below], and these are my notes from the relevant part of his chat. Please bear in mind that this is a very rough paraphrase, from notes I was taking in real time:
We need new models. The first inkling of it is the Kindle. You can get the whole paper there. And you can get the whole of The Wall Street Journal on your BlackBerry. We’re investing in a new device that has a bigger screen, four-color, and you can get everything there. [Did I just hear that correctly?]
After the event, I checked in with a News Corp. spokesperson, who confirmed that I hadn’t been hallucinating: News Corp. is indeed in “exploratory” talks about making an investment in a company working on e-reader technologies.
Who might that be? No guidance there. Plastic Logic, based in Mountain View, Calif., has been working on a reader with a 8.5 by 11-inch screen for several years. But that company has already raised $200 million from investors, including Intel (INTC) and Oak Investment Partners. And its device, scheduled to hit the market in 2010, will feature a black-and-white screen that uses the same E Ink technology that the Kindle and Sony’s (SNE) Reader use.
Another option: Rival publisher Hearst, which has plans for its own Kindle. But Hearst’s unnamed reader will initially be a black-and-white affair as well.
Anyone have any other possibilities? You can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com. Or if you want to be completely anonymous, which is understandable but less useful to me (I won’t have any way of reaching you for follow-up) you can use the blind tip box here.
EARLIER:
This year’s cable show seems lightly attended, but folks are are buzzing here about Bob Iger’s comments this morning, where the Disney (DIS) CEO alternately tried to placate and challenge the industry with his online plans. I’ve got high hopes for this one, too, a keynote speech from News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch, who will then take a seat and chat with three fellow CEOs: Time Warner’s (TWX) Jeff Bewkes, Viacom’s (VIA) Philippe Dauman, and Liberty Global’s Michael Fries.
Moderating the discussion: Murdoch employee Neil Cavuto, who does anchor work at both Fox News and Fox Business (and since this Web site is owned by Dow Jones, I’m a Murdoch employee, too).
I’ll be covering the Q&A live, which means that any text you read below is an on-the-fly attempt to paraphrase the speakers on stage–unless it’s in quotes, which represent my best attempt to get the words verbatim.
Starts with Q&A with Murdoch.
NC: Are things getting better?
RM: I think the long-term situation is still extremely dangerous. I’m pessimistic because every family is poorer and they’re going to save more and spend less. Even more dangerous if the government throws too much money at the problem:
NC: What if you’re wrong?
RM: “I pray I am”
NC: Markets are up in reaction to G20 plan. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about (re too much spending from Congress, etc.)
RM: I’ve never seen any money from the World Bank that’s done much good. Maybe the IMF should be recapitalized. But it doesn’t matter, because none of the money will come back to the U.S. “I would say it’s a bear market still. We’re not going back to the old levels anytime soon. We’re two or three years away.”
NC: What about the economy?
RM: May get better in a year. “I walk around the streets of New York, and all I see is “to let” signs everywhere.” Space we rented for $80 a foot on Sixth Avenue is now $60 a square foot. On our business in general: Advertising is flowing out of the big networks, but our cable advertising is up. “They’re in good shape, and we’re very happy to have a number of them.”
NC: They are rioting in London against capitalism “they’re rioting against success…they don’t like rich people. Are you offended?”
RM: No. There’s only about 4,000 of them. “Makes good television, someone with blood on their face…but it’s greatly overstated.” I have had worse problems when I had strikes 20 years ago.
NC: So you don’t buy this sort of “new global class warfare.”
RM: It’s very dangerous. “We all know in the last two or three years there have been notable headline-grabbing excesses, in this country and in Europe, despite what the Europeans are saying, and we’re paying for that.” But I don’t think we’re going to have class warfare. “We do need an SEC that’s awake,” in part so we don’t have work with the French and their regulators.
NC: Everyone’s piling on the U.S. What does that mean for the U.S.?
RM: I don’t care what the French say. “But when the Chinese speak, I pay some notice.” The Chinese don’t want us in an inflationary situation, or they won’t lend us money.
NC: President Obama talked about working with the rest of the world. Is Washington saying that “we are this big global powerhouse together”?
RM: It’s very nice for the President to say that, but I don’t think Bush ever did that. He was talking to world leaders every day. He wasn’t as articulate about it as Obama. But “we’re the big boy on the block” so naturally people are jealous, but we better remain “damned sure” that we remain the big boy.
NC: But we owe everyone lots of money.
RM: That’s what worries me. I worry that we’re going to start printing lots of money, we’ll have runaway inflation.
NC: You just said Obama is brilliant. Your companies “have a reputation for being slightly more conservative than he is.”
RM: “We’re fair and balanced.”
NC: “Absolutely.”
RM: The monolithic liberal press complains when they don’t get a corner of the world; “if they want to smear you, or me, that’s fine.” Re Obama: “I’ve had a couple of very charming conversations with him.” He talks about how pragmatic he is. “We’ll see.” So far, a couple of little tests have been disappointing. With regard to Teamsters and school vouchers in Washington.
NC: So you’re saying he has a reputation for being pragmatic, but he isn’t. And he doesn’t seem to like Wall Street either.
RM: “That’s putting it too strongly” I think it offends him to see people making $200 million dollars a year, or whatever it is.
NC: Taxes are going up for the wealthy.
RM: Yes. So “we’ll go live in Texas.” It’s serious. a 60 percent tax rate is going up. Not just the federal taxes, but states, and counties. My Long Island house “is not very big at all” but what Nassau charges for taxes is enormous. The bill has gone up from $3,000 to $7,000 or $8,000. “I’m trying to sell my house.”
NC: You’re a newspaper guy. Newspapers as a physical product are dying. San Francisco may not have a paper at all soon. What do you think of that?
RM: “It’s sad. But let’s face it. San Francisco is a pretty small area. And there’s some pretty good papers in that area,” and they’re not folding. “People are getting used to getting everything on the net for nothing. That’s going to have to change.” Take the New York Times. No matter what you’re going to say about it, it has a very very good Web site. But it’s never going to make enough money to cover what it’s losing on the print side. The question is: “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights? Just take them? Not just Google but all the aggregators? Yahoo? And I feel that if you have a brand that’s strong enough, like the New York Times, they should be able to go to Google and say ‘no.'” So when you go to search on Google, it doesn’t show up. But there’s only 10 or 15 of those, probably.
We need new models. The first inkling of it is the Kindle. You can get the whole paper there. And you can get the whole of The Wall Street Journal on your BlackBerry. We’re investing in a new device that has a bigger screen, four-color, and you can get everything there. [Did I just hear that correctly?]
[Time to bring on the other panelists]
PD: “If I may, I’d just like to say bon jour to Rupert.”
NC: Philippe Dauman, you said you’re seeing some positivity in your business. Where?
PD: Theater sales are healthy. Cable is OK. Saw some deterioration in ad sales, but in last few weeks, we’re seeing some plateauing. On the kids’ cable channel upfront, we’re starting to do well. “There are some advertisers that are increasing their spend. They’re healthy, and they see an opportunity to expand market share. Advertising works, even for banks.”
Jeff Bewkes: We’re pretty much seeing the same thing. Advertising for print is down, cable is very strong. AOL, “not so strong.” The problem is that outside the U.S., growth rates have come down, and financial problems are much worse. “But I think it’s short-term” so we’re still investing. Invested in Eastern Europe.
Michael Fries: We’re doing OK, too. Cable isn’t immune, but we’re selling products people need. Our Eastern European markets aren’t doing great, but fundamentally we’re still growing. We’re still growing through this. Since we’re not ad-supported, we’re not having down markets or down quarters. In some of our markets, there will be some consolidation, and we can get some of our competitors out of the way.
[Missed a section on broadband and infrastructure outside the U.S. Apologies]
NC: You have great content but on the Web, but many people don’t pay for it. What can you do about that? Do you have to do deals with the likes of Hulu, and get pennies on the dollar instead of giving it away?
PD: There’s a middle ground we’re trying to follow. Consumer behavior changes, revenue models have to change, too. We put a lot of content on line, we also do a lot “windowing.” Some content like news goes online right away, and the “Daily Show.” That’s on Hulu. But you do get incremental monetization “if you do it right.” “Daily Show” ratings are up since we went on Hulu. We have to experiment and see what we can do to enhance the experience.
MF: Content doesn’t follow eyeballs. Content follows money. Content providers want first and foremost to get paid. Consumers want random access to content. They want high-quality content. I like the idea [i.e., to put all their stuff online] that Time Warner and Comcast is promoting “is a no-brainer.” Online now has a negligible impact on TV, so right now it’s something we can get a hold off.
RM: It varies from show to show. A good show can get improved ratings over time, via the DVR. Like “24.” A lot of stuff that’s DVR’d is played that evening. “There’s no loyalty to audiences at all. There’s loyalty to certain shows.”
NC: Journalists are moving to the Web, but they’re not going to get paid as much on the Web [yup]. Point being: Aren’t authors and artists who produce work for the Web, or the Kindle, going to get screwed?
PD: No. You can charge lower prices but you have lower costs. If you have a secure download-to-own business, you can protect revenues for everyone.
NC: But generally, don’t all content creators have to realize that their content is worth less?
JB: This is the cable convention. Rupert’s right about not having loyalty to broadcast networks. But there is, or at least different identities, on cable. The broadcast business has its challenges, as we know. But the cable channels have the most value and the most future….This industry can now deliver all our great stuff on broadband, and over mobile. [Rambling here but basically Bewkes is repitching his “TV everywhere” idea] “We’re not trying to make the Internet not free. We’re just saying that if you use it for free, you ought to get what you have in your home….Look how slow we’re being. We’re all being too slow to put all these channels and put them broadband….We ought to do it, and we ought to do it now….Put it on the Hulus and YouTubes if you need too, but only if people are subscribing to the cable plans. You can’t just blow up the financial structure….We ought to be taking the advertising model from cable networks and moving it over to broadband.”
NC: That isn’t what I was asking about. What about us content creators?
PD: “We treat creators of content really well.”
JB: “Yeah.”
PD: Back to Bewkes’s plan. People get the advertising model.
RM: People are used to the free content being free, and “the fact is that nobody’s making money with the free content on the Web, except for search.” We’ve got to find a way to charge.
MF: This notion that we’ll figure out how to pay for something, someday, is wrong. There’s value in aggregators and editors, and people go to Fox News because they know what they’re getting. “We have a generation below this lost generation that we can capture and retain, if this industry does it right.”
JB: Hey, want to see what that looks like? [Now it’s time for Bewkes to run a promo, literally for HBO. “HBO GO.” The “coolest way to watch HBO on your computer….If you have the key, it’s free.” I am assuming that this is a mock ad for a product that Bewkes would like to exist–HBO OnDemand, online.
JB: I apologize for running a commercial.
PD: That works well for pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime and our new channel. Not sure about other channels.
NC: Let’s say our recession/depression lingers for a while “a real protracted type of a deal.” What then for entertainment?
JB: It will hold up.
NC: What about advertising?
JB: Less.
PD: It will be slow, but we’ll get through it. We have to plan for the possibility that it will be bad for a long time. You spend less, you have to be careful about not spending on things that aren’t you core brands, and acquisitions, and that can be self-defeating. We’re dependent on Washington in some ways, but what we really need are the credit markets to work again.
MF: Bingo.
NC: How has recession affected you personally? Do you change the way you display your wealth, or your own personal behavior?
JB: [Sitting next to Murdoch] “I tend to sit next to people who are richer than me.”
PD: Hotel managers are beside themselves because no one has business meetings, and then they have to fire working class people. But I think this “populist surge” about abuses will pass. “We’re going through an extreme period, and this is a country that still values entrepreneurial behavior.”
[Panel is over.]Jun 26, 2015; Sunrise, FL, USA; A general view of the NHL shield logo before the first round of the 2015 NHL Draft at BB&T Center. Mandatory Credit: Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports
The Rangers have found success in finding free agents in college, juniors and overseas in recent history. Here are some players the Rangers can target this year.
It’s no secret that the New York Rangers prospect pool is thin, and their AHL roster is even thinner. This has mostly been due to the fact that the Rangers have not had a first round pick since 2012. In recent years, the Rangers have had to look outside of the draft to bolster their youth development.
Fortunately, they have also been successful in this venture. Recent signings like Jimmy Vesey and Kevin Hayes have worked out tremendously for the Rangers, giving them young, talented NHL players at almost no expense. Signings like John Gilmour and Ahti Oksanen also add youthful potential to the Wolfpack.
NHL ready veteran talent can also been found, in such examples like Alexander Radulov signing with Montreal, or Artemi Panarin with Chicago. Finding these hidden weapons, especially if they can be had on entry level contracts, is incredibly valuable to building a championship caliber team.
On that note, here are some players the Rangers can target this year:
Zach Aston-Reese, F Northeastern University (32GP, 27G 29A 56P)
Zach Aston-Reese is a forward who has improved statistically with Northeastern each year, culminating in a highly productive senior year. Second in the NCAA in scoring, the 22 year old Staten Island native can be a valuable addition to the Rangers organization should they encounter cap difficulties amongst their forwards.
Aston-Reese projects as a bottom six two way forward with some offensive potential. Though the Rangers are deep in that area, players like that are always smart to retain in an organization, whether it be for the NHL team or as AHL projects.
Mike Vecchione, F, Union College (32GP, 24G 30A 54P)
Mike Vecchione has been gaining a lot of attention this season as a versatile forward for Union College. The fan favorite Vecchione is a hard working, gritty-despite-his-size scoring forward. His play style is similar to former Rangers captain Ryan Callahan.
Should the Rangers take a chance on the 23 year old Vecchione, he would most likely begin on the Wolfpack and work his way up the ranks based on performance. Putting a true projection on him is difficult; he has top six potential, but his style allows him to slot into just about any role.
Denis Smirnov, F, Penn State (28GP, 16G 23A 39P)
Smirnov is an undersized but electrifying offensive talent for Penn State University. Still only a freshman, the young Russian chose to take the college route after going undrafted as a USHL player. Now, he leads all NCAA freshmen in scoring, including first round picks like Clayton Keller.
A scoring forward in every sense, Smirnov utilizes his terrific hands and lightning quick release to set up teammates and score beautiful goals. Though he stands at only 5’8, his size is not a hindrance; he easily has the talent to become a top six forward in the NHL.
Matias Cleland, D, University of New Hampshire (32GP, 2G 30A 32P)
Matias Cleland is a puck moving defenseman in his senior year for UNH. The 23 year old leads the NCAA in points by defensemen, most of which have been assists created by his terrific on ice vision.
Though one could argue that his production is mostly a product of NCAA scoring leader Tyler Kelleher, the Rangers are starved for puck moving defenseman prospects. Cleland would fit that need without costing anything.
Darren Raddysh, D, Erie Otters (50GP, 15G 48A 63P)
Passed over in the NHL Entry Draft several times before, the overage defenseman Raddysh will now be eligible to sign as an unrestricted free agent.
The Rangers need for offense driving right handed defensemen will lure them into Raddysh’s camp, who is likely to get a contract this summer.
Raddysh, whose OHL teammate and brother Taylor was a 2nd round pick of the Lightning, would be a smart signing for the Rangers, and projects as a consistent AHL defenseman from the get go, with the talent level to potentially be a top six NHL defenseman.
He attended the Kings prospect development camp last summer.
Sebastian Aho, D, Skelleftea AIK (44GP, 10G 19A 29P)
Not related to the Hurricanes Sebastian Aho from Finland, the Swedish defenseman Sebastian Aho has been steadily improving each season at the highest level of hockey in Sweden, and deserves an NHL contract.
The undrafted offensive defenseman leads the SHL in points among his position and, due to his dominance amongst men at just 21 years old, will garner a lot of attention from teams that need young mobile defenseman. The Rangers fall right into that category, and would be silly not to offer him an entry level contract.
With players like these, it isn’t expected of them to be the answer to all the team’s problems, or even to develop into NHL talents. These signings are incredibly low risk with the possibility of high reward. On top of that, these players are more valuable than employing Tanner Glass in either the NHL or the AHL. The New York Rangers would be smart to reach into these markets again as much as possible.Before their scheduled eviction today, Gum Gee Lee and Poon Heung Lee, an elderly Chinese couple who’ve lived in their San Francisco apartment for 34 years, are putting up one last very public fight. They’re the last holdouts in a building that was bought by a real estate developer whose specialty is flipping old apartment buildings into luxury condos. Elected city officials, community members and the Lees are currently in front of the apartment building ready to engage in civil disobedience to protest their eviction, said Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus’ attorney Omar Calimbas, who represents the Lees.
The Lees worked in the city for decades, raised their family in their apartment and still care for a disabled daughter in their home. When developer Matthew Miller offered buyouts to the other tenants, the Lees tried to move as well. But as seniors on fixed incomes whose daughter is dependent on care she receives in San Francisco, Calimbas said, they didn’t have the kind of leverage they needed. So they decided to stay and fight.
In a daylong protest outside their 1840-A Jackson Street apartment building the Lees, accompanied by politicians like San Francisco Supervisors David Campos and Jane Kim and community advocates including the Chinese Progressive Association and the San Francisco Tenants Union, protested their eviction.
The Lees don’t actually have much legal recourse; under California law a landlord may evict tenants if they are pulling the unit off the residential rental market. But in San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area where the tech boom has forced a rent explosion, the law, called the Ellis Act, has facilitated the evictions of long-time San Francisco residents–particularly those who can’t afford to stick around in the new housing market. Ellis Act evictions and buyouts have increased three-fold since just the beginning of the year, the San Francisco Examiner reported. The Lees’ fight is about much more than just tenants’ rights. It’s also a protest against the gentrification that’s remaking the city into a luxury playground that few but the rich can afford.
“The goal here is to get the ear of City Hall and start working toward concrete proposals to set up safety nets for families like the Lees, those most at risk of being evicted,” Calimbas told Colorlines. “Especially when there is a rebound that makes rent-controlled propoerties very attractive to short-term high-yield flipping strategies.”
The Lees do not have a place to move to, Calimbas said.Contrary to claims by Dick Cheney, Barack Obama has had a solid first year in foreign policy matters, according to Michael O'Hanlon. | REUTERS Cheney wrong on Obama slam
Vice President Cheney has been excoriating President Obama’s foreign policy approach of late, and Republican partisans reportedly sense an opportunity to portray yet another Democratic president as supposedly weak on national security in the coming months. The last week of 2009, with an attempted plane bombing in Detroit and tragic attack against CIA operatives in Afghanistan capping off the year, helps set the context for these criticisms.
But in fact, Obama has had a solid first year in foreign policy matters. By one measure, comparison with other first-year presidents in modern history, Obama ranks with the three or four best since World War II by my estimation - and I write this as someone who opposed Obama during the Democratic primary process of 2007-2008 largely because of fears at the time that he would not be strong on national security.
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To be sure, Obama’s first year accomplishments are more in the realm of creating good inputs to policy rather than achieving good outputs. Results to date have been relatively few, as would be expected of a first-year president, and as Obama himself rightly acknowledged in his December speech in Oslo accepting the Noble Peace Prize.
Indeed, that peace prize was to my mind badly premature. To his credit, Obama seemed to agree in calling his accomplishments to date “slight” by comparison with other prize winners. The speech itself was good, as were Obama’s addresses in Prague in April over the future of nuclear weapons and in Cairo in June about U.S. relations with the Islamic world. But these remarks were more solid, smart, and reasonable than transformational or historic; my solid assessment of his first year in office is not based on his words, or vision of hope and change, so much as sound policy decisions.
As everything about recent events has underscored, the United States still has literally a world of problems to address, few of them substantially mitigated over the course of 2009. But on balance things Obama has gotten a few major matters moving in better directions, limited the damage or found the least-bad policy when faced with a menu of bad choices on other matters, and set the stage for possible future progress elsewhere.
First-year presidents do not tend to perform well on the foreign policy front. Some did have good years, of course. George H. W. Bush may be the best example, with progress towards German reunification, major developments in ending of the Cold War, and the successful invasion of Panama to show for 1989. Ronald Reagan accelerated the post-Vietnam U.S. defense buildup dramatically in his first year in office. Eisenhower helped end the Korean War. George W. Bush responded reasonably successfully to 9/11, though his disdain for ongoing negotiations with the likes of North Korea as well as Palestinian and Israeli interlocutors tainted the year’s accomplishments, and of course bin Laden got away in the mountains of Tora Bora at the end of 2001.
Most Democratic presidents had big problems. Kennedy dealt with the Bay of Pigs. Johnson starting falling down the slippery slopes of Southeast Asia in a way that set the stage for full-scale American combat involvement in Vietnam in 1965. Carter struggled with his effort to balance human rights and national security interests in 1977; Clinton struggled with Somalia and Haiti and Bosnia in 1993. And of course Republicans had their issues too; it would be hard to call 1969 a particularly impressive year for Richard Nixon, in light of the escalations Nixon set in motion in Vietnam.Why do women tend to be more empathetic than men? Is there something unique about female physiology that produces the ability and willingness to experience another person's feelings? Or is empathy a learned trait we encourage in girls and discourage in boys?
A fascinating new study that observed fathers interacting with their toddlers lends evidence to the latter argument. It finds dads interacting with their two-year-olds in ways that reflect gender stereotypes.
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The study reports fathers of sons "used more achievement language" during their interactions, while dads of daughters used more language "related to sadness and the body." It further finds fathers "were more actively engaged" with their female child.
"Fathers may actually be less attentive to the emotional needs of boys, perhaps despite their best intentions," says Jennifer Mascaro of Emory University, lead author of the new research. "If the child cries out or asks for dad, fathers of daughters responded to that more than did fathers of sons."
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The study, in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience, featured 52 fathers—30 with young girls, 22 with young boys. (The children averaged just under two years of age.) For two full days, each dad wore a device that periodically recorded their voice as they interacted with their child.
The recordings revealed that fathers engaged in more "rough and tumble play," such as "tickling, poking, and tumbling," with boys than girls. On the other hand, "fathers of girls used more sadness language when talking to their child."
In addition, "fathers of daughters engaged in more whistling and singing, and were significantly more engaged and responsive to their daughters," the researchers write. "This may facilitate the development of increased empathy in girls."
"Fathers may actually be less attentive to the emotional needs of boys, perhaps despite their best intentions."
The researchers also discovered some unexpected linguistic patterns.
"While fathers of sons use more language related to achievement, such as 'top,' 'win,' and 'proud," fathers of daughters used more analytical language," they report. Since such language has been "linked with future academic success," this "may help explain the consistent finding that girls outperform boys in school achievement."
"Additionally, fathers of daughters used more language referencing the body, such as 'belly,' 'foot,' and 'tummy,'" Mascaro and her colleagues note. In doing so, they may be instilling a hyper-consciousness of one's body way before puberty, which could lead to many problems in adolescence and beyond.
The fathers also underwent brain scans, which measured neural activity as they observed various images of their child's face. Here, too, some telling patterns emerged.
"The fathers' brains responded differently to the emotional facial expressions of daughters compared to sons," the researchers write. "Specifically, fathers of daughters had a more robust response to happy facial expressions in visual processing areas, likely reflecting increased attention of fathers to their daughters' happy faces."
Of course, this does not definitively settle the nature vs. nurture question. "Gender differences in paternal behavior may be the result of fathers responding to differential cues from the children, some of which may be highly influenced by biological sex differences," the researchers speculate.
As they note, it's possible that boys, having been "exposed to higher levels of fetal testosterone," essentially "ask" their dads for more rough-and-tumble play, and the fathers respond accordingly. What's more, such play arguably teaches emotional intelligence in its own way, given that it shows the child that certain physical actions that would be seen as threateningly aggressive in one context can be fun and harmless in another.
Nevertheless, the finding that fathers—or at least those participating in this small-scale study—were more attentive to their daughters is disturbing, and potentially revealing. If a boy learns early on that he is on his own, he could grow up to become fiercely self-reliant—or emotionally detached, with an inability to empathize with others.
Is that the lesson we want to be teaching our sons?NHL.com's Q&A feature called "Five Questions With …" runs every Tuesday. We talk to key figures in the game and ask them questions to gain insight into their lives, careers and the latest news.
The latest edition features Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock:
Mike Babcock has a trusted, old-school way of telling if the season is going as planned.
"You wake up every day, you look at the standings, and if you don't have to turn the paper upside down to be happy it's a positive thing," Babcock told NHL.com.
Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock addresses the team's play in the wake of Jimmy Howard's injury and the emergence of Tomas Tatar in this week's Five Questions. (Photo: Dave Reginek/NHLI) Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock addresses the team's play in the wake of Jimmy Howard's injury and the emergence of Tomas Tatar in this week's Five Questions.
The standings look good right-side up to the Detroit Red Wings nowadays.
Detroit currently sits third in the Atlantic Division with 71 points. The Red Wings are two points behind the Tampa Bay Lightning and a notch below the Montreal Canadiens because of |
for revision should be built into the law. However, due to cultural biases and stigma that have been cemented into society, science and bureaucracy, those avenues have largely failed marijuana. The nearly century-long institutional effort by the U.S. government to paint marijuana as anathema to society, in all forms and under all circumstances, has been devastatingly successful.
How has that effort played out? Beyond promoting propaganda that stoked public, congressional and media fears of marijuana, the government also decided that it was of greater interest to fund research that focused on marijuana’s addictive properties rather than its possible medical efficacy. The government stifled the ability of the scientific community to build knowledge and expertise in as robust a way as research has explored the efficacy of other controlled substances, even as research came to discover the endocannabinoid system and developed an understanding of how cannabinoids impacted certain human systems and cellular processes.
The federal government set up a DEA-mandated monopoly through the National Institutes on Drug Abuse for the growth of research grade marijuana — not for all Schedule I drugs, just marijuana. For decades, the supply from that monopoly was often insufficient to meet clinical researchers’ needs. Until recently, all marijuana research proposals needed to go through an additional, unique review by the Public Health Service that added a bureaucratic layer, hindering research.
[The paradox at the heart of our marijuana laws — and how to fix it]
So what was the result? Decades of federal policies — entirely separate from the CSA — limited the ability of the scientific community to produce the type of research that could demonstrate that medical value. In order for marijuana to be rescheduled to Schedule II, it requires demonstration of an “accepted medical use.” Yet government policy has effectively created a “cannabis Catch-22” for research, ensuring that regardless of reality, marijuana will remain Schedule I.
The CSA hasn’t failed marijuana. Instead, the federal government has prevented the CSA from working properly when it comes to marijuana. If you want marijuana rescheduled, don’t blame the law; blame the hundreds of lawmakers who consistently vote down reasonable marijuana reforms.
Explore these other perspectives:
Keith Humphreys: The paradox at the heart of our marijuana laws — and how to fix it
Erwin Chemerinsky: Why legalizing marijuana will be much harder than you think
Bill Piper: There’s something missing from our drug laws: Science
David T. Courtwright: Scientists want to study marijuana. Big Pot just wants to sell it.Following on from his excellent Approach & Attack full movie, Antti Autti has chopped together all of his best bits of footage into one explosive full part. Check it!
Antti Autti’s full ‘Approach & Attack’ movie was one of the most watched snowboard flicks on our website this year, and for good reason.
It’s exploratory approach is something that everybody can relate to, and it featured some unusual locales, as well as some inspirational backcountry freestyle snowboarding from Antti and friends.
His new full part effectively condenses and distills all of his choice shots from the movie, and presents them in one dynamite-laced 4 minute part. From big backcountry booters to mellow powder hacks and mind-blowing big mountain lines, this is one full part that will keep you gripped for its entire duration.
Don’t sleep on it!UDHAGAMANDALAM: A judicial magistrate court in Ooty on Tuesday issued a non-bailable arrest warrant against eight Tamil film actors, including Suriya Sathyaraj, R Sarathkumar and Sripriya, for their failure to appear before it in connection with a defamation case filed by a freelance journalist.On October 7, 2009, the South India Cine Actors’ Association ( Nadigar Sangam ) held a meeting in Chennai to condemn a Tamil daily for publishing an article which allegedly tarnished the image of actresses.The complainant, M Rozario, a freelance journalist in Ooty, said the actors who spoke in the meeting attacked all journalists instead of targeting a particular Tamil daily that published the article.Subsequently, the court ordered to issue summons to about eight actors -- Suriya, Sathyaraj, Sarathkumar, Sripriya, Vijayakumar, Arun Vijay, Vivek, and Cheran -- to appear before the court on December 19, 2011. However, the actors filed a petition in the Madras high court seeking to dispense with their personal appearance in the court. However, the petition was dismissed.On May 15, 2017, the case came for hearing again. After learning that the actors had not appeared before the court, judicial magistrate Senthikumar Rajavel issued non-bailable warrant against the eight actors on Tuesday.Mysteriously Aligned Black Holes May Shed Light on the Structure of the Universe
According to recent
simulations,
, in which galaxies compose the filaments that are thinly stretched around huge, dark, empty voids. These filaments serve as a sort of scaffolding for the universe, and as a place for galaxies to form, but they are not believed to actually impact the matter within them. If the filaments are somehow determining the direction of these astrophysical jets, then it would change a huge supposition about the nature of our universe.
"What we're seeing is the result of a very large region in the early universe spinning coherently in the same direction," study leader Russ Taylor told Science News. If that's true, it adds a "new wrinkle to explain how large-scale structure formed."
strophysicist Michael DiPompeo from Dartmouth College claims that he ran his own calculations, and while it's possible that there is some sort of anomaly, it's also possible that there could be a similar pattern derived from 64 randomly oriented galaxies.
"If an alignment like this exists, it's very interesting," said DiPompeo. "But I'm not super convinced that it's really there. I could pretty regularly get patterns that look like this."
We generally don't think of black holes as synchronizing with each other, but in a new study, scientists have found that about a dozen black holes are spewing jets of matter in approximately the same direction. This weird synchronicity is not only fascinating in itself, but it could give us further insight into the formation of the large-scale structure of our universe.While black holes are known for consuming matter, they also tend to eject matter from time to time. Supermassive black holes periodically emit astrophysical jets of matter from their poles that can extend great distances into space, and some of those jets contain radio waves that can be detected on Earth. Researchers from the University of Cape Town found that out of the 64 galaxies whose supermassive black holes are emitting radio waves, about a dozen are spewing matter in the same direction. According to the researchers, this type of pattern is statistically significant and shouldn't exist, unless the waves are being guided by a larger cosmic structure. the universe resembles a gigantic spiderweb on a cosmic scaleThere are some detractors, however, who claim that the sample size of this study, as well as those previous studies that found similar alignments, is in fact not large enough to conclude that the results are statistically significant. AHowever, further investigation is needed to fully rely on or discount the results. DiPompeo went on to say that if the galaxies are extremely varying distances from Earth, then the pattern is most likely a coincidence, but if clusters of galaxies showed similar patterns, then it's more likely that there are larger forces at work. And if the latter case is true, then there may be even more of a cosmic structure to our universe than we previously thought.myexperienceandbleeblutherecluse:
I met Mark in 2013 when I decided to tag along for a Huntsville shoot with a mutual friend. I had been a fan of his earlier works, which creatively explored horror and beauty as complementary concepts. I found these works to be more introspective, and less “exploitative for the sake of shock value.” I expected less vulgarity and more maturity and professionalism from the 27-year-old photographer whose work I initially admired. I did three of my first photoshoots with him before I pinned down what, exactly, it was about him that made me uncomfortable. Before I continue, I want to note Alabama’s law regarding public nudity and the definition of coercion:
“ALABAMA*
Section 13A-12-130 – Public lewdness.
(a) A person commits the crime of public lewdness if: (1) He exposes his anus or genitals in a public place and is reckless about whether another may be present who will be offended or alarmed by his act;
or (2) He does any lewd act in a public place which he knows is likely to be observed by others who would be affronted or alarmed.
(b) Public lewdness is a Class C misdemeanor.”
Coercion is legally defined as “intimidation of a victim to compel the individual to do some act against his or her will by the use of psychological pressure, physical force, or threats.”
A few months after shadowing the Huntsville shoot, he convinced me to shoot with him in what would be my first photo shoot as the subject. As someone with more experience and comfort behind the camera as opposed to in front of it, I had no idea what to expect, and I was scared/nervous. I was asked to pose naked, which I was hesitant to do, because girls are criticized by everything we do or don’t do. Posing nude is definitely not easy, especially if you could get in trouble with an employer, friends, or family if your identity is linked. I was an insecure and naive 19-year-old fangirl, and he was a 27-year-old experienced and popular photographer. This dynamic made me easy to persuade despite my apprehension. Despite the fact that he was aware of my discomfort, he made little effort to minimize it. He didn’t even tell me that he would have another male present to assist him until I got there. Two strange men would be staring at me in my most vulnerable state. The shoot was later entitled “fabrica spectra.” This is also the only shoot I signed a media release form for.
Fast forward to a colder season, and I agreed to try “modeling” a second time. I live about to two hours away, so I was expecting this shoot to be worth the early morning adventure. We arrived at the Walls of Jericho, only to find it covered in snow flurries. I was unprepared, so the cold made me shiver. After about 30 minutes of exploration, we found a river. This river was close enough to the road to be seen by passing cars, but Mark didn’t seem to care that it might not be an acceptable location to do a nude shoot. He wanted me to lie down in the freezing river with nothing on. We never even discussed nudity for this shoot. I didn’t want to do this: the water was freezing, and we were in a location where people could see me from the road. Again, he didn’t care: “Just do it. Hurry up. Let’s go. C’mon.” He coerced me into compliance by way of harassment, and my body language in the pictures reflect my discomfort. A photo from that day is below (and notice how red my hands and legs are.)
The final strike was when he and his girlfriend at the time came to visit Birmingham. It was warmer now, and Mark wanted to take pictures of both of us outside. I felt more comfortable because another female was involved. But, when they arrived at my apartment, Mark entered my room, continuously questioned how many guys I’d slept with, and bragged about how many girls he’d slept with…while his girlfriend was in the other room. Mark and I were never good enough friends for this ever be appropriate, and this was not the first time he asked me about my sex life. I tried to forget about this, and we went to the Botanical Gardens.
Going back to the final shoot, we arrived at the local Botanical Gardens around midday. Now, this is a family-oriented facility open to the public and a common location for photographers and their clients. This is in no way a suitable place to take nude photos. But again Mark didn’t seem to care. He wanted nude photos, despite my and his girlfriend’s protests. He was rude and irritable the entire time, taunting his girlfriend and I. “Just do it. Hurry up. Let’s go. C’mon. Don’t be a baby.” At one point, we were almost caught by a guard patrolling the area. Below is a photo from that day, edited for censorship.
Mark pressured me in an uncomfortable situation, on multiple accounts, where I could have been charged with Public Lewdness. He did not care about my well-being and safety, even after I expressed my concerns. He cared about himself.
Coercion is when you are nonviolently forced into doing something you don’t feel comfortable with, either by way of threat or harassment. That’s what he did. It happens all of the time, and it’s really dangerous because people think “well, if you did it, that’s the end.” But, if you harass someone into doing something they don’t want to do, or shame them, that’s coercion. Mark and I had an imbalanced power dynamic. He is older, established, and very well known. Back then, I was young, naive, and inexperienced. This created a situation in which I felt pressured to do something I didn’t want to do because I didn’t feel comfortable enough saying no. The worst thing is, I’m not the only victim of Mark’s behavior, yet the other girls I spoke to are afraid to speak out.
Mark has around 40,000 followers on Instagram, alone. He gets messages, comments, and follows from hundreds of girls, and many of them are underaged. A person with his reach has the power to exploit people without retribution by virtue of influence alone. His influence/following can actively silence any model who might express discomfort with his behavior–after all, if he’s had this many girls pose for him, and he has all of these followers, how bad could he possibly be?
For over a year of silence, I’ve actively tried to suppress how ashamed Mark made me feel. I have watched him go forth with his facade, and watched more young girls be persuaded the way I was. But today, I managed the chutzpah to tell my story because this lies within a deeper issue beyond anything personal, this is about justice. I believe it is important to warn girls of these talented, yet manipulative people. As Grove’s Law continues to apply, and more freelance photographers enter the market, more of our girls are being subjected to this kind of unprofessionalism, especially with nude photography.
My response to Mark’s public acknowledgement and refusal to accept responsibility to my valid accusations.
Mark Using Homophic Slurs, Body Shaming, and Joking About Physically Assaulting MeDepartment of Defense Press Briefing by Col. Dorrian via Teleconference from Baghdad, Iraq
Colonel John Dorrian, Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman
STAFF: Good afternoon. And thank you for all coming at this later time. We, as you know, moved the schedule today to accommodate the briefing by Admiral Harris at the House Armed Services Committee. And, J.D., I know, for the -- for you, that means likely missing dinner, and we appreciate your sacrifice to allow for that, so our reporters could cover both of these important briefings today.We want to turn over to you in a moment, ladies and gentlemen, Colonel John Dorrian, the spokesperson for Operation Inherent Resolve, joining us live from Baghdad. J.D. -- J.D., over to you.COLONEL JOHN DORRIAN: All right, very good. Good afternoon, all. We'll start with the Syria update, and then discuss progress in Iraq.As you know, Turkey conducted airstrikes in northern Syria's Hasakah province the night before last, resulting in the loss of life of our partnered forces in the fight against ISIS.In the last 48 hours, the same partnered forces in the southern part of the country, the SDF and the Syrian Arab Coalition, continued their relentless campaign to isolate Raqqa, clearing more than 215 square kilometers of territory in Ops Box North of the city, where they were able to link forces fighting from east and west, and then back-clear the pocket created by the link-up.The SDF also continues making progress in Tabqa city, where they're controlling the tempo of operations against tough resistance and pushing ISIS into an ever-shrinking area.They accomplish this progress despite fierce counterattacks by fighters in the city as ISIS recognize the extent to which Raqqa is being isolated by the SDF and SAC operations.Our partners are making tremendous sacrifices in this very difficult and dangerous fight against ISIS. They have done so in Manbij, and they continue to do so in the countryside around Raqqa this very day.COL. DORRIAN: Of course, the coalition air support has been an instrumental component of the SDF's advance into this dense terrain, suppressing the enemy's ability to retain their positions, destroying ISIS fighting positions, headquarters, weapons and resources. We will continue that support.Moving on to Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces continue making progress in isolating and clearing territory from a dense urban terrain of Mosul despite ISIS resistance and brutal control measures against civilians who remain in the city.Yesterday the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service cleared the al-Tenek neighborhood, one of Mosul's largest. The neighborhood was important to the enemy as a command and control site and was a location the enemy used to keep a lot of weapons and resources.Unfortunately, we continue to see reports of ISIS actions to terrorize and control the remaining civilians in the city. As many of you know, the enemy uses the Al-Bayan radio network to broadcast to their fighters and to the people of Mosul. And despite the fact that many of these sites have been overrun and dismantled by the Iraqi Security Forces, they've maintained an intermittent ability to broadcast into both east and west Mosul.Certainly, such messages are disconcerting to civilians who remain in the west or have returned to their home in the east because of the brutal treatment. But the city is completely surrounded and ISIS is losing territory every day. It's only a matter of time before the Al-Bayan network is silenced in Mosul forever.As you've seen, the strikes that the Turkish Air Force conducted last night also killed several Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in this vicinity of Sinjar. The strikes were conducted without proper coordination with the coalition or the government of Iraq. We're troubled by that.We call on all forces to remain focused on the fight to defeat ISIS, which is the greatest threat to regionally and worldwide peace and security. The coalition continues using precision air strikes, including nine yesterday to remove ISIS fighters, snipers, weapons caches, vehicle-born improvised explosive devices and other targets from the battlefield anywhere that they can be found and struck with precision in Mosul and other areas around Iraq.And now, I'm pleased to answer your questions.STAFF: And we'll start with Missy Ryan from the Washington Post.Q: Hi, colonel. Missy Ryan, here. Thanks.I have a couple follow-up questions on the Turkey strikes. First of all, can you provide us an estimate of how many YPG, or Peshmerga, or PKK people were killed in those airstrikes?Secondly, how much nervous did the United States get about those strikes and how much time ahead of time were -- was the United States notified? And do you have anything on reports of any new strikes -- or -- either air or artillery across the Syrian border from Turkey into Syria by -- by the Turkish government? Thank you.COL. DORRIAN: OK. In order, out of respect for our partners, we're not going to give out their casualty numbers. That's something that they must do.So, we're not going to get into that. You've seen the same open- source reports that I have.There was less than an hour of notification time before the strikes were conducted. That's not enough time. And this was notification, certainly not coordination as you would expect from a -- a partner and an ally in the fight against ISIS.And your third question? I'm sorry.Q: Artillery strikes, you know, from Turkey against the YPG -- today.COL. DORRIAN: I've seen open source reports on those but I have not seen the evidence of additional strikes. We'd have to circle back with you. I've seen open source reports but I haven't seen any operational reporting on that this afternoon.Q: Just to clarify, you said less than an hour notice. So was that between 30 minutes and sixty minutes or was it less than 30 minutes notice?COL. DORRIAN: Well, it was less than an hour they contacted the Combined Air Operations Center.Q: OK. Thanks.STAFF: Tara Copp, with Stars and stripes.Q: Hey, colonel. Just wanted to follow up on some of Missy's questions. After the strikes, did Turkey reach out to its partners to provide any further explanation or did the coalition reach out to Turkey to ask for an explanation of the strikes?COL. DORRIAN: We let the Turks know that the amount of time that was being provided for the strikes was inadequate for us assure safety of our forces on the ground. We had forces within six miles of the strikes. As far as the effects that they achieved, they killed a significant number of Peshmerga fighters. These are fighters that had been very important to the fight against ISIS and then our partnered forces.We have not had extensive discussions with regard to them reaching out but I know that there has been a significant amount of diplomatic activity between the two sides since that occurred.Q: And just for comparison, normal operating procedure if Turkey was conducting an air operation, how would that go?COL. DORRIAN: Well, I'm not going to get into exactly what all the procedures were. It'd be inappropriate to that in the interest of operational security. That would provide valuable insight into the enemy on our tactics, techniques and procedures. What I will say though is that it was less than an hour. We believe that's inadequate and it was done as a notification as opposed to coordination.Q: Thank you.STAFF: To Laurie Mylroie.Q: In condemning the Turkish attacks on the Peshmerga, the KRG said that the basis of the problem is that PKK is remaining in Sinjar. Is that a perspective that you would agree with?COL. DORRIAN: Well, the PKK being anywhere in Iraq or Syria is a problem because they're a terrorist group. As far as whether that's the crux of the problem, we've identified what we think is problematic here and the inadequate coordination time and the notification rather than coordination are two areas that are just not good. And then of course our partnered forces have been killed in this strike and these are forces that have been integral in fighting ISIS, they've been reliable in making progress against ISIS fighters under very difficult and dangerous conditions.They have made many, many sacrifices to help defeat ISIS and that keeps the whole world safer. So that is our position on that.Q: And you said that U.S. forcer were within six miles of the strike. Are you saying that U.S. forces were potentially endangered by that?COL. DORRIAN: I'm saying that less than an hour of notification is an inadequate amount of time to have our forces leave the ops box area that was identified. Which was a very large ops box, not enough fidelity for us to assure that they were safe. So it was an unsafe way to conduct operations. It's a very complex battle field here. And we just want to make sure that coordination is done so that we can get these things right and prevent the types of incident's that we saw here, which included the killing of Peshmerga soldiers in Sinjar area.Q: Question, did you get any assurances at all that something's been done to rectify this problem, it won't happen again?COL. DORRIAN: I'm not aware of any at this time.STAFF: OK. Next to Kasim Ileri with Anadolu.Q: Colonel Dorrian, you said that PKK is a problem wherever it is in Iraq because it's a terrorist group. And then yesterday a group of U.S. forces have been filmed and pictured in -- I'm sorry North East Syria, in the area where struck by a Turkish air elements. And those forces are welcomed by PKK flags, as well as PKK leaders, posters and pictures. So for -- according to you, isn't it controversial for American forces, being welcomed by supporters and elements of designated terrorist group in that area -- that's PKK?COL. DORRIAN: Well -- our -- we did have forces that went to check on the partner forces who were harmed by the strikes. So that's what they were doing. They were working with the SDF -- that's our partner force, they've been a reliable force in fighting ISIS throughout Northern Iraq. And indeed have made a tremendous number of sacrifices in order advance and isolate Raqqa. So that's what we were doing there.Q: So the -- so you say that it was the SDF elements who were carrying PKK flags, or PKK leader's posters? Or were there PKK elements over there? Are you aware that there is no PKK elements in the area where you're forces have been checking or, you know patrolling?COL. DORRIAN: Well what I'm telling you is that we were there to visit our partnered force. They've been a reliable partner force, and we wanted to make sure that we were there to assess the damage and to assure them that we're committed to our partnership with them, as they continued isolating Raqqa.Q: Turkish military is saying that they have conducted those strikes based on the intelligence information, that many of the reason, PKK attacks in Turkey have been plotted and supplied with equipment and arms coming from Sinjar region and (inaudible) region. Militarily speaking (inaudible), apart from notification and predicting partner forces, do you think that those targets were actually militarily legitimate targets, because they -- as significant national security threat to that is coming out of those areas -- - those two areas?COL. DORRIAN: Yeah, we believe that our partner forces were struck in North Syria and we believe that Peshmerga forces were killed in Sinjar. Those are the two things that we believe based on what we've seen here. And some of the problem with this was there was not an acceptable level coordination between the two sides.And not an adequate amount of time given to ensure that that coordination could be done so that we can deconflict operations and make sure that all forces that are fighting ISIS in Northern Syria have the opportunity and remain focused on that.STAFF: Sure.Q: Ragip Soylu with Daily Sabah. To follow up on Kasim’s question. There is a picture and a video showing that an American -- a senior officer apparently with a -- walking with a PKK officer, a well known commander. His name is (inaudible) yesterday and he has been a top commander in PKK's arm of HPG and he has been in control of the European command for a while, while he was in Europe.And then he returned to Syria and he was assigned as YPG's and PKK's general commander in the country. And he has been designated as especially a leading terrorist by Turkey and he's pictured as proof that he's walking with an American officer in Northern Syria. Are you aware of that?COL. DORRIAN: I'm aware that we had an officer go to Northern Syria to check on our partner force, following the strikes that killed some of their soldiers. And that's what we were there to do. There were a lot of people present that's really all I have for you on that.Q: Second question, the Turkish Foreign Minister said that they informed United States that they should withdraw their forces from the border at a distance of Turkey kilometer because there was an upcoming Turkish operations in coming days. Like days before those airstrikes. Do you have any information on that? Would you confirm that Turkey informed you that they would conduct operations that specific region?COL. DORRIAN: Yeah, I haven't seen those statements so it'd be inappropriate for me to comment on them.STAFF: Laurie Mylroie, who I skipped over before.Q: (off mic) I came up with another question.(CROSSTALK)Q: Kurdistan 24, and sir -- Colonel Dorrian, your statement that it's not an acceptable level of coordination. Are you suggesting that if the Turkish forces had coordinated properly with you and told you where they were going to strike and when, would you have let them go ahead and wouldn't you have understood that they're going to strike partner forces in Peshmerga and would have stopped it, told them no, don't strike thereCOL. DORRIAN: Yeah I'm not going to get into hypothetical scenarios about what we would or wouldn't have agreed to. What I can say is that it's much better to coordinate properly and assure that these conversations between allies -- stalwart allies for more than 50 years continue to assure that we can keep all of our guns trained on ISIS. That's the most dangerous enemy in the area. And unfortunately, that didn't happen. And as a result, we have this unfortunate set of incidents.STAFF: OK. To Ryan Browne from CNN.Q: Hello, colonel. Thank you for doing this. Just one quick on on -- on these Turkish airstrikes.So, within that hour's notification, were any of the -- you said the coalition forces were within six miles. Did -- were coalition forces moved at all after that notification? Or did they remain in place?COL. DORRIAN: Yeah, I -- I don't know what their movements were. I just know that it was inadequate amount of time to clear all of our forces away from what is a very significantly sized area.So, we didn't have exact fidelity on where the strikes would occur. And not an enormous amount of time to have our forces react.Q: You -- and -- and was there any effort by the part of the coalition to warn -- once that warning was communicated by the Turkish troops, was there any movement to notify the SDF partners of this impending strike within that hour window?COL. DORRIAN: Well, there's not really enough time to do that within that hour window. And there's not really enough fidelity on exactly who was being struck in order to even consider doing so.SO, this was a notification that strikes were going to occur against terrorists. You know, NATO ally -- you know, Turkey is a NATO ally. So, there's not really enough information there for us to know exactly who was being struck or exactly where the strikes were going to occur.So, this was just an unfortunate set of incidents. And it resulted in the deaths of many forces who had been very effective in fighting ISIS.Q: And -- and on a separate note, I -- last week we talked a little bit with -- about the chemical weapons attack that'd been done on some Iraqi security forces and some of the U.S. and Australia advisors nearby. Is there any update on that -- on what kind of chemical weapon was used in that attack and whether or not any coalition service members were exposed?(Crosstalk)COL. DORRIAN: I don't know if you can hear all of this. But it's a near deafening exercise that's going to be done here.And I need to just take a quick pause while we finish that. Sorry about that.(Crosstalk)COL. DORRIAN: Question again, and we'll see whether we can get it answered for you. I apologize for that.Q: Colonel, totally understand. Thank you that you're fielding the question.We talked a little bit about the chemical weapon -- series of chemical weapons attacks by ISIS against Iraqi troops and U.S. advisors and Australian advisors nearby last week. Is there any update on what kind of chemical weapons were used in those attacks and whether or not any coalition forces were exposed?COL. DORRIAN: Well, coalition forces became aware of the chemical attack. They left the area. They donned their equipment. Where they were tested, none of them showed any negative effects from being in that area.As far as the types of materials that the enemy used they have low grade capabilities in that is representative of chlorine and mustard agent. Sometimes I see that reported as mustard gas, that's not correct. It's mustard agent.So, it dispersed into a very small area whenever these munitions go off. These munitions are not especially effective about anything except creating a public narrative. So, there not as effective even as explosive rounds but they do get some attention.STAFF: OK. Next, to Corey Dickstein, Stars and Stripes.Q: Hi, sir. Ryan actually asked my main question, but I do want to make sure I'm clear on the troops that were six miles from the straight Turkey conducted, those were in Syria no Iraq, correct?COL. DORRIAN: That's correct.Q: And then, can you talk a little bit about the isolation effort around Raqqa? How much is left to do to encircle that city? Is ultimately encircling the entire city, is that plan and I guess that's it.COL. DORRIAN: Yes. More than 8,000 square kilometers have been cleared by our partner force the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Syrian Arab Coalition. As they begin isolating Raqqa. So they have them largely isolated to the north, to the east and to the west.Some significant clearing operations still have to occur in Tabqah City. That is west of Raqqa. Once that area, which has been a big staging area for ISIS, it's also a place with their main prison and a significant number of fighters. Maybe, somewhere around the order of 700 or so.Once that are is cleared and, of course, the dam is there which is a source of hydroelectric power. That's the largest dam in Syria. Once that area's been cleared then the cordon, our partner forces have continued to close toured Raqqa, they'll continue that effort and get the city where it's really completely isolated to the north, the east and to the west.All the main roads out of Raqqa will be completely blocked and controlled by them. There is very harsh and difficult to reign to the south. And, of course, this is not a very hospitable area for anybody that wants to try to get out of there.We'll continue working with partnered forces to disrupt what few enemy would try to go in to that area. So, the city will be completely isolated and then at a time of -- our partner forces choosing, then we'll move in and liberate the city as they've done in many other areas.Q: How far are the SDF forces from Tabqa dam at this point? Do you have any idea how long -- how much more effort would go into securing that area?COL. DORRIAN: Yeah, just -- just a few kilometers, I believe. I -- I don't have the exact number, but they're very, very close.OK, another pause. Sorry.(Crosstalk)OK, I think we can resume. I don't know if I've got a question hanging there.STAFF: OK. Next, to Tony Capaccio from Bloomberg.Q: Hi, John.I have a non-Turkish question. In the three -- three weeks since the Syria strikes took place, has the Syrian government taken any -- or the Syrian military taken any steps to paint U.S. aircraft, or interfere in any way with the encirclement of Raqqa or U.S. operations in Syria?COL. DORRIAN: No, I've not observed any. I don't believe so. The -- you know, our aircraft are very capable. You know, we've got F-22s and other very capable aircraft flying over Syria at all times.So our aircraft are not being threatened at this point, and we haven't seen anything that's -- we would characterize as an attempt to disrupt our partnered forces from trying to isolate Raqqa.Q: While you mentioned it, the -- the price of the F-22 is still of interest to a lot of people. What is it performing there? It's a stealthy airplane. What kind of missions is it performing in the support of the Mosul and Raqqa operations?COL. DORRIAN: Well, they do defensive counter-air patrols over Syria, and then they're also capable of dropping munitions, including the small-diameter bomb.These are very important weapons, especially when you get into dense urban terrain, because it's the 250-pound weapon, much smaller, and can be delivered with precision to create precision effects and destroy targets to make the way for our partnered forces' advance, or to take out enemy leadership targets or targets that have to be struck with precision.So it's a very important capability, and it's -- it's one that's doing its job here -- you know, in Iraq and Syria.Q: And one other air -- aircraft question. There's been more concern voiced by the Army about the use of drones in general against U.S. forces in the future. Can you give us a sense of how ISIL is using drones in the last five or six months in the Mosul operation, and to counter shaping operations in Raqqa?COL. DORRIAN: Yeah. What we've -- what we've seen in Mosul is that the enemy is using commercial, off-the-shelf drones, mainly, but also improvised drones to surveil the areas where the Iraqi security forces are advancing, and they also use them to drop, mainly, grenade-size munitions on the enemy, and on civilian areas.They're really very indiscriminate about where they're dropping. These are not really strategic capabilities. They're not game changers. It's not going to stop what's happening on the battlefield, which is them losing, being pushed out of areas, and getting killed. But it does present a tremendous amount of danger to people on the ground when we see these.The enemy has used them, sometimes where multiple drones have been used at one time. Of course, that is a capability that, you know, certainly will get attention and require the Iraqi security forces to take measures to put a stop to that.Most recently, though, we've been able to provide some capabilities on the battlefield to disrupt that. So that's electronic warfare capabilities. And then, of course, the enemy, you know, is -- is really limited in their technical expertise. So we've got these electronic warfare capabilities. We can't go into a tremendous amount of detail about exactly how that's going to work, but we can move capabilities where they need to be in order to stop the enemy from being more effective.We've seen a lot fewer munition drops recently, although, you know, occasionally we still do see that. But one of the things that's kind of an interesting conundrum for the enemy is we have the ability to disrupt them when they want to use these. The Iraqi security forces have turned the tables and begun to use them as well. The enemy has no such capability other than to fire at the Iraqi security forces' drones and the Iraqis are seeing some success against the enemy in using these capabilities to take out snipers, to take out improvised explosive -- vehicle-borne improvised explosive |
Daisuke Jigen doing what they do best, escaping pursuit after having robbed the national casino of Monaco — only to discover that their entire haul is counterfeit. The bills are of amazingly high quality and could be none other than the legendary "goat money" — perfect counterfeits that have been used to rock the economies of nations since the invention of paper money.
When Lupin was just getting started as a professional thief, he was almost killed while searching for the source of the goat bills. He decides that it is time to take another chance, and the two head off to the (fictional) Duchy of Cagliostro — a tiny country (the smallest country in the United Nations according to Lupin) that appears to be a conglomeration of various old-world European locales.
Shortly after arriving, they rescue a young girl from a car full of thugs, only to let her get captured again when Lupin is knocked unconscious after tumbling down a cliff. They later discover that she is the late grand duke's daughter and is engaged to be married to the evil count.
The count wants to recover the ancient treasure of the Cagliostro family, and needs the princess's ring in order to find it. Wackiness, chases and intrigue ensue.
Lupin's former lover, sometimes enemy/friend Fujiko Mine shows up as an employee in the castle, cohort and master swordsman Goemon Ishikawa is called in to help the gang in their final assault on the castle, and Lupin arch-rival Interpol agent Inspector Zenigata even finds himself allied with Lupin and company in order to expose the count.
Releases Edit
In 1979, Tokyo Movie Shinsha released the original theatrical version. In 1991, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer created a subtitled version for American theatres. MGM/UA Home Video released the film on VHS in 1992 (dubbed by Carl Macek's Streamline Pictures), and Best Film and Video Corp. released it on VHS in 1993 (the Streamline dub). In 2000, Manga Entertainment recorded and released a new dub.
Streamline's dub, while lauded for the overall acting talent of the voice cast, has been widely criticized for its picture cropping and retiming of the opening credits to remove all traces of Japanese hiragana, as well as for liberties taken with the translation of its dialogue. Most famously, Goemon's signature line, "Once again I have cut a worthless object" — uttered as Goemon slashes Lupin's burning clothing off — was altered by Macek into "Should've worn an asbestos suit."
Manga's new dub of Cagliostro has been lauded for its overall faithfulness to the original Japanese dialogue, but criticized for its unnecessary use of four-letter words. In addition, Manga's original DVD release has been criticized for lacking an anamorphic transfer or any extras apart from previews for other Manga Video releases, and in the way its English titles are hard-matted onto the movie's video image, obscuring parts of the screen behind them.
Optimum Releasing re-released Cagliostro in the UK after Manga Entertainment lost its license in the UK. The new DVD features an anamorphic widescreen print with the original Japanese audio track as well as the Streamline dub, both in stereo.
As noted in DVD Aficionado and The Right Stuf, Manga released a new "special edition" DVD of Cagliostro with a street date of August 29, 2006. The disc is double-sided with the movie on side A and the extras on side B. It includes a new digital transfer; Manga's English dub in 2.0 and 5.1 surround plus Japanese, Spanish, and French language tracks in mono; the complete movie in storyboard format, accompanied by Japanese audio with English subtitles; an original Japanese trailer; a sketch and still gallery; a 26-minute interview with animation director Yasuo Ōtsuka; and animated menus. (Early rumors had indicated the disc would also include a Lupin cosplayer photo gallery and an interview with Lupin III creator Monkey Punch; however, these do not appear in the final release.) The movie is presented in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen; however, the opening credits, which feature Lupin and Jigen slowly making their way across Europe to the song "Fire Treasure", have been heavily re-edited to remove the Japanese credits, instead using selected still-frames of scenes that appear without Japanese writing. The English-translated names are superimposed over these stills. The DVD packaging of this special edition is strongly reminiscent of that of Disney's Studio Ghibli film releases.
Trivia Edit
Lupin III is the grandson of the literary thief Arsène Lupin, created by Maurice Leblanc. Most of Lupin III's cast refers back to older entertainment which is popular in Japan. His nemesis Koichi Zenigata refers to a long running drama Zenigata Heiji—who is an 18th century Japanese Lawman who uses a jitte and throwing coins. Goemon is based on (and descended from) the Japanese folk hero Ishikawa Goemon.
The Disney film The Great Mouse Detective shares many similar scenes, particularly the fight in the clock tower. Disney was accused of plagiarism [citation needed], although no lawsuits were ever filed.
Batman: The Animated Series features a few Cagliostro references, most notably in the episode "The Clock King" (the clock tower fight) and the movie Mask of the Phantasm (Batman being washed down the sewer matches shot-for-shot Lupin being washed down the aqueduct).
Another Cagliostro in-joke appears in episode 24 of Macross/Robotech, where a suspiciously Lupin-like blue-jacketed figure is shown playing a video game that re-enacts Cagliostro's car chase scene.
Gary Trousdale, co-director of Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire, has admitted that a scene at the end of Atlantis, where the waters receded from the sunken city, was directly inspired by a similar scene from Cagliostro.
There was a real-life historical figure named Alessandro Cagliostro; he was an infamous alchemist, Freemason, and forger who was implicated in the affair of the diamond necklace, an incident that led up to the French Revolution. His iconic standing in French history subsequently led to his appearance or mention in many works of French literature, including Leblanc's Arsène Lupin tales. Early in his career, the original Arsène Lupin crossed swords with Countess Cagliostro, who was either a descendant of Cagliostro or his alchemically-long-lived daughter. Subsequently, she kidnapped Lupin's firstborn son and raised him to challenge his illustrious father in a very long-ranged scheme of revenge. There seems to be no direct connection between the Count Cagliostro of this movie and the Countess Cagliostro of Arsène Lupin's, though his apparent age could make him her son or nephew.
Castle of Cagliostro includes elements that were seen in other Arsène Lupin works, as well. One Arsène Lupin tale involved the discovery of a tremendous stash of forged Franc notes with which World War I-era Germany had planned to destabilize the French economy. Another featured a secret treasure hidden at the bottom of a lake.
Sharp-eyed viewers will note that Lupin and Jigen are not alone in the opening robbery. The top of Goemon's head and sword can be seen in the back window of the car when Lupin throws the money out of the sunroof. This explains why the casino security force's cars fell apart so readily a few moments before; Goemon had cut them apart with his sword.
Every weapon used in the film really exists, including the MP-40 submachine gun, MG-34 machine gun, and PTRS anti-tank rifle. In addition, Lupin and Clarisse's cars in the car chase scene are also real. They are the Fiat 500 and Citroën 2CV respectively.
There is a long-standing rumour that Steven Spielberg saw Castle of Cagliostro when it was shown at the Cannes film festival and called its car chase one of the greatest chase sequences ever filmed, and/or called Cagliostro "one of the greatest adventure movies of all time." While this rumour has not been specifically verified, Manga Video considered it credible enough to mention on the back cover of its DVD release.
Wilhelm scream: In the Streamline dub, Wolf loosens one of the gears in the clock tower, sending Count Cagliostro's men running for their lives.
Sayako Kuroda, formerly Her Imperial Highness The Princess Nori (Sayako) of Japan, is known for being a fan of animé, especially Miyazaki's works, and had a replica of Clarisse's dress made for her wedding in 2005.
Full cast Edit
Yasuo Yamada as Lupin III
Kiyoshi Kobayashi as Daisuke Jigen
Makio Inoue as Goemon Ishikawa XIII
Eiko Masuyama as Fujiko Mine
Goro Naya as Inspector Zenigata
Taro Ishida as Count Cagliostro
Sumi Shimamoto as Lady Clarisse d'Cagliostro
Kohei Miyauchi as the groundskeeper
Ichirō Nagai as Jodo
Tadamichi Tsuneizumi as Gustav
Yoko Yamaoka as the waitress
Manga Video English dub Edit
David Hayter as Arsene Lupin III (credited as "Sean Barker")
John Snyder as Daisuke Jigen (credited as "Ivan Buckley")
Richard Epcar as Ishikawa Goemon XIII
Dorothy Elias-Fahn as Fujiko Mine (credited as "Dorothy Melendrez")
Dougray Scott as Inspector Keibu Zenigata (credited as "Dougary Grant")
Kirk Thornton as Count Cagliostro (credited as "Sparky Thornton")
Bridget Hoffman as Lady Clarisse d'Cagliostro (credited as "Ruby Marlowe")
Barry Stigler as the groundskeeper (credited as "Gil Starberry")
Richard Barnes as Jodo
Joe Romersa as Gustav
Bambi Darro as the waitress
Jamieson K. Price as an Interpol officer (credited as "James Lyon")
This page contains text in an East Asian writing system.
Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of the East Asian characters.If America ever wants to shed our cynical, accurate view of our political system being solely a game for the rich, we must—must!—reform the way we finance political campaigns. This week, Congress is determined to take a big step in the wrong direction.
One element contained in a massive spending bill that Congress is debating this week: a new law that "would increase the amount individuals could donate to national parties tenfold," by not only raising the limits on individual giving to political parties, but also allowing individuals to give to various funding committees dedicated to specific purposes, like funding political conventions. The Washington Post calculates that "Under the language in the bill, a couple could give as much as $3.1 million to a party's various national committees in one election cycle."
An individual couple—Mr. and Mrs. Corporate CEO, for example—would be able to give more than ***three million dollars*** to, say, the Republican Party for the upcoming presidential election. Perhaps the most distressing part of all this is that some campaign finance watchers are presenting this as progress, because it will help to give more funding and power back to the parties themselves, rather than the enormous and unaccountable Super PACs that now form a shadow financing world in our fucked political system. It is a victory, they say, for "transparency" in who funds our elections.
Big deal. Transparency is nice, but it does not solve the underlying problem. If someone shoots you in the head, then reveals their identity to the world, you've still been shot in the head. The underlying problem is that political influence in America can be bought. Political power is merely an investment. Our political parties represent moneyed interests, not the citizenry at large. Redirecting huge sums of money into the political parties does nothing to change that. It simply codifies our current awful system of the extremely rich being feted and treated like royalty by the elected officials who are supposed to be representing us all.
Stricter donation limits. Public financing of campaigns. That is what we need. We should note that this same bill also rolls back regulations of Wall Street derivatives, and that it is being strongly opposed by Elizabeth Warren. Dang. If only she were running for president.
[Photo: AP]The Galactic Republic, Disney/ABC Television Group, Lucasfilm and Netflix Inc. today announced the highly-anticipated debut of the sixth and final season of the Emmy Award-winning series “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” exclusively to Netflix members in the U.S. and Canada on Friday, March 7. Accompanying the 13-episode new season dubbed “The Lost Missions” will be the entire “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” saga, which includes several director’s cut episodes never seen on TV as well as the feature film. This multi-year agreement also makes Netflix the exclusive subscription service for the entire “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” series.
In these eagerly anticipated episodes of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” some of the deepest mysteries of the conflict between the light and the dark sides of the Force are revealed. An intrepid clone trooper discovers a shocking secret, Anakin Skywalker’s closest relationship is tested to its limits and what Master Yoda discovers while investigating the disappearance of a Jedi could forever change the balance of power in the galaxy. Fans will not only be able to watch the thrilling finale, they’ll be able to see more of “The Clone Wars” than ever before as Netflix will also stream the director’s cut of seasons 1 5.
“Star Wars is one of the most iconic franchises of all time and this series joins a long line of Disney content that Netflix members are and will continue to enjoy for years to come,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix chief content officer. “‘The Clone Wars’ marks an important moment as Netflix welcomes more and more first-run content from The Walt Disney Company and its subsidiaries.”
“Star Wars: The Clone Wars” is the first time any Star Wars content has been available for Netflix streaming members. The deal follows a recent announcement from Netflix and The Walt Disney Company to bring multiple original series based on Marvel characters to the service in 2015. Netflix will be the exclusive U.S. subscription television service for first-run, live-action and animated movies from the Walt Disney Studios including titles from Disney, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, Marvel Studios, Disneynature and Lucasfilm beginning in 2016. Netflix members can currently enjoy a wide range of Disney, ABC Entertainment Group and Disney Channel films and TV shows across the 41 countries where Netflix operates.The flowers next to the memorial of antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, who was stabbed to death by a Golden Dawn supporter in September 2013, are fresh. One would expect that the decision to postpone the trial against 69 members of the neofascist party, including senior officials, would dominate conversation in the western Athens suburb of Keratsini. Most people, however, prefer not to talk about it.
“It is not spoken of. After all, how could one express support for the party after the killing?” said a shop owner near the site of Fyssas's murder. “However, behind the ballot booth curtain they can do what they like.”
Despite support having dropped off during the last national election in January, Golden Dawn's performance in Keratsini and the neighboring Nikaia and Perama districts has been above the national average. The party picked these neighborhoods as political battlegrounds against its ideological rivals. They are the same places where GD members and supporters have been charged with criminal acts including the attack on PAME unionists and the beating of Egyptian fishermen.
“They are keeping a low profile,” said Keratsini Mayor Christos Vrettakos. The last time that members of Golden Dawn carried out a provocative act as a group was on January 14, the day after the party announced its candidates for local elections in Piraeus. Its members marched in Keratsini, took down a banner in memory of Fyssas, and raided anarchist hangout Resalto. “They mostly shy away from provocation – also because of the trial. However, their polling power remains strong,” Vrettakos said.
Threats
GD garnered 7 percent in Keratsini and 9 percent in Perama. However, locals point out that there is no trouble in the streets any more. Things were different in the past, as GD appeared to up the ante each time a party member was put in detention. A year ago, GD local leader in Perama Pericles Moulianakis, who also ran for deputy regional governor in Piraeus, said in a campaign rally: “Those servants that are PAME will be over. We shall terminate them and that is a promise,” in reference to the Communist-affiliated trade union.
During an event outside GD's Perama offices in November, speaking on the phone from inside Korydallos Prison, MP Yiannis Lagos repeated similar threats. “We have been and we still are their opponent, their only enemy, their nightmare,” he said of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). At the same event, Sotiris Develekos, former chauffeur of GD party leader Nikos Michaloliakos, said that after the party's senior officials have been released from custody, “everyone will be held accountable.” “Piraeus has ports and seas, which is something that the ‘unwashed’ do not like, and they may find themselves in for some headlong dives,” he said of leftist supporters.
Since then, however, according to shopkeepers, workers and teachers in Perama, GD members and supporters have all but withdrawn. People speak less. The trademark black T-shirts emblazoned with the party's emblem are no longer worn by pupils at schools. The union set up in the shipbuilding zone remains officially active, but has no other presence. Even the slogans targeting KKE and immigrants that were painted in downtown Perama have been removed. Those who used to openly back GD are less keen to do so, locals say. Meanwhile, people who in the past received goods during the party's handouts have since turned to other organizations for help, including antifascist groups.
Education
Local government officials express concern at the fact that little action has been taken at schools. Authorities in Perama are mulling an antifascist graffiti festival, while in Nikaia leftist officials have suggested awareness-raising talks to inform people of Golden Dawn. Some 500 pupils have been taken on educational tours this year to learn about the battle between communist-dominated EAM/ELAS resistance fighters and the German occupation forces on October 13, 1944, when the former succeeded in defending the power station at Keratsini from the latter, who wanted to destroy the local infrastructure.
“This is a neighborhood of refugees,” Vrettakos said of Keratsini. “We need to turn to history to show what fascism really is.” However, he points out that GD remains strong in very poor areas. Meanwhile data from the free clinic set up in Perama and Keratsini by Doctors of the World are devastating. About 10,000 uninsured and poor people flocked to the clinic for medical aid or help last year, up from 7,000 in 2013. “We used to rely on construction and shipbuilding, both of which have collapsed,” Vrettakos said. “Unfortunately, this is a breeding ground for frustration.”
The trial
The trial of Golden Dawn’s leadership and members, which began on Monday morning in Athens, was adjourned until May 7 amid reports of attacks on witnesses.
The trial was adjourned after it emerged that one of the 69 defendants did not have a lawyer. A total of 44 defendants appeared in the special courtroom set up inside Korydallos Prison, but these did not include Michaloliakos and other senior MPs such as Christos Pappas and Ilias Kasidiaris.
Journalists were told that witnesses of Fyssas’s murder and a number of students were attacked by GD supporters as they arrived at the prison, despite a heavy police presence.
Local authorities and residents protested the decision to adjourn the trial as their appeal for the proceedings to be moved to another venue is not to be heard until May 7. Locals object to the trial taking place at Korydallos as they fear unrest.From doing your weekly shop and booking a taxi to paying your bills and filing your tax return, most of the important transactions in your life can now be carried out online. But one crucial process is still stuck in the dark ages: voting.
How many transactions can you think of that require you to go to a particular place at a particular time on a particular day and fill out a piece of paper that will be processed along with thousands of other pieces of paper by a handful human beings? It's positively archaic.
Most people agree that allowing people to cast their vote over the internet would have a positive impact on participation. A recent report by campaign group WebRoots Democracy found that the introduction of online voting could boost turnout in a UK general election by nine million.
The report also found that online voting option could reduce the cost per vote by a third, saving taxpayers around £12.8m per general election, while significantly reducing the number of accidentally spoilt ballots, speeding up the counting process, and enabling vision-impaired voters to cast a secret ballot for the first time.
Despite widespread public support, there has been a lack of political momentum behind online voting, amid concerns about the costs associated with introducing such a system, the security risks, and the potential for electoral fraud and coercion of voters.
However, these attitudes are starting to change. In November 2014, the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee produced a report, recommending that the government "come forward with an assessment of the challenges and likely impact on turnout, and run pilots in the next Parliament with a view to all electors having the choice of voting online at the 2020 general election".
The Digital Democracy Commission, set up by House of Commons Speaker John Bercow, echoed this recommendation in January 2015, stating that people should be able to choose to vote online in the 2020 general election.
"I don’t mean by that that it will necessarily at any stage be compulsory to vote in that way, but I think that the notion that, if it can be established as secure and reliable people should have the option to vote online, will gain ground more and more and more,” Mr Bercow said at the time.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party said in March that, if it wins the general election, it will "trial online voting to see if we can do it safely and cost effectively" in an attempt to improve turnout.
However, Cabinet Office minister Sam Gyimah has warned that moving to electronic voting would be a "huge task" for any government: "We cannot be under any illusion this would be easy to achieve. The fact electronic voting is incredibly rare across the globe I believe is testament to some of the problems delivering it," he said.
Following Estonia's lead
Estonia is currently the only country in the world that relies on internet voting in a significant way for legally-binding national elections.
The system was first introduced in 2005 for local elections, and was subsequently used in the 2007, 2011 and 2015 parliamentary elections, with the proportion of voters using this voting method rising from 5.5 per cent to 24.3 per cent to 30.5 per cent respectively.
London-based software firm Smartmatic and Estonian IT company Cybernetica worked to develop the electronic voting system used by the the Estonian Electoral Commission. Michael Summers, commercial director of Smartmatic, is confident that a similar system could be rolled out in the UK ahead of the 2020 general election.
"The reality is that participation in UK elections is dropping. There has been a gradual decline from the 1960s to the point where turnout in local elections and European parliamentary elections, for example, could be down to 30 per cent," said Mr Summers.
"So I think there is a necessity to do something to really bring the ballot to the voter, and to give voters more of a choice as to how they cast their ballot and where they cast their ballot from, and I think there’s a big role to play there for something like internet voting."
As well as Estonia, online voting systems have been used in various state-wide elections in Australia, the US, and a number of countries in Latin America, such as Mexico and Peru – primarily as a replacement for postal voting.
Mr Summers said that internet voting is a natural replacement for postal voting, which he descibes as "a poorly conceived business process", due to the high cost, frequency of accidentally spoilt ballots, and high risk of fraud. The only information currently required for a postal vote is date of birth and a handwritten signature.
"It’s effective as a remote voting channel, but it’s not a good solution to a business process. So I absolutely see internet voting as replacing postal voting, and in fact that is the place I would start," he said. "That might be a good way to start building confidence in the process."
First steps
One major step that has been made since the last election is the introduction of online voter registration. In June 2014, The Government Digital Service (GDS) introduced an internet portal that allows UK citizens to register to vote using their National Insurance number.
According to figures from GOV.UK’s voter registration site, more than 485,000 people registered to vote online on Monday 20 April – the day before the deadline – with 469,000 of these registrations completed online.
Mr Summers said that the process of registering to vote online helps people to get used to the idea of transacting over the internet. However, there are still a few hurdles that need to be overcome before online voting can become a reality – most notably the problem of coercion.
The way Estonia deals with this is to allow the voter to access the platform and cast a ballot as many times as they want, but only the last ballot cast is counted in the final tally.
"The point is that if I’m in a situation where my father is saying I’ve got to vote a certain way, I could cast my ballot with him looking over my shoulder, and then I can go in at a later date and change my mind," explained Mr Summers.
"If the voter really feels that they are unable to remove themselves from a coercer, they can then go to the polling station on election day and cast a paper ballot, and that paper ballot cancels out any previously cast internet vote."
Another potential issue is the difficulty of proving beyond doubt that the person who is casting the ballot really is who they say they are.
GDS is currently in the process of rolling out a tool called GOV.UK Verify, which will allow users to select and register with an identity provider, and then use their 'assured' identity to access digital services. The current list of identity providers includes the Post Office, Experian, Digidentity, Verizon, Barclays, GB Group, Morpho, PayPal and Royal Mail.
To register with an identity provider a user must provide their name, gender, address and date of birth. They also need to provide at least two pieces of evidence that demonstrate they are the person they say they are, such as driving licence or bank account details.
The identity provider then performs a series of background checks to verify that the person is who they say they are. These checks may vary depending on the level of assurance the service requires, but could include counter-fraud checks and activity history.
So far, GDS has given no indication that its Verify system could support internet voting. However all of the identity providers have been certified to verify the user's identity to a defined level of assurance to meet published government standards.
Verify is already used with a number of online government services including claiming for redundancy payment, filing a self-assessment tax return and checking or updating company car tax.
Smartmatic is also developing its own identity management platform called your.id, that uses fingerprint scanning and facial recognition alongside personal information to establish the voter's identity. Once registered, this allows voters to cast their ballot using either the fingerprint reader or selfie camera on their smartphone.
Smartmatic is seeking to become part of the government’s Verify programme. However, it said that its internet voting platform could also integrate with other identity management platforms.
Challenges ahead
There is still resistance to internet voting from a number of quarters. One report, published in 2014 by J. Alex Halderman, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, claimed to identify "major risks" in the security of Estonia’s internet voting system.
“There is no doubt that the Estonian I-voting system is vulnerable to state-level attackers, and it could also be compromised by dishonest election officials,” said Halderman. “With today’s security technology, no country in the world is able to provide a secure Internet voting system. I would recommend that Estonia return to a paper ballot only system.”
The Estonian National Electoral Committee reponded to the report, stating that the claims were unsubstantiated and the described attacks infeasible. Before each election, the system is rebuilt from the ground up, and security testing including penetration testing and denial-of-service mitigation tests are carried out.
The incident shows that there are still many cultural obstacles to overcome, as well as technological ones, when it comes to implementing online voting. Above all, citizens need to have confidence that they system they are using is secure and not susceptible to fraud.
With the rollout of GOV.UK Verify, and the development of new technology like Smartmatic's internet voting platform, online voting in the 2020 general election is well within the realms of possibility. However, it will need a political party to champion the idea, and tackle people's concerns head-on.
"If we want to move people to vote online for the 2020 parliamentary election, what we really should be doing is getting people used to the technology between now and 2020, and giving people the facility to vote in local elections and in EU elections using internet voting," said Mr Summers.
"Then when we do roll it out for a nationwide parliamentary election, as many people as possible can use it, are comfortable using it and understand how the system works."A scare actor at Universal Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights complained to police over the weekend that a visitor kicked him in the face.
The Orlando Police Department said in a report filed Monday it plans to ask the state attorney's office to file a battery charge against the guest, Brandon Keaton Brown of Fort Myers. Scare actor William Gailit escorted Brown out of a haunted house Saturday night, telling police he'd been kicked. Gailit, who was treated for a bruise to the face, was working at the "Jack Presents: 25 Years of Monsters and Mayhem" house.
"It's definitely my last year doing it [Halloween Horror Nights]," Gailit, a 27-year-old Universal attractions worker, told the Orlando Sentinel. "I know a lot of people that work the event and half of them said they would never do it again."
A state attorney's office spokeswoman said the case information has not yet been received.
The incident happened around the same time as reports surfaced on social media of three female Universal scare actors quitting their jobs, saying they couldn't take harassment by guests any more. The blog ThemeParkInsider reported Monday that three workers had posted their decision to quit in a Facebook group.
A scare actor at Universal Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights complained to police that a visitor kicked him in the face. (Video by FOX35) A scare actor at Universal Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights complained to police that a visitor kicked him in the face. (Video by FOX35) SEE MORE VIDEOS
Universal spokesman Tom Schroder said he could not talk about specific workers or incidents.
"The safety of our team members and our guests is our most important priority. We have a zero-tolerance policy that can include prosecution of anyone suspected of compromising the safety of our team members," he said in a statement. "Our scare actors receive special safety training and we staff our event with uniformed law enforcement officers and team members whose role is to keep everyone safe."
Halloween Horror Nights is a 25-year-old nighttime event at Universal Studios Florida that features several haunted houses. Visitors can buy alcohol there.
CAPTION The Universal Soldier tackled Halloween Horror Nights opening night. Here's a look at the characters in the scare zones and haunted houses made up to scare you. The Universal Soldier tackled Halloween Horror Nights opening night. Here's a look at the characters in the scare zones and haunted houses made up to scare you. CAPTION The Universal Soldier tackled Halloween Horror Nights opening night. Here's a look at the characters in the scare zones and haunted houses made up to scare you. The Universal Soldier tackled Halloween Horror Nights opening night. Here's a look at the characters in the scare zones and haunted houses made up to scare you. CAPTION Michael Aiello, Director of Entertainment - Creative Development, for Univeral Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights gives an overview of the annual event. Michael Aiello, Director of Entertainment - Creative Development, for Univeral Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights gives an overview of the annual event. CAPTION Blumhouse Productions is responsible for producing some of the creepiest movies over the last two decades. And now some of those films are coming to Halloween Horror Nights 27, incuding The Purge, Sinister, and Insidious. Blumhouse Productions is responsible for producing some of the creepiest movies over the last two decades. And now some of those films are coming to Halloween Horror Nights 27, incuding The Purge, Sinister, and Insidious. CAPTION Horror film director Eli Roth has made his commercial directorial debut with Universal's Halloween Horror Nights. Horror film director Eli Roth has made his commercial directorial debut with Universal's Halloween Horror Nights. CAPTION View the 2017 Halloween Horror Nights commercial directed by Eli Roth. View the 2017 Halloween Horror Nights commercial directed by Eli Roth.
If there is a problem throughout the park with unruly guests, banning alcohol might have to be considered, said Robert Niles, editor and publisher of ThemeParkInsider. Alcohol is already forbidden at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal's Hollywood park.
Universal has to find balance, Niles said. The theme park has to protect workers. But with too many restrictions, Niles said, you "create a perfectly event that would be totally boring that nobody would want to go to. The very nature of a Halloween event is, it is an up-close, in-your-face thing that crosses boundaries."
spedicini@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5240Overview
Position: Cornerback
Height: 5’11”
Weight: 199 pounds
School: Florida Gators
Combine Performance Data
40-yard dash: 4.50 seconds
Bench press (225 pounds): 15 reps
Vertical jump: 39 inches
Broad jump: 10 feet, 10 inches (third-best among cornerbacks)
Vernon Hargreaves 2016 NFL Draft Profile
What you see is what you get with Vernon Hargreaves. Coming out of high school, Rivals.com rated him as the second-best overall prospect in the nation. The Tampa, FL native was the crown jewel of a loaded 2013 recruiting class for the Gators under then head coach Will Muschamp. It’s no surprise then that three years later his skill set is highly coveted by pro scouts.
It didn’t take Hargreaves long to make an impact in Gainesville. As a true freshman, he started ten games and was one of few bright spots on a Gators team that finished 4-8. His three interceptions led the team and he tied a school record for a true freshman with 11 pass breakups. He was named to the SEC all-freshman team, made first team all-conference and even garnered third-team All-American honors by the Associated Press.
In 2014, he continued to develop a reputation as one of the SEC’s top shutdown corners. He tallied another three interceptions while also breaking up 13 passes which was tied for 12th best nationally. A year later, he would add four more picks and finish eighth in the nation with 152 yards off interceptions. All the while, the Gators would finish in the top 20 in scoring defense both seasons. In 2015, Hargreaves was named a consensus all-American.
Strengths
elite level athleticism and acceleration.
excellent fluidity in hips which enables him to mirror receivers well.
phenomenal vertical explosiveness gives him edge in the air on contested passes.
great tackler who rarely gives up yards after catch.
will prey upon quarterbacks who telegraph passes with their eyes.
fierce competitive streak who rarely takes a play off.
stayed healthy throughout entire college career.
can play on special teams as both a return man and blocker.
Weaknesses
decent frame and build but not prototypical.
height could pose problems against tall feature receivers.
has a tendency to get too separated from receivers on comeback routes.
can get burned off double moves when in off-man coverage.
overly physical in run support; could pose injury risk at next level.
was a relative non-factor in Florida’s blowout loss to Michigan in the Citrus Bowl.
NFL Comparison: Casey Hayward
Teams with Need at Position: Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, Jacksonville Jaguars, Miami Dolphins, New Orleans Saints, Oakland Raiders, Philadelphia Eagles, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Projection: top ten pick
Bottom Line
Other than potentially Jalen Ramsey, you’re probably not going to find a more pro-ready defensive back than Hargreaves. His competitive fire and exceptional athleticism make him a highly coveted pro prospect. He lived up to all the recruiting hype and then some while at Florida. As a result, expect him to be off the board fairly early on day one of the draft.More than $12 million.
That's Providence's payout in firefighter overtime in the last fiscal year.
It’s way up over years past, way up said City Councilman John Igliozzi because of the mayor's move two years ago to change firefighter's shifts.
“The financial facts are, we saved no money,” Igliozzi told NBC 10 News.
Instead, Igliozzi, who chairs the council's finance committee, said it's the opposite.
In fiscal years 2014 and 2015, firefighter overtime costs were about $7.5 million a year.
Then, Mayor Jorge Elorza mandated new firefighter shifts, citing high overtime payouts. He said at the time the change would save about $5 million a year.
Igliozzi said the overtime number then rose to more than $9 million in 2016 and more than $12 million in the fiscal year that ended in July. It is now on pace to be even higher this current year.
The controversial shift change |
protested against Frederikshavn Municipality’s decision to allow the drilling.
READ MORE: Activists: Civil disobedience the only way to stop shale gas
In 2010, the former Venstre-led government gave the French oil company Total and Nordsøfonden, the government’s oil exploration arm, permission to drill for and produce shale gas in 40 Danish municipalities.
Kirsten Brosbøl, the environment minister, has since decided that any exploration of shale gas by fracking should no longer be decided by municipalities, but by her ministry.The first computer I ever bought was a commodore 128 (I actually received it as a gift for my 16th birthday)
This baby had 128K (not MB) of RAM, 4 sound channels and 16 colors
With the C128 you had a C64 built in and you could run CP/M (it came with a floppy)
I almost always booted up C64, this gave you 39KB free memory to use, the speed was 1MHZ, the C128 could run at 2MHZ but then the screen would go dark before you switched back to 1MHZ. The C128 came with BASIC built in, I had a taperecorder so that I could store and retrieve programs games. This was such a nuisance, if your friend gave you a game and the heads on his recorder were aligned different you could not load the game, you would have to use a screwdriver to fix the azimuth. It would take up to 30 minutes to load a game if you didn’t have a turbo.
I still remember the great games from that time, here are some of my favorites
1942
yie-ar kung fu
kung fu master
Zaxxon
Ghost N Goblins
The best part about the games is that you could change the value in an address space after you loaded a game but before typing run
You would use POKE for that, examples:
POKE 43719,234 POKE 43720,234 POKE 43721,234 Invincibility
POKE 44731,76 POKE 44732,253 POKE 44733,174 All doors unlocked
POKE 34202,200 SYS 2060 Unlimited lives
Here is a list of common pokes: http://ready64.org/articoli/_files/043_pokesc64.txt
Programming on the commodore was primarily done in BASIC or assembler (built in) but you could also buy a C compiler, Oxford Pascal or many other languages.
Here is an example of basic
Visual Basic 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 10 PRINT "THIS IS THE MAIN PROGRAM", 20 GOSUB 1000 30 PRINT "AND AGAIN" ; 40 GOSUB 1000 50 PRINT "AND THAT IS ALL." 60 STOP 1000 REM SUBROUTINE STARTS HERE 1010 PRINT "THIS IS THE SUBROUTINE," 1020 RETURN 10 PRINT "THIS IS THE MAIN PROGRAM", 20 GOSUB 1000 30 PRINT "AND AGAIN"; 40 GOSUB 1000 50 PRINT "AND THAT IS ALL." 60 STOP 1000 REM SUBROUTINE STARTS HERE 1010 PRINT "THIS IS THE SUBROUTINE," 1020 RETURN
Here is some assembler language
LDA $5000 ASL CLC ADC $5000 STA $5000 BRK
Now I will tag a bunch of people, I want to know what your first computer was and the top 3 of your favorite games
Brent Ozar @brento
Denny Cherry @mrdenny
Michelle Ufford @sqlfool
SQLBatman @sqlbatman
Jeremiah Peschka @peschkaj
Jason Massie @statisticsio
Mladen Prajdic @MladenPrajdic
For all the ones I did not tag, feel free to leave a commentFaster tree growth stimulated by rising carbon dioxide levels does not translate into more long-term carbon storage in forests. PHOTO: CHRISTIAN KOERNER
There is much scientific and political interest in using the transfer of carbon from the atmosphere to the biosphere, or carbon sequestration, to help mitigate the greenhouse effect (1). Because plants fix carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) by photosynthesis and store carbon in their body (close to half of plant dry matter is carbon), faster carbon uptake by plants through faster growth is widely held to increase carbon sequestration. Yet, this assumption is supported by neither theory nor evidence. Any gain in carbon storage from faster tree growth will be transitory.
Carbon sequestration is the process of storing carbon that has been collected and removed as CO 2 from the atmosphere. Increasing the greenhouse effect by CO 2 release may be seen as a debt put on future generations; translocating carbon from the atmosphere back to the biosphere mitigates this debt, provided that the removal and subsequent storage last for as long as society considers an increasing greenhouse effect unwanted. This desired time scale is likely to be on the order of centuries. Shorter-term storage, followed by carbon release within a couple of months or years, would burden the next human generation and has no sustained effect.
It is with these time scales in mind that we need to investigate whether faster tree growth can cause existing forests to store more carbon (2, 3). The problem is analogous to money turnover and capital in the economy. The carbon turnover of an ecosystem and the size of the ecosystem's carbon pool are commonly not related. To determine the size of the carbon pool, we must subtract the net carbon output from the net carbon input and then multiply the remainder by the carbon residence time. Pools (capital) will become larger only if two conditions are met: The carbon input must exceed the carbon output, and the difference in these carbon fluxes must remain stored in the system for hundreds of years.
If trees grow faster as result of growth-stimulating environmental change, they will either arrive more rapidly at harvesting size or pass through their natural life span faster. Should such a ramping up of the carbon pool (by faster growth) take place in synchrony over large areas, the result will be a transitory gain in carbon storage—often called “buying time”—followed by a slowing of growth and finally by a carbon release wave when these trees get older (2). This appears to be happening right now in Amazonia, where a decreasing trend of carbon accumulation combined with accelerated mortality (a shorter carbon residence time) has been documented since the 1990s (4). In the long run, growth stimulation increases carbon turnover, but not the carbon residence time (and hence storage).
Over large areas and over long periods of time, the birth and growth of trees can be considered to balance their death and decay (2, 5–7). For the carbon pool to grow in a given forest, tree demography must shift toward a greater abundance of older age classes—that is, toward higher mean tree longevity. Once that demographic shift has occurred and a forest has reached its new, higher storage capacity, there is no further net gain in carbon, irrespective of the rate of carbon turnover. The best practice to retain the benefit of such stores is to protect carbon-rich old-growth forests (8).
The critical role of longevity becomes obvious when the tree plantation industry is considered. There, the goal is fast production of timber and pulp, which means short carbon residence times and less carbon storage per unit forest area than in slower-growing, old-growth forests. The use of wood in lasting products must not be mistaken as carbon sequestration unless the overall carbon pool of wood products rises. Just as in forests, what matters is the difference between input and output and the mean residence time (currently, a mean of about 20 years for wood products in Europe).
Although it sounds contradictory, forest productivity is commonly negatively correlated with the carbon capital of a forest (7, 9) under a given set of environmental conditions. In tropical forests, the fastest-growing trees also store less carbon per unit land area as a result of short life span and low wood density.
Thus, unless the residence time of carbon (tree longevity) is maintained or enlarged, faster growth does not mean there is more carbon sequestration. And unlike in the economy, the options for extending the growth of carbon capital in trees are naturally limited. This insight had nourished another idea: to increase carbon sequestration in soils. Microorganisms convert plant debris to soil organic matter (SOM), and carbon can be stored in that form for thousands of years. The overall size of the soil organic carbon pool is about three times that of the global biomass carbon. However, SOM stores not only carbon, but also many other chemical elements that plants need for growth. Organic carbon sequestration to soils therefore competes with plant growth for essential nutrients. For instance, the ratio of nitrogen to carbon needed to tie up carbon in organic material can be as low as 1:400 in timber, and as high as 1:10 in SOM (10). The addition of nitrogen to a forest may facilitate SOM formation (11), but other plant nutrients in addition to nitrogen also become locked up in SOM.
Correspondingly, the results of CO 2 enrichment experiments with forest trees cannot be translated into future CO 2 effects on carbon sequestration. These experiments test whether—and if so, by how much—carbon uptake can be accelerated by higher CO 2 supply to photosynthesis. They were not, nor could they have been, designed to identify the mean residence time of carbon. Tree stands that did not show a sustained growth acceleration in response to higher CO 2 supply (12, 13) (because chemical elements other than carbon limit their growth) might still slowly build a larger carbon capital by delayed recycling of biomass carbon (delayed mortality), whereas those that showed growth stimulation might reduce the landscape-wide carbon capital in the long run because of a faster life cycle (2, 7, 14). The value of these CO 2 fertilization experiments lies in advancing our understanding of the forest carbon cycle, and helping to make model parameterizations more realistic.
Whether forests will grow faster in a changing environment (irrespective of their carbon storage) is of societal interest because forest products can substitute fossil carbon-based products or provide bioenergy. Nevertheless, changes in productivity do not scale with changes in carbon sequestration, which is inevitably tied to residence time (tree turnover, tree mortality) (7, 9). Similarly, earlier bud break and a longer season in temperate trees have little to do with a change in the size of the forest carbon capital, as the phenology research community often assumes. A longer season may contribute to higher annual tree growth to the extent that the internal clock of trees permits it (15), but not to more long-term carbon storage.
The most effective way to enhance forest carbon storage is to prevent logging old-growth forests and to extend the forested land area (8). Once these new forests reach their storage capacity, they will not sequester additional carbon, irrespective of how fast trees grow and turn over carbon.How to build a simple dashboard with Salt UI
This week the guys at SaltStack cut the first developer release of Salt UI. Salt UI is a framework for building web applications that interfaces with Salt using Salt API. That might sound boring, but it is incredibly powerful, it will let you build advanced web apps to perform any sort of management, orchestration, monitoring and so forth using all the modules and functions in Salt. Salt UI is not yet a mature project yet but I wanted to see how I could build a simple self service dashboard for our company's web team.
Impatient readers will want to check out the screenshots at the bottom first.
Goals
The goal is to build a simple dashboard with 4 functions.
Refresh salt pillars
Create git repositories
Create/update databases with users and permissions
Create/update virtual hosts on our webservers
Prerequisites
This howto assumes you have a working salt ecosystem, including latest git versions of salt API and salt UI. For a quick rundown over the salt UI architecture and concepts, check out this page
Salt UI changes
Hop into the git clone of Salt UI and start making changes.
First we need a new route to add the dashboard view. Open up the routes file, and add the new route called dash, which points to tmpl/dash.html
js/conf/routes.js
route_map.add('dash', { url: '#/dash', tmpl: require('text!tmpl/dash.html'), type: 'full', });
Then add the dasboard HTML template. The structure is using the Bootstrap for layout. The thing to note in this html is the tag <x-dashexec>. This is a "magic" tag that we will use later on.
tmpl/dash.html
<div id="wrap"> <div class="container-fluid"> <div class="row-fluid"> <div class="span12 page-header"> <img src="/img/logo.png"> <h1>Salt UI Dashboard</h1> </div> </div> </div> <div class="container-fluid dash-container"> <div class="row-fluid"> <div class="span2 sidebar dash-sidebar"> <div class="sidebar-nav"> <h5><i class="icon-cogs"></i> Operations</h5> <x-dashexec></x-dashexec> </div> </div> <div class="span10 main"> <div class="hero-unit"> <h1>Dashboard Proof of Concept!</h1> <p> This simple dashboard has the following features </p> <h4>Features</h4> <ul class="unstyled"> <li><i class="icon-ok"></i> Refresh salt pillars </li> <li><i class="icon-ok"></i> Create git repositories </li> <li><i class="icon-ok"></i> Create/update databases with users and permissions </li> <li><i class="icon-ok"></i> Create/update virtual hosts on our webservers </li> </ul> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div id="push"></div> </div> <footer id="footer"> <div class="container-fluid"> <img class="pull-left" width="400" src="/img/saltstack.png"> <p class="pull-right muted credit"> Proof of concept by Tor Hveem </p> </div> </footer>
Style
What good is markup without styles. We add our styles to the project in a new less file. Salt UI is using less which is a language that compiles into CSS.
Modify less/saltui.less to include dash.less:
less/saltui.less
@import "dash.less"; // Custom rules for the dashboard
And then add the styles for the dasboard:
less/dash.less
html, body { height: 100%; /* The html and body elements cannot have any padding or margin. */ } /* Wrapper for page content to push down footer */ #wrap { min-height: 100%; height: auto!important; height: 100%; /* Negative indent footer by its height */ margin: 0 auto -60px;.page-header { h1 { /* Salt color */ color: rgb(3, 169, 219); font-size: 56px; line-height: 36px; } img { width: 80px; float: left; } } } /* Set the fixed height of the footer here */ push, footer { height: 60px; } footer { background-color: #f5f5f5; padding-left: 18px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px; p { line-height: 80px; } border-top: 1px-solid #e5e5e5; }.dash-container {.sidebar-nav { button { width: 100%; } margin-right: 15px; } }
The magic tag we added in the template needs to be inited. Salt UI keeps all its tags in js/elements/init.js. Lets add our new tag for dashboard. Find the elem_map variable and add the new element like this:
js/elements/init.js
var elem_map = { exec: require('elements/exec/exec'), dashexec: require('elements/dashexec/dashexec'), exec_docs: require('elements/exec-docs/exec-docs'), exec_results: require('elements/exec-results/exec-results'), login: require('elements/login/login'), minion_detail: require('elements/minion-detail/minion-detail'), minion_list: require('elements/minion-list/minion-list'), modal: require('elements/modal/modal'), };
Now it is time to write javascript and template for our new custom element dashexec. I made 4 buttons, 1 for each of the wanted opertations. The trained eye will quickly see that the buttons specify which targets, module functions and with what args the salt commands should be ran.
js/elements/dashexec/template.html
<form> <button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary" data-class-disabled="vm.inprogress" data-target="salt.demo.no" data-fun="state.sls" data-arg="salt-git-pillars" data-disabled="vm.inprogress"> <i class="icon-magic" data-class-icon-spin="vm.inprogress"></i> Refresh pillar </button> </form> <form> <button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary" data-class-disabled="vm.inprogress" data-target="git.demo.no" data-fun="state.sls" data-arg="git-repos" data-disabled="vm.inprogress"> <i class="icon-magic" data-class-icon-spin="vm.inprogress"></i> Update Git repos </button> </form> <form> <button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary" data-class-disabled="vm.inprogress" data-target="db*.demo.no" data-fun="state.sls" data-arg="mysql" data-disabled="vm.inprogress"> <i class="icon-magic" data-class-icon-spin="vm.inprogress"></i> Update database </button> </form> <form> <button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary" data-class-disabled="vm.inprogress" data-target="web*.demo.no" data-fun="state.sls" data-arg="nginx" data-disabled="vm.inprogress"> <i class="icon-magic" data-class-icon-spin="vm.inprogress"></i> Update webservers </button> </form>
The template goes along with this javascript to let the magic happen
js/elements/dashexec/dashexec.js
/** A custom element that turns carefully crafted form buttons into salt commands and renders result into a x-tree tag @module saltui.elements @submmodule dashexec @event SaltExecution **/ define(function(require) { 'use strict'; var template = require('text!./template.html'), rivets = require('rivets'), xhr = require('utils/xhr'), drawtree = require('./tree'), xtag = require('x-tag'); var exec = { content: template, onCreate: function() { this.xtag.inprogress = false; rivets.bind(this, {vm: this.xtag}); }, events: { /** Submit the execution form via Ajax and draw the result using d3 drawtree **/ submit: function(e) { e.preventDefault(); var that = this; this.xtag.inprogress = true; /* Use the event to find the correct button */ var button = e.target.querySelector('button'); var lowstate = { client: 'local', tgt: button.getAttribute('data-target'), fun: button.getAttribute('data-fun'), arg: [button.getAttribute('data-arg')] }; /* Clear content */ document.querySelector('.main').innerHTML='<div class="results"><h4>Results</h4><x-tree><i class="icon-spin icon-sp inner"></i> Running...</x-tree></div>'; xhr('POST', '/', [lowstate]).get('return').get('0').then(function(result) { that.xtag.inprogress = false; var tgt = document.querySelector('x-tree'); /* Clear target */ while (tgt.firstChild) { tgt.removeChild(tgt.firstChild); } drawtree(result, tgt); }); }, }, }; return exec; });
Drawtree is the function that turns the output from salt into a graphical tree. Think of it as a salt outputter for web. I modified the default tree a tiny bit to put some colors on result and changes, so the people pushing the buttons easily can see if every change went OK and what was changed. Much can be done with this outputter to render beautiful visualization on the changes. Change the tree.js color-function to look like this:
tree.js
function color(d) { if (d.name =='result') { if (d.val == false) { return '#9d261d'; } } if (d.name == 'changes') { if (d.children.length > 0) { return '#46a546'; } } return d._children? "#3182bd" : d.children? "#c6dbef" : "#fd8d3c"; }
Screenshots
The dashboard welcome screen
The dashboard tree displaying the state output
Thank you for reading, feel free to email/twitter comments and/or suggestions!Sony Officially Buys Factory Producing Wii U’s DRAM; Could Actually Work for Nintendo for a While
Giuseppe Nelva January 31, 2014 5:13:55 AM EST
Sony’s intention to purchase the Renesas Electronics semiconductor manufacturing plant at Tsuruoka, in the Japanese Yamagata prefecture, has been rumored for a while, and the house of PlayStation finally announced with an official press release that the purchase has been finalized and a definitive agreement with Renesas has been signed.
The plant at Tsuruoka is well known in the industry for manufacturing the DRAM chip that serves as the heart of Nintendo’s Wii U.
The agreement seals the transfer of the facility and all its equipment to Sony Semiconductor Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony. Sony paid 7.51 billion yen (a little over 73 million dollars) for the whole package. The transfer of property is expected to happen by March 31st.
The sale saved the plant from its planned closure due to the restrucuturing of Renesas Electronics’ business, and Sony will absorb part of its workforce within its own ranks.
Tsuruoka will become the center of Sony’s new Yamagata Technology Center for the production of CMOS sensors for smartphones, involving further investment of 27.5 billion yen (a little south of 268 million dollars) to improve the company’s production from the current capacity of approximately 60,000 wafers per month to approximately 75,000 wafers per month.
But what about the Wii U? Here comes the interesting part: Nintendo still didn’t disclose the identity of any new partner for the production of the valuable Wii U component. The deal between Sony and Renesas includes the following clause:
After the Asset Transfer, the system LSIs and others produced at the Tsuruoka Factory will be produced there for Renesas Electronics by SCK (Sony Semiconductor Corporation) on a contract basis for a certain period of time as agreed by Renesas Electronics and Sony. After expiration of that period, Renesas Electronics will shift the production of the system LSIs to its Naka Factory or discontinue production, as Renesas Electronics previously announced to its customers.
While the press release doesn’t name Nintendo (or any other customer) explicitly, the historical console manufacturer from Kyoto is between Renesas’ customers, so it’s very possible that the DRAM of the Wii U could still be produced by Sony at Tsuruoka at least for a while, until the production will shift to Renesas’ plant in Naka or Nintendo finds a new partner.
While that possibility isn’t confirmed, a little bit of Sony could be beating within the heart of the Wii U in the future.There is tension in village Khampur under Chapaar police station in Muzaffarnagar district following violent clashes between the kawariyas and some members of the minority community. Over a dozen kawariyas have been admitted to hospitals with injuries, and the police force has been deployed in the village.
While kawariyas were raising religious slogans on their way back with Gangajal (water of river Ganga) from Haridwar, some residents of Khampur asked them to pass through their village silently. However, they refused to stay silent and continued sloganeering. This apparently angered members of the minority community who attacked them with sharp weapons when they were entering a temple in the area to offer Gangajal.
KB Singh, Senior Superintendent of Police said, "Some people have sustained injuries. The situation is now under control."
But Kapil Deo Agrawal, a local Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, alongwith a large number of members of Hindu organizations have said they would start a movement against the apathy of the state government towards kawariyas.A U.S. District Judge has just ruled that the government agency responsible for using a company’s truck in a botched drug sting that got a driver killed and caused $100,000 worth of damage to the truck won’t have to pay the company owner anything for their mistake.
All the way back in 2011, one of Craig Patty’s two trucks was in the shop for repairs, or so he thought. In fact, the Drug Enforcement Agency was using the truck and its driver to haul a load of marijuana north from the Rio Grande Valley as part of a sting operation targeting the Los Zetas cartel.
Unfortunately, as the truck passed Houston, it was ambushed by cartel members and despite the fact that he was being shadowed by two dozen federal agents and local police, the driver was killed when the truck was shot full of bullets.
After the incident, the truck was ruined and needed repairs. The insurance company refused to pay for it since it had been used in a criminal act (hauling the marijuana), and the DEA refused to pay for it simply because they didn’t have to.
Since 2011, Patty has been fighting to make the DEA pay him the money he feels he is owed. His is currently fighting for $133,532 in repairs and lost wages for the time the truck wasn’t able to be used, and $1.3 million in damages to himself and his family who have lived in fear of retaliation by the cartels since the incident.
Now a judge has ruled that the DEA doesn’t have to pay him back because it doesn’t have a rule against doing what it did. Despite the fact that the DEA wiped away the driver’s substantial criminal record so that he would be hired, despite the fact that they used the driver and equipment for illegal activities, despite the fact that they never asked permission or told the company owner anything about what was happening until after the incident, and despite the fact that a man died as a result of their botched operation, the DEA still hasn’t legally done anything wrong. So they don’t have to pay.
A lawyer for Patty sounded as incredulous as everyone else after the ruling saying;
“It is not just that you can’t sue the federal government, but that federal law enforcement agencies under this ruling can use anybody’s property to do anything they want to further their law enforcement mission and not have to go get the permission from the owner of the property to do it.”
He went on to comment that “This type of ruling, in our judgment, ignores the Constitution, ignores the privacy rights of individuals who are just trying to make a living, an honest living… Even if the district judge was right [applying the law], the law needs to change because this completely tramples what we believe the Constitution protects.”
From here, Patty plans to appeal the ruling in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. His attorneys will have a total of 20 minutes to plead his case. If he loses there, his last possible option will be a hearing in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Source: fleetowner, truckersreport, washingtonpost, chron, houstonchronicle, techdirtFirefox Metro's touchable tab bar for Windows "Metro"
Source: Mozilla Mozilla has released a preview version of Firefox Metro for Windows 8, a version of the browser which runs both in Microsoft's "Metro" touch-friendly environment and on the classic Windows desktop. Mozilla has continued to use the term "Metro" to refer to the user interface even though Microsoft has ceased using that name.
The preview shows off a number of new features that have been created for this version such as a "Metro" style Firefox start page with rectangular coloured panels on a grid representing bookmarks and recent history. The preview also includes support for "Metro" touch and swipe gestures, Windows 8 "charms", a simple version of the Australis interface and Firefox Sync.
The rectangular colourful stylings of "Metro" continue inside Mozilla's Metro browser
Source: Mozilla
According to one of the developers, Brian Bondy, this preview is not meant to be complete, but only to give a glimpse of what will be delivered. The preview will have automatic nightly updating enabled with its own channel for those updates. To use the "Metro" browser, it is necessary – to comply with Windows 8 – to set the browser as default; this can be done from within Firefox. The preview lacks Flash support, and the "Metro" environment will not have add-ons enabled, but the Windows Desktop version will. At the moment, panning and zooming is disabled and scrolling with the mouse wheel is broken.
The developers say that people should feel free to file feature requests and post bug reports. Further information about the nightly version and the general development of the Windows 8 version of Firefox is available on the Mozilla Wiki. The nightly version is available as a direct download.
(djwm)The Labour Party is in disarray. It is in a situation of utter embarrassment; one where they cannot even oppose a Conservative budget properly because they are unsure whether their next leader will oppose much of it or simply try to mimic it.
This dire conundrum stems from the reality that the Labour Party has been infiltrated by neoconservatives who seek to capitalise on what they think is conservative sentiment sweeping the nation. These people think they are being insightful by trying to adopt the policies of the winning party, which must be popular since they won, and that embracing even more conservative policies will win them the next election. It makes sense, or rather it would if Labour lost the election because they were too socialist. But this analysis could not be any more incorrect, because Labour still endorsed welfare cuts and austerity across the board, and that is simply not socialism – far from it.
Labour lost because what Britain rejected in May was not true leftism, but rather because people were disillusioned with where they thought the party stood because it still embraced conservative policies. Moreover, the Conservatives’ party line that Labour caused the financial crash also drastically helped secure them another term, this time alone, because Labour did not even attempt to combat it with the actual economic truth. And yet, despite this rather obvious explanation, very few Labour MPs seem prepared to stand up for their own party and what it ought to represent. Three out of the four Labour leadership contenders look set to continue this trend of proven failure, but this time with even more emphasis. Predictably, this will result in even more failure.
It is only Jeremy Corbyn that has put forward a logical direction for Labour to head: farther away from the Conservatives, not closer. The Labour Party are supposed to be the official opposition; an actual alternative to Conservatism. Instead, they risk becoming a failed photocopy that bought the wrong ink.
MPs like Harriet Harman, Chuka Umunna and Liz Kendall have bowed to the Conservatives and done just as they wished: the Labour Party embracing Tory policies. They wanted this to happen because they know that when the British electorate is given the choice between a mimic of a party and the actual thing, they will choose the actual thing, especially when the latter has had experience of being the actual thing. Those within Labour that want a shift to the ‘centre’ ground think they are being smart, but in reality they have been duped and played with. It is, in fact, the Tories that have been smart, because they have shifted the centre ground right and thus dragged Labour with it, into Tory territory. And everyone knows that when you drag someone into your territory, in which you are experienced, you have the upper hand. Labour must head home before it’s too late.
Ryan Curran
Like our Facebook page: http://www.Facebook.com/lookleftwardLast updated: 27.7.X10.2
Trickster is one of the 15 player classes.
Game Description: The trickster fights with a dagger while using her magical prism to distract enemies.
Thse prism can also teleport without having a player to teleport to.
Click here for a guide on to use the Trickster effectively.
Another Guide
How to Unlock: Reach level 20 with Assassin and level 20 with Paladin, or unlock instantly with 999.
Sound when hit
Sound when killed
Stats
Initial Stats Gain Per Level Average at 20 Base Stat Cap Hit Points 150 20 to 30 625 720 Magic Points 100 2 to 8 195 252 Attack 10 1 to 2 38 65 Defense 0 0 0 25 Speed 12 1 to 2 40 75 Dexterity 15 1 to 2 43 75 Vitality 12 0 to 1 21 40 Wisdom 12 0 to 2 31 60
Technical Details: All values exclude bonuses from equipment
Maximum Achievable Stats
Technical Details: Assuming you have maxed all stats
Character Skins
For a list of skins, see this page.One of the New York Giants' best moves before their 2011 Super Bowl season was one of their quietest. They re-signed versatile pass rusher Mathias Kiwanuka to a low-cost, two-year deal despite the career-threatening neck injury he suffered in 2010.
One year later, the Giants have rewarded Kiwanuka with a contract extension. Once again, they did it without anyone noticing.
Ralph Vacchiano of the New York Daily News noticed in the NFL Players Association contract database Friday that Kiwanuka had a new contract that lasts until 2015. NFL Network's Kimberly Jones confirmed the deal, and the Giants later announced it, although they didn't reveal terms.
The database indicates that Kiwanuka's base salary dropped from $4 million to $950,000 in 2012. He is now scheduled to make $2.95 million in 2013, $4.375 million in 2014 and $4.775 million in 2015. Up-front money and bonus information is unavailable, but look for Kiwanuka to have received a big bonus to sign the contract.
Kiwanuka really is the prototypical Giant. He's massive, he's intelligent, and he can rush the passer from a variety of positions. He had just 3.5 sacks in 2011 while playing mostly linebacker, but he had a great season stuffing the run with 84 tackles.
The Giants have known what players to let go of for the most part in recent years, like Kevin Boss and Steve Smith. They also have known what players to reward, and Kiwanuka is a keeper.
Osi Umenyiora, meanwhile, will have to wait. Jones reports Kiwanuka's contract won't have any effect on Umenyiora, who will be paid $3.975 million next season on his current deal.
"No idea what it means, but we will see," Umenyiora wrote in an email to The Associated Press. "I thought it was a good, smart decision by the Giants."A Toys R Us store is seen in Hayes, Britain, on Dec. 2. (Peter Nicholls/Reuters)
With the holiday shopping season approaching and bankruptcy proceedings underway in federal court, Toys R Us went to its creditors in November with an unorthodox request. To boost sales, the insolvent company asked: Let us pay out millions of dollars in bonuses to our top executives.
On Tuesday, a bankruptcy judge approved the request.
Under the plan, Toys R Us will pay 17 executives about $14 million in incentive bonuses, as long as the company hits its target of $550 million in earnings. It must hit a minimum of $484 million in adjusted earnings before any bonuses are awarded, as USA Today reported.
Attorneys for the company argued in court papers that the bonuses would help encourage executives to focus on driving up sales as the holidays approach.
“Timing, of course, is everything,” they wrote in a Nov. 14 filing. “Now more than ever the senior management team must be properly motivated and incentivized to handle the panoply of responsibilities attendant to their two full-time jobs of leading the Debtors through this restructuring and, at the same time, implementing a worldwide strategy to increase sales following a near shut-down of operations just eight short weeks ago. The task at hand cannot be underestimated.”
[Toys R Us files for bankruptcy, the latest victim of the ‘retail apocalypse’]
But Judy Robbins, a Justice Department lawyer representing the interests of creditors, contended that the bonuses were excessive, given the company’s financial situation.
“It defies logic and wisdom, not to mention the Bankruptcy Code, that a bankrupt company would now propose further multi-million dollar bonuses for the senior leadership of a company that began the year with employee layoffs and concludes it in the midst of the holiday season in bankruptcy,” she wrote.
“Apparently, this Christmas, Toys ‘R’ Us intends to deliver not only ‘children their biggest smiles of the year’ but the insiders, too,” her Nov. 28 objection read. She added later that some executives already receive other perks, including personal drivers and private planes.
In court, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Keith Phillips noted that none of the company’s creditors or lenders had raised objections — a silence that he said he found “particularly striking,” according to USA Today.
“On the contrary, I see the committee and any creditors who have addressed this court are asking the court to approve this plan and I think that’s telling,” he said. He gave the bonus plan the green light after a five-hour hearing in Richmond.
The company’s attorney, Joshua Sussberg, assured the judge that the company is “laser-focused on the holidays,” according to Reuters. There is still time, he said, to spur shoppers to “buy as much as they can.”
Sussberg also argued that the financial goals are challenging. “These are not layups,” he said, according to USA Today. “These are half-court, backwards, with a blindfold.”
Toys R Us, headquartered in Wayne, N.J., has 1,600 stores globally and about 64,000 employees. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September with plans to restructure $5 billion in long-term debt. It bought out one of its biggest competitors, FAO Schwarz, in 2006.
Sussberg said the retailer hopes to have a business plan ready by July, and aims to be out of bankruptcy by the |
Wallace’s leadership: *“Yes. I think that Mike … When Mike came in, I hit it off with Mike right away. He seemed like a team guy, and he is a hard-working guy. He definitely … He is excited this year. He has a little extra amp to him. I like that about him. He brings that positive attitude every day. He is a hard-working guy. He was ready to attack that conditioning test, and he killed it, so he was fired up about it. I like that. He is over 30, and he is coming in worrying about killing the conditioning test. Guys that are motivated like that, those are the guys you want to see – guys that are older, but still have that drive. He has that, and I am excited about him. I love the attitude he brings every day. He is a positive influence. He is not a whiner guy; he is not a complainer guy. He is a grinder. I am a Mike Wallace fan.”
*On if he feels the national spotlight on the Ravens due to all the surrounding news: *“I don’t. At this stage of my career, I kind of try to keep my head down and focus on what is in the building. I try to tell young guys that you can’t be getting caught up in the media every day, because obviously, if you read the media, the sky is falling every day, and we aren’t going to survive until tomorrow. No, I tell them to put the blinders on and control what we can control. We can’t control injuries on the football field. It is a nasty, violent game, where people are going to get hurt, and you don’t want them to get hurt. That is just the nature of the beast. What we can do is control our preparation, our attitude and our focus every day. We have to roll with the guys that we have, and the guys that are hurt, we want to get them back as fast as possible. Obviously, we have guys in the building that are working on doing that. I tell guys to focus on their job. I try not to get distracted or anything like that. You just focus on your job and what you have to do.’”
*On if he has a sense of how upset QB Joe Flacco is that he isn’t practicing: *“You guys know Joe as well as I do. He does not ever miss practice. Besides his knee, the guy has never missed practice. I’m not worried about him; I think that he will be fine. But obviously, I do not know. I can’t predict the future, and I don’t know if it is super serious. All I know is that I think he is going to be fine, and everything is going to be fine with him. Obviously, if they can rest him right now, why not rest him and let it heal before we start actual live bullets? Backs are nothing to deal with or mess with, but I feel good that he will be ready to go when we need him.”
*On what he thinks of the young defensive linemen: *“During camp, the defensive linemen, they have the upper hand a little bit during training camp, as far as the drills that are run and stuff like that. Sometimes, defensive linemen have a little bit of an advantage during camp, but they have brought in some young guys that are playing hard and looking good. Michael Pierce, watching that kid develop – obviously, he is only in his second year – but just the power and flexibility he has for a big man is pretty special. I am excited about him and some other of the young guys, too. Obviously, Mike is in his second year. The other guys they have brought in, it is early, but everybody is working hard, and we will see how they do. It is still early, but they have a lot of time to have a good camp.”
*On if he has noticed anything about T James Hurst this season: *“No. I think that James Hurst, since the day he was [signed] here, he comes in with the right demeanor to get better every day and to know his job and know his role. He acts like a pro. Even when he was a rookie, he acted like a pro, as far as taking this job seriously and putting this job first before anything else. When he comes into the building, he is locked in and focused. I do not think that has changed. He has been working his tail off, and I expect great things out of him this year. I think he is going to do great. I think he does everything the right way. He has the ability. He has played a lot of games for us, and we have won a lot of games with James. I am excited for him just to stay at right tackle, take every single rep at right tackle, and get better every single day. Obviously, he has always been flipping back and forth; he has been our swing guy. But, you just want him to get it at right tackle, take every single rep, get comfortable at that position, and you hope for him to play every down.”Rossi reveals what Ljajic said
By Football Italia staff
Delio Rossi has revealed exactly what Adem Ljajic said to provoke his physical attack. “I understand Serbian...”
The Fiorentina Coach was sacked after he struck 20-year-old player Ljajic during an incredible dugout brawl following a substitution in Wednesday’s 2-2 draw with Novara.
Rossi accepted the decision and apologised to Ljajic, but refused to confirm or deny what was said during his farewell press conference.
However, he has now told La Repubblica newspaper what sparked his totally out of character fury.
“While he was going back to the bench Ljajic applauded and said to me: ‘Well done, maestro. Really, you’re a phenomenon.’
“I told him he shouldn’t dare behave like that and he offended me in Serbian. But I have trained many Serbian players in my career and I understood what he said.
“He told me to ‘go back in your mother’s ****’ and at that point I lost it.”
The article also claims Ljajic goaded Rossi during the attack, repeatedly telling him to hit harder ‘as they’re going to kick you out anyway.’
Meanwhile, Fiorentina have confirmed Ljajic’s father will not press charges against Rossi, changing his mind after telling the Serbian media he would contact a lawyer.
Ljajic has been frozen out of the squad until the end of the season and is unlikely to ever play for Fiorentina again.Ireland has been ranked fourth in the EU by the European Digital Forum (EDF) as part of its 2016 Startup Nation Scoreboard looking at how established a nation’s start-up ecosystem is.
The EU start-up scoreboard was devised through a crowdsourcing exercise involving the national experts of 25 countries, most specifically looking at the outcomes of the StartUp Manifesto written back in 2013.
The manifesto was a 22-action roadmap supported by nine of the leading European entrepreneurs – divided into 72 measurable actions to spur discussion on improving the start-up ecosystem and digital-era performance in the EU’s 28 member states.
In the manifesto, so far signed by thousands across Europe, there are six key pillars on which this recent scoreboard was defined.
These include an institutional framework, access to education and skills, available talent, amount of funding available, data protection standard and finally, digital leadership within a nation.
In the report, Ireland is shown to have adopted the recommendations in the manifesto at a rate of 72pc, compared with the EU average of 60pc, putting it in fourth place overall.
The Netherlands has been ranked first by the EDF with 85pc, followed by Italy (82pc) and the UK (77pc).
The worst-ranked nation in the EU is its latest addition, Croatia, which has an adoption rate of the manifesto of just 32pc of its key targets since 2013.
In its focused explanation of Ireland’s ranking, the EDF cites Irish entrepreneurs’ demand for a start-up manifesto for the country as being a key factor, given Ireland’s hosting of Startup Nations Summit this November, the first time it is to be held in Europe.
“Ireland’s start-up ecosystem seems to be at a phase of network growth where individual pockets of excellence are increasing in density and starting to connect with each other nationally,” says the report.
Despite Ireland ranking an adoption rate of 100pc in terms of digital leadership, it has only ranked 50pc in terms of access to talent, despite many of the major tech companies having their headquarters here.
Principal author of the report and director and co-founder of Open Evidence, an online consultancy firm, David Osimo, says: “On balance, Europe is making good progress in key areas. But many countries need to move beyond words.
“Policymakers need to take harder decisions to deliver more progress in areas that would make it easier for start-ups to scale up. And we need to involve the start-up community more directly in setting challenges – and monitoring progress.”
EU flag image via ShutterstockIf you believe the pundits, Donald Trump is going to wage a one-man revolution if he loses the 2016 presidential election.
That was the media’s big takeaway from the third and final presidential debate in Las Vegas between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
At issue was a question posed by moderator Chris Wallace regarding whether Trump would accept the election results.
"I will tell you at the time," Trump replied. "I'll keep you in suspense. OK?"
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The mainstream media went apoplectic.
They want you to believe that Trump is going to gallop down 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on a white stallion leading a battalion of Minute Men armed with muskets and waving the Gadsden flag.
The MSM is advancing this outrageous narrative to avoid covering legitimate scandals – like the James O’Keefe videos exposing DNC thuggery and the WikiLeaks emails that reveal media collusion with the Clinton campaign.
Hillary Clinton and her minions have attacked Catholics, Evangelicals, Republicans, Rednecks and Southern beauty queens as a bunch of irredeemable deplorable bigots.
Her outright contempt for everyday Americans and our values should disqualify her from being the next leader of the free world.
I have no doubt a Clinton presidency would soil the U.S. Constitution much like that DNC tour bus did on the streets of Lawrenceville, Georgia.
So here are my top 10 takeaways:
1. Mr. Trump needs to stay focused on the issues. The American people don’t care about the alleged sex scandal and I doubt they care about his remarks on whether he will concede the election if he loses.
Voters do care about jobs, securing the border, protecting the Second Amendment and preventing radical leftists from commandeering the Supreme Court. The American people do not care about phony crises and scandals manufactured by Hillary Clinton’s fanboys in the Mainstream Media.
2. Unborn lives matter. Christians who are still undecided about voting should reflect on Clinton’s and Trump’s comments regarding late-term, partial birth abortions. “If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of a baby,” Trump said.
Clinton did not deny the charge. Instead, she called it “scare rhetoric.”
3. Hillary's basket of dirty tricks. Thanks to the fine undercover work of James O’Keefe we know that the Democrats were allegedly involved in a dirty tricks campaign. They disrupted Trump campaign events – leaving innocent Americans bloodied and battered. WikiLeaks revealed that her campaign’s goal was to portray Republicans as bigots and extremists. Mrs. Clinton and the Democrats must be held accountable.
4. Add gun-toting toddlers to Hillary’s "basket of deplorables." Mrs. Clinton offered a bizarre theory for why she wants to crack down on the Second Amendment. “Dozens of toddlers injure themselves, even kill people with guns, because, not everyone who has loaded guns in their homes takes appropriate precautions,” she said.
5. Liberals accused me of being sexist. A motley crew of leftists slammed me on social media last night for calling the Democratic nominee “Miss Hillary.” Upon deep personal reflection, I’d like to offer a public apology to Mrs. Bill Clinton.
6. Chris Wallace was the winner of last night’s debate. My colleague at Fox News delivered a fair and balanced debate to the nation. He kept the candidates and the crowd on point. It was a tremendous job.
How refreshing to have a moderator instead of someone auditioning to be Hillary Clinton’s press secretary.
Well done, Mr. Wallace!
7. The Case of the hanging chad. The mainstream media are once again is predicting Trump’s demise – they are furious over his refusal to say whether he will concede the election if he loses.
CNN called it a death blow. One well-known pundit said it was political suicide. Mrs. Clinton said she was horrified.
I wonder if she was horrified when Al Gore challenged the 2000 presidential election. The MSM seems to have come down with a sudden case of amnesia.
8. It depends on what "open borders" means. Clinton was asked to explain a quote from a speech divulged by WikiLeaks on her dream for “open borders.”
She dodged the question. But I’ll be glad to answer for her.
She wants to sacrifice American sovereignty. Under President Hillary Clinton – our nation will be overrun by illegals as well as Islamic radicals disguised as refugees.
9. Mrs. Clinton should consider purchasing a lovely American flag pin. It’s a must-have, patriotic fashion accessory – especially for presidential candidates. And it goes well with anything – including pantsuits.
10. Let’s keep things in perspective. No matter what happens on Election Day, remember that God is still in control – so let not your heart be troubled, America.WASHINGTON — President Trump, who regularly argued that widely accepted government-compiled jobs figures under President Barack Obama were phony, now believes that upbeat employment statistics on his watch are “very real,” the White House said Friday.
Press secretary Sean Spicer, asked why Trump was so dismissive of the figures on the campaign trail and yet was so ready to celebrate the new jobs numbers released hours earlier, said he had discussed the matter with the president.
“He said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,’” Spicer said with a laugh at his daily briefing for reporters.
The spokesman’s comments came after the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy added 235,000 jobs in February, beating expectations. The figures were largely in line with the previous two Februarys.
When Obama was president, Trump regularly scoffed at jobs numbers released by the Labor Department, arguing that they underestimated economic suffering under Obama.
“Don’t believe these phony numbers,” the entrepreneur told supporters in early 2016. “The 5 percent figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics,” he said in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club in August of last year, referring to the unemployment rate.
Read more from Yahoo News:Spoiler Warnings Ahead: Nothing in Metal Gear Solid V's story is spoiled in this article, but if you wanted to watch Quiet awkwardly writhing around in the rain for yourself, then you might want to give this a miss.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain does a lot of things right. So many things, in fact, that it's a serious contender for game of the year. However, there are also a few things that, depending upon your perspective, the game does wrong, and sitting atop that list is its treatment of Quiet.
An otherwise compelling addition to the Metal Gear series' wide and varied cast of characters, it is a crying shame that physically she is reduced to an embarrassing source of titillation, with her needlessly sexual design (Hideo Kojima's explanation that she breathes through her skin so therefore needs to be more-or-less naked isn't a reasonable justification for it, no matter what he says), combined with the game's clear objectification of her through gratuitous camera angles and awkward "intimate" scenes, all contribute to her being an unfortunate source of controversy in what at this point in time is believed to Kojima's swansong with the series.
The very worst scene, however, takes place when you return to Mother Base with her on a rainy day, in which the following mess ensues:
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While players can go through the game without encountering this scene, those who have are inevitably talking about, with it being the most unashamed example of how uncomfortable the overtly sexual portrayal of Quiet is. Now, I do not believe that sex and video games are two mutually exclusive things - though I personally cannot get my jollies off to ladies made out of polygons rendered by a team of programmers, there is certainly a very reasonable argument for sex being includes in games, much like it is in all other forms of entertainment.
I also believe that there are many who see sex in video games as a white and black argument with no shades of gray, with some routinely arguing that any portrayal of an attractive female (I am using females in this instance because so rarely is a male video game character portrayed in such a way) in a video game is inherently an example of objectification, while others believe that video game creators should be allowed to do as they please, dismissing any critique of how they feature female characters in their games as though video games should be excluded from the same sort of debates that we frequently have about movies, television and music.
But I do believe that the below image of the team at Kojima Productions angling the camera firmly at Quiet's arse cheeks is disappointing, regardless of how silly the world of Metal Gear is.
I understand the series is a flamboyant one and that absurd scenes are expected if not required, but there are times when MGSV plays out like a pervert simulator in which the player is the unwitting participant. This is no more apparent than in this scene, in which Quiet strips down to her thong and rolls around in the rain while some incongruously introspective music plays in the background, as though this scene is meant to be an emotional one in which the player should feel something for Quiet other than wanting to wrap her up in a blanket because she might catch a cold.
As I've said, there is no harm in having video game characters both female and male engage in nudity or scenes of a sexual nature if they are handled well, but in the case of Quiet, the character is treated with very little dignity. Watching her crawl around on all fours in the rain doesn't serve to add anything to the character other than adding a few more minutes onto the game in which the game intends for you to ogle its female character, and that isn't okay.
Throw your accusations of "social justice ruining video games" at any critic of Quiet's portrayal, but the fact remains: if we'd seen this shit in a movie we'd all be scratching our heads about it, and video games are not exempt from having a responsibility to not portray women as nothing more than a source of sexual stimulation for men.NEW YORK, Feb. 3 (UPI) -- A New York man repeatedly mistaken by police for a fugitive with the same name said legal action against the department has not stopped the arrests.
Michael Terry, 37, said he was awarded a $120,000 settlement from the New York Police Department in 2005 after he was jailed for 28 days due to the mix-up with his name and that of a wanted Pennsylvania man, but he has been arrested twice since then due to the same name confusion, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
Terry said he was jailed for a week in 2008 on a warrant meant for the Pennsylvania Terry and a September arrest on the same warrant led to a strip-search and five days behind bars.
He said a second lawsuit against the police department is pending.Regardless of how many #10 cans of “just-add-water-ready-to-eat” stuff you have, at some point you’re going to have to learn to use a kitchen in much the same way as your granny, or your great-granny, did. So we’ve put together this list of 38 essential kitchen items for any survivalist.
Matches – If you don’t smoke, why on earth would you need matches? But if we’re going to learn to cook like granny, for most of you that would include cooking on top of a wood heat stove, or on a wood cook stove with an oven. I know there are ways to start a fire with a magnifying glass, some straw and some kindling, but believe me, matches are easier. If you’re really good at starting and keeping a fire throughout the 3 daily meals, you could use as little as 1 match a day. If you’re not, 20 may not be enough. We have found that the most economical matches are book matches, like you get with a pack of cigarettes. They come in a box of 50 books, 20 matches per book, for about $1.50 in many stores. That’s a lot of lights for cheap. Wooden kitchen matches go for about $3.50 for 250 matches. See the difference? Can-Opener – we’re not talking about the kind that plugs into a wall. Have at least 2 good, sturdy hand operated can-openers. The newer ones from China do wear out. We’ve worn out a few. We also have an Army C-Ration P-38 can-opener. It takes a little practice, but once you get the groove going on it, you can open a #10 can in a few seconds. Hand Grain Mill – We have said this before, but we personally like the Wondermill Junior Deluxe Hand Grain Mill. (This is not a compensated endorsement, it’s just what we use and like.) For the money, it’s the best we have found. What can you do witih it? Grind wheat, rice, barley, oats, rye, lentils into flour. It can also be used to make nut-butters, like pinion butter, walnut butter, chestnut butter. It will also make cornmeal. The uses are virtually endless, especially if you eat a lot of whole, natural foods. Cast Iron/Stainless Steel Cookware – If you are going to be cooking over a wood stove of any kind, you need durable stainless steel or cast iron cookware. Aluminum (besides not being good for your health) tends to warp on wood cook stoves. Black, cast iron pans heat evenly, hold the heat for a long time and do not warp – not to mention giving you a little dose of iron in your food. Roasting Pans – Enamelware is best, and so is stainless steel. Make sure the roasting pan will fit into your oven! Wood cook stoves don’t have the same huge ovens as gas or electric stoves. Tea Kettle – Stainless Steel or Copper. In the winter, a steaming tea kettle on the wood stove not only serves as as-the-ready for tea or coffee, the steam warms and moisturizes the air. Just don’t let it boil down all the way before refilling it. Colanders – Metal (stainless steel) is best. If you have or want some plastic colanders, understand that they will break over time, and most of them are made with BPA in the plastic. Cookie Sheets – for breads, biscuits, cookies, for drying fruits or veggies… Avoid Teflon coatings or aluminum cookie sheets – get stainless steel. Cooking Utensils – Again, metal (stainless steel) is much better than plastic, and with stainless steel and cast iron cookware, you don’t have to worry about scratches: Spatulas Ladles Serving Spoons Serving Forks Slotted Spoons Pastry Cutter Rolling Pin Sharpening Steel Cheese Grater/Slicer Whisk Potato Peeler Meat Tenderizing Hammer Measuring Cups and Spoons – Once again, stainless steel is the best choice for these. A 4-cup glass measuring cup with a pour-spout would be a nice addition, too. Good Knives – Good Knives are ones that will keep a sharp edge for a reasonable amount of time, not go dull instantly upon use. If you can find old, carbon-steel knives in yard sales or flea markets, they are best – Old Hickory, Old Timers, Imperial are some brands to look for.
When you are ready to deal with cooking real foods, here are some things you’ll want to have on hand:
Sugar (or honey or molasses)– Essential for coffee, tea, baking, preserving, and much more. Get Turbinado or Demarara Sugar, which is unrefined and still contains nutrients. Salt – Sea salt may seem more expensive that “table” salt (I didn’t know you could get salt from a table!?!), but it has many minerals and nutrients still in it. It also tastes better. Baking Soda – there are soooooooo many uses for baking soda besides baking: antacid, drawing poultice, kitchen cleanser, vegetable rinse, fire extinguisher, food preservative, water purifier, toothpaste, bathing, hair rinse, facial exfoliant are just a few. Vinegar – white distilled vinegar, apple cider vinegar, wine vinegar all have their uses. Distilled vinegar can remove lime deposits from cookware, use in salad dressings, rinse minerals from hair, preserve/pickle vegetables. Spices – this will be different for different people (no accounting for taste!), but here are some suggestions: Garlic powder Paprika Dill Basil Oregano Onion Powder Cinnamon Chili Powder Dried Veggies – these can also be used to season dishes, or to make soups or stews. Again, this is not a paid recommendation, but sfherb.com (San Francisco Herb Company) has a great bargain – 1 lb of dehydrated veggies for around $7. A pound lasts me about a month, and I cook a lot. Cooking Oil – In our opinion, there are only 2 types of cooking oil safe for human consumption… Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Peanut Oil.
Dan and Sheila are the authors of Surviving Survivalism – How to Avoid Survivalism Culture Shock and hosts of the free podcast, “Still Surviving with Dan and Sheila”, both available at http://survivingsurvivalism.comhttp://survivingsurvivalism.com. For information about their survival community, or for other questions, they can be reached at surviving@lavabit.comsurviving@lavabit.comsurviving@lavabit.com.There are many perils to life in Congress: the humidity, town halls yelling... But worst must be when screw-loose ex-staffers go over to the opposition and accuse you of betraying your country to Turkey while having a lesbian affair.
According to an American Conservative interview with Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish and Farsi language translator who used to work for the FBI, a Democratic congresswoman from Illinois was seduced by a Turkish secret agent.
Edmonds was hired by the FBI as a contractor right after 9/11, and she worked for them until they fired her for whistleblowing in 2002.
As reported by Vanity Fair in 2005, an internal FBI Inspector General's report stated that Edmonds had been improperly fired and it further said that "many of her allegations had bases in fact."
She has made lots of allegations, too! Like the ones involving former Illinois Congressman and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who, according to Edmonds, received tens of thousands of dollars in secret campaign payments from Chicago-area Turkish diplomats and Turkish-Americans. (Hastert then withdrew from House consideration one of those perennial resolutions acknowledging the Armenian genocide.) (Hastert now works for a lobbying firm hilariously named Dickstein Shapiro, where he lobbies for Turkey.)
She has further claimed to have heard evidence of Turkish agents recruiting sources in the FBI and State Departments to steal nuclear secrets which were then sold on the old black nuclear secrets market. Nice work if you can get it!
But after getting warmed up with these allegations, Edmonds decided to really see how far she could go. She says that these Turkish spies discovered that married Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky was bisexual, and so a female agent was assigned to sleep with her on camera, in order to blackmail her. Yes! According to an interview in Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine, as related by BradBlog:
Edmonds says in the Giraldi interview that "in 2000... Turkish agents started gathering information on her, and they found out that she was bisexual." A female Turkish agent is said to have "struck up a relationship with her", and then, following the death of Schakowsky's mother, the woman is said to have attended the funeral "hoping to exploit her vulnerability." "They later were intimate in Schakowsky's townhouse," Edmonds tells Giraldi, "which had been set up with recording devices and hidden cameras." The reason for attempting to get at Schakowsky, Edmonds believes, is so that they would be able to get both her "and her husband Robert Creamer to perform certain illegal operational facilitations for them in Illinois," along with Hastert, who was already on the payroll, and several other Chicago officials.
The old lesbian honeypot! Wow!
Anyway we can barely follow this insane story so who knows if you should be freaked out about the Turkish spy ring selling nuclear secrets or if their bribery and blackmail has thus far succeeded only in preventing Congress from officially recognizing this mass murder they perpetrated in 1915.The 7th edition of the Eddie Bravo Invitational will take part on July 16, 2016 (Saturday). EBI 7 will be crowning the promotion’s featherweight (145lbs / 65kg) division champion, a title currently held by Eddie Cummings.
Although the open weight tournament (EBI 6) included big names of jiu jitsu’s international circuit, this featherweight event will have the popular tournament return to its origins in a recipe that rose the attention of the sport’s fans in previous showings, a mix of veteran grapplers, fairly unknown talent and rising stars of the submission only movement.
Location;
The Orpheum Theatre
842 S. Broadway Ave.
Los Angeles CA
Date:
July 16, 2016
Contact + info:
[email protected]
Find out more about each EBI title contender below.
EBI 7: THE FEATHERWEIGHTS
EDDIE CUMMINGS (32)
Style: Leglock specialist
Current EBI featherweight Champion
ADCC US Trials Champion
Being the champ, Cummings is arguably the favorite to win the tournament. A black belt under John Danaher, Eddie is known for his heel hook combinations and excellent guard retention.
GEO MARTINEZ (29)
Style: 10th Planet
ADCC US Trials Champion
Current EBI Bantamweight Champion
Former EBI Featherweight Champion
Geo is one of the most exciting grapplers to follow at the moment, being also an EBI tournament veteran with a wealth of experience under these rules.
JOE SOTO (29)
Style: MMA
Bellator Featherweight Champion
Bellator Season One Featherweight Tournament Winner
Tachi Fights Champion
A veteran in mixed martial arts, Soto has also competed in submission wrestling, being an EBI tournament veteran. Soto who also had a successful collegiate wrestling career before turning to MMA.
KIM TERRA (28)
Style: Jiu Jitsu
World Bronze Medallist (2015)
South American Champion (2012)
One of the more accomplished names in sport BJJ on this tournament, Kim Terra is an IBJJF World bronze medallist in the light featherweight division. Terra is also brother to Caio Terra, one of the most accomplished rooster-weights in the history of the sport.
RAFAEL DOMINGOS (age unknown)
Style: MMA/Jiu Jitsu
EBI 5 Runner-up
IBJJF World Championship 3rd Place – brown belt division (2013)
Rafael Domingos is a Demian Maia black belt who competes in mixed martial arts. Domingos showed great potential at EBI 5, reaching the final of the event.
DENNY PROKOPOS (28)
Style: 10th Planet
EBI Lightweight Champion (2014)
World No Gi Champion – brown belt division (2007)
Eddie Bravo’s first black belt returns to a tournament he won two years ago.
MIKE DAVILA (33)
Style: n/a
World No-Gi Champion – purple belt (2014)
Amateur MMA record (2-0-0)
We don’t know much about the 33 year old from New York. Davila is a brown belt from a Renzo Gracie Academy affiliate school in the Bronx – NY
MIKE MAIN (24)
Style: Jiu Jitsu
Pan American No Gi Champion – 2008 blue juvenile
Pan American No Gi Championship 3rd Place – 2009 blue
Competed on EBI 4
Mike Main is a black belt who comes out of Pure MMA gym in Rockaway NJ. Main also trains with Marcelo Garcia in NY.
JOAO ALFREDO TAVARES (33)
Style: Jiu Jitsu
Pan American Champion (2016 Master 1)
Abu Dhabi World Pro (2015 Masters)
Tavares has been an avid competitor in the Masters division (over 30 years old category) over the past couple of years, conquering a Pan American Masters title and the Abu Dhabi Pro, also as a Master.
BARET YOSHIDA (41)
Style: Submission Grappling
ADCC Silver Medallist (2003, 2001)
World Nogi Champion (2008, 2009)
Yoshida is the oldest athlete on the roster, and also the most accomplished, having earned 2 ADCC silver medals, the last one earned 13 years ago. The Hawaiian brings a wealth of experience to the tournament, and may surprise some of the younger athletes.
ARA MURADYAN (35)
Style: MMA (?)
Muradyan has a pro MMA record, but this is as far as we go on our knowledge of Ara’s resume.
SERGIO HERNANDEZ (38)
Style: Esquijiu
38 year old Sergio Hernandez competes in the Californian jiu jitsu circuit, and is also an EBI veteran. Hernandez is a longtime student of Baret Yoshida being known for his peculiar guard style, a system he named “reverse closed guard” and “rubber side control”.
ASHLEY WILLIAMS (23)
Style: Jiu Jitsu
British Open Champion purple belt
European No-Gi Open black belt
The youngest athlete on the card, Ashley is also the only European representative competing at the Orpheum Theatre on July 16. We don’t know too much of the man from Wales, only that he won the European No-Gi Open this year and has a British title in the purple belt division.
JOSE DE JESUS GUTIERREZ (29)
Style: Jiu Jitsu
We don’t know too much about Jose regarding his grappling accomplishments. We do know he is a black belt under Robson Rodrigues (Robynho) and teaches the nogi class at his academy. Gutierrez also trains with the 10th Planet crew in Costa Mesa – California.
BILL COOPER (29)
Style: Jiu Jitsu
Pan American Champion (2007 brown belt)
Last medalled in IBJJF in 2010
Bill “The Grill” Cooper was regarded as one of the rising stars of jiu jitsu 9 years ago, when he won a Jiu Jitsu Pan American championship as a brown belt. Cooper has since slowed his pace in jiu jits’s international circuit, competing for a while in local tournaments such as Grapplers Quest, and running a short stint in MMA. Cooper also competed in EBI back in 2014.
ALEX ECKLIN (27)
Style: Jiu Jitsu
American National Champion – brown belt (2013)
IBJJF World Championship 3rd Place – brown belt division (2013)
European Open 3rd Place – brown belt (2014)
EBI veteran and black belt under Vitor Shaolin Ribeiro, known for his unconventional half guard sweeps.Curt Flood's refusal to accept a trade to the Phillies in 1969, and subsequent lawsuit against major league baseball, is often pointed-to as the turning point that toppled the Reserve Clause and brought MLB players free agency. Of course, Flood ultimately lost his decision before the US Supreme Court, and it was the result of something more like a clerical error a few years later - two players playing a season without a contract - which led to "the Seitz decision," where an arbitrator effectively ruled that players who reached the end of their contract were entitled to free agency.
Flood's challenge was one of many over the years which poked holes in the dam of the Reserve Clause. Twenty years before Flood refused his trade, another player tried to sue for the right to negotiate his own contract and choose his employer: Danny Gardella.
Gardella was born in New York City in 1920, and at age 17 joined his older brother Al in the Tigers organization. After a few years in the minor leagues, he left affiliated ball to head back to New York and work in a shipyard. In 1944, he was playing for the shipyard's semipro team when a New York Giants scout saw him and signed him to contract.
It was the height of World War II, and the big leagues were hemorrhaging talent to the military. Gardella joined a Giants outfield that still contained Hall of Famer Mel Ott, and over 47 games of the 1944 season, put up a respectable.250 /.323 /.464 slash line.
The 1945 season was the one with the most established players overseas and the most semipro shipyard workers in the league. Gardella played 121 games and hit.272 /.349 /.426, including 18 home runs.
Coming into the 1946 season, the Giants offered Gardella a $5000 contract, a $500 raise from the previous season. But Gardella had a better offer. At a gym in New York, he had met Jorge Pasquel, a wealthy Mexican businessman who had just become president of the Mexican League and was determined to draw major league players south of the border. He offered Gardella $8,000 to play in Mexico.
Gardella joined Cardinals pitching great Max Lanier and 15 other players in defecting to the Mexican League for the 1946 season. Many of those players immediately regretted their decision, finding poor playing conditions or contract agreements which were not met. But Gardella played the entire season in Mexico, including a game sharing the outfield with Babe Ruth - nearing the end of his sad, Jose Canseco-esque retirement tour. The next season, Gardella |
?
Our Views:
It is more important to realize the importance of Fathers as natural guardians of children than to expand the definition of guardian.
Women are not socially or biologically conditioned to be protectors like men. In an event of high risk or unsafe situation, a typical woman’s behavior is often counterproductive to situation. The panic, high emotions and hysterical behavior that women display actually worsens the situation.
Q6. How to create and implement mediation or conciliation institutions to be necessarily involved in the process of grant of guardianship and shared parentage?
Our Views:
Shared parenting must be default arrangement for parenting. The mediation or conciliation institutions must not play any role here creating uncertainty in the process.
Mediation and conciliation processes in courts are nothing but methods to threaten, coerce and insult men so that he coughs up large sums of money to the separated wife. These institutions have rarely acted in good faith showing any sensitivity to the serious family issues. There are enough occasions where mediators went to the extent of provoking the man by insulting his parents or mother.
Men working in mediation centers often believe that men are evil by nature and they need to bring chivalry to protect or impress the woman howsoever abusive she may be.
The current mediation process in India in matrimonial litigations needs a complete overhaul owing to its extreme gynocentric behavior which places a man’s needs inferior to those of a woman’s needs and the same argument gets extended to fathers and mothers wherein fathers are viewed as demons and mothers as goddesses.
Q7. Whether child welfare officers may act as information/ service providers?
Our Views:
Yes. The child welfare officers must act as information and service providers as not everything should be left to family courts, which are non-transparent and have often not shown any accountability or sensitivity.
Our experience of dealing with aggrieved fathers tells us that there is a huge discrimination of fathers going on in family courts especially around the area of child visitation and custody issues. This also highlights the lack of awareness of father’s rights in the society. Hence, before we institute child welfare officers as information/service providers, we must ensure they are sensitized enough to the concept of father’s rights.
Q8. Whether there should be physical or joint custody or should it be left to the discretion of the judge?
Our Views:
No. Nothing should be left to the discretion of the judge. Joint custody must be default arrangement for parenting.
The Indian family courts has shown absolutely no accountability when it comes to marital problems. People are made to run around multiple courts for years attending dates after dates giving a false hope that they will get some justice and some respite and for one issue, the courts have got 2 or 3 laws. There are multiple maintenance laws. There are also multiple cases opened under domestic violence allegations (under PWDVA and also section 498A). People have been cursing this judicial system for its apathy and insensitivity. The Indian Judiciary is still wrought with the colonial mindset that they can play with people’s lives and it is their birthright to do so. Men and fathers are uncalled for victims of the pathetic mentality of judiciary which considers accountability akin to impasse on freedom.
The basic question arises is, are judges being responsible here or are they even competent to deal with family court cases in a fair and just manner? When contested divorces are rarely granted unless 8 or 9 years pass by, why do judges and lawyers make people run around courts giving them a false hope? We have come across many people having lost mental balance, jobs or have gone into depression due to such false hopes created in family court system.
We have come across many cases wherein the courts have not ordered even basic visitation for fathers even though the petition has been lying in the courts for around 2-3 years. However, the courts have shown extreme amount of volition and discretion in ensuring that the father pays the child maintenance. This is akin to treating fathers as FREE ATM MACHINES and SPERM DONORS.
And these instances also highlight the plight of the father at the hands of a judiciary that is insensitive to father’s rights. It would be extremely preposterous to rely upon such an anti-male and biased judiciary to decide physical or joint custody. It would rather be imperative that the legislature sets down rules and guidelines to facilitate such physical or joint custody in consultation with organizations like SIFF-FRW.
Q9. In which circumstances must shared parentage arrangements be withheld? Eg: domestic violence, insolvency, mental illness
Our Views:
As long as child is safe and secure, no excuses or circumstances must be used to withhold shared parenting.
It is well known that older generation of men running the Government and judicial system do not believe in gender equality and they deny existence of domestic violence against men. They even go to the extent of refusing to conduct any surveys on domestic violence on men so that propaganda can be carried out that men rarely face domestic violence.
It is this set of powerful men who have allowed women to get away by leveling false and baseless allegations of domestic violence under Section 498A as well as Protection of Women against domestic violence act (PWDVA). In fact, this older generation of patriarchal men feels that the younger men have to be harassed using these tools as weapons or negotiation tools.
It is expected that women who do not want shared parenting rights for fathers of their children will use all these excuses to cut off men from their children.
Today men can expect very little from family courts, given the enormous bias and deliberate discrimination of men that is built into family court system. Under no circumstances, women must be allowed to delay the shared parenting.
It must be noted that most judges in family courts are highly conservative people with strong belief in traditional values. Such attitudes clash with modern outlook of many young people, men or women. Many judges even consider granting divorce some kind of moral sin and they tend to believe that people getting divorce or getting separated deserve to suffer. Such clash of two different cultures is harming young people going through separation.
Q10. Should and how does gender inequality (e.g. financial) affect establishing a shared parentage preference or option? E.G. the use of children as bargaining chips to secure maintenance
Our Views:
It is a well-known fact that mothers use children as bargaining tools for maintenance in matrimonial disputes and divorces. Even, to the extent that well-qualified and gainfully employed women are hiding their financial statuses just to make sure the father is made to pay through his nose in the name of the child. Unfortunately, courts are facilitating such behavior.
Well qualified women like CAs, doctors, engineers, graduates, bank executives, financial professionals, teachers etc. should be made to share the expenses of the child and also any payments being made by father should be on actuals only.
After regularizing the financial wherewithal of the child, efforts must be made to ensure shared parenting is adopted.
Q11. What should be the role of the court in matters of joint custody? Should the court be proactive in such matters i.e. a constant supervisor of such arrangements?
Our Views:
Nothing must be left to the discretion of the courts and shared parenting must be the default arrangement for parenting of the child.
Indian family courts are highly inefficient and are known to introduce delays deliberately. This has harmed millions of men, who have lost access to their children for months and years. Millions of children have even forgotten the face of their father. They call their own father as “Uncle” when they meet accidentally. Thanks to family courts, the children have suffered as they are suddenly cut off from a loving father at a tender age, experiencing immense and unspeakable trauma.
The family courts do not have time to deal with existing cases. This situation is unlikely to change even in next 10 years. So, it is obvious that under the excuse of constant supervision, delays will be introduced, litigation is just increased or men are endlessly threatened, coerced and blackmailed in the mediations centers of the courts.
Q12. What should be the nature or limit of discretion that judges can use while awarding joint custody decisions?
Our Views:
Judges should have no discretion at all in the issue of joint custody or shared parenting. Joint custody must be default mechanism for parenting of children during separation or divorce of parents.
Judges must get educated on guidelines of shared parenting and strictly implement the same and come down heavily on women, who take the father for granted and attempt to alienate or poison the child’s mind against him.
Unless a child is safe and secure, a judge must never intervene in the matters of joint custody arrangement.
Our past experience shows whatever law commissions have recommended, the law makers in the parliament have subverted those recommendations by being unduly influenced by the propaganda, lies and fake one-sided statistics by women’s NGOs, United Nations, USAID (of American State Department) and many such global organizations.
This has resulted in extremely one-sided biased unjust laws. One example of such a case is, the Sexual Harassment at Work Place Law. Government ultimately denied men any protection from Sexual Harassment at workplace under pressure from Feminists and global vested agencies, though Law Commission of India had recommended a gender neutral version of this law. Similar sinister attempts are now made to bring high handed discrimination and injustice into proposed Irretrievable Break down of Marriage Law (in the amendment to Hindu Marriage act).
So, it is obvious that whatever law commission recommends in the issue of shared parenting even that will be seriously subverted as many members of parliament have openly been anti-male and have advocated making men second class citizens by denying them basic human rights. Subjecting men to injustice by design seems to be agenda of most of the policy makers.
Additional Points:
1. Courts must immediately deny maintenance and alimony to any woman, who opposes or indirectly attempts to prevent her separated husband from accessing and parenting the children.
2. Any attempts by a woman to alienate the child from father or poison the child’s mind must be used to deny her custody temporarily or permanently.
3. Any attempts by a woman to threaten her husband with false cases of Section 498A, Domestic Violence Act etc. must be taken as a serious attempt to alienate the child and the woman must be denied custody of her children.
4. Shared parenting arrangement must be default arrangement of parenting and ex-parte court orders have to be passed and executed if any parent attempts to delay or evade the shared parenting or court proceedings.
5. Under no circumstances the grandparents of the child must be denied access to the children.
6. As our NGO works in this domain being a support group for separated fathers, we have come across thousands of cases. There were situations where the wife and her parents selfishly denied the father and his old parents the access to the minor children. However, as karma takes its own course, the deaths of these wives due to illness or accidents, suddenly reversed the whole custody situation with father getting full rights over the child. Now, the selfish parents of the women have to beg for access to the children.
The lesson here is, blatant discrimination of young men/fathers by family courts, can create strange anomalies and reversals for women and their families, as the law of nature is ultimately much more powerful than any man-made law or any law implemented by a judge.
7. We, in India, are often fascinated by systems in the West and look to imitate them. However, the systems in the West have their own share of discrimination against fathers. Thomas Ball, an ex-army man of US had self-immolated himself in front of the family court after facing extreme discrimination and being alienated from his 4 year old daughter.
Place: Delhi
Thanks and Regards
Rohit Girdhar
Head, Father’s Rights Wing
Save Indian Family Foundation (SIFF)
Phone: 0-94102 17409
Comments
commentsThere is a youth system in Barcelona that is reaping the rewards of their investments and it does not go by the name of La Masia. Espanyol, Catalonia’s other La Liga club, can count on a golden generation of youngsters that have risen through the ranks this season. Defenders Marc Navarro (21) and Aarón Martín (19), as well as midfielders Marc Roca (20) and Óscar Melendo (19) have all made the leap from the reserves.
“These are players that came through on their own merit, they didn't come in to plug a hole due to an injury, they're going to have long careers in the top flight," Angel Morales, Coordinator of Espanyol's academy, spoke with Reuters in an interview on the talent coming through their ranks.
A fixture at the Spanish National team youth levels (Spain U16, U17, & U19 International), young 19-year-old, Aarón Martín, has become an indisputable starter at left-back for Quique Sánchez Flores since his arrival into the team in October. He has started 20 of the 22 matches he has played this season. It is his consistent performances that have caught the eyes of Los Blancos, but Aarón has been on Madrid’s radar for some time. He was a member of the U-19 Spanish team that dominated the European Championships — a team which included Marco Asensio, Borja Mayoral, and Dani Ceballos. Technically gifted and defensively sound, Aarón has impressed throughout his career. Espanyol’s golden generation never lost a derby against Barcelona. Aarón and Adama Traore (former Barcelona 1st team member, now of Middlesborough) had immense duels, and Aarón always left marks of his quality on a match.
“He Always Stood Out for his technical quality” – Dani Fernández, Aarón Martín’s coach at youth levels.
Fernández has said that Aarón has a similar playing style to Kolarov of Manchester City and Alaba of Bayern Munich. He has all the qualities of a modern left back: technical, good positioning, transitional play, and a superb strike. Dani Fernández has claimed that both Madrid and even more aggressively Barcelona have been after Aarón since he was 15. Each have scouted him throughout the youth levels and at the U19 European Championships.
There will always be doubts of a 19-year-old bursting onto the scene with only one season to judge. Fans and pundits alike may very well argue that Madrid is a step too far and step too soon for Aarón. The same could be said back in 2007 about a young 18-year-old Marcelo Viera — but what can be said about him now? Contrary to life at Espanyol, Aarón most likely will not be an undisputed starter for Real Madrid. Though, given the amount of games Madrid have in a season, and the demand on the full-back position, it would be fair to say he will be given ample game time and can become the Spanish heir to Marcelo as the Brazilian will be entering his 30’s next season.
The Cornella will not want to let go of any of their jewels this summer, but recent relations between clubs may help negotiations. Players like Asensio, Lucas Vazquez, Callejon, and Burgui have all been transactions between the two clubs in past seasons. Time will tell if Madrid’s interest is genuine enough to pursue and negotiate what will surely be a hefty fee of around 20 to 30 million euros for the player. Keep Aarón Martín on your watch list as he is one for the future.
References:
PANIAGUA, RAÚL. "Aarón, la joya del Espanyol que se le resistió al Barça." El Periodico. El Periodico, 28 Dec. 2016. Web. 21 Mar. 2017. Link.
Reuters. "Espanyol's rise is fuelled by youngsters, not big names." MARCA in English. N.p., 28 Feb. 2017. Web. 21 Mar. 2017.Public belief in climate science has seen a precipitous slide in the US, according to new polling that suggests fewer Americans are concerned about the threat posed by global warming.
Nearly half of Americans – 48% – now believe the threat of global warming has been exaggerated, the highest level since polling began 13 years ago, the poll published today by Gallup said.
It directly linked the decline in concern to the controversies about media coverage of stolen emails from the University of East Anglia climate research unit and a mistake about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 in the UN's authoritative report on global warming.
"These news reports may well have caused some Americans to re-evaluate the scientific consensus on global warming," Gallup said.
Half of Americans now believe there is a scientific consensus on climate change. Some 46% believe scientists are unsure about global warming, or that it is not occurring. A UK poll last month showed adults who believe climate change is "definitely" a reality had dropped from 44% to 31% over the past year.
"The last two years have marked a general reversal in the trend of Americans' attitudes about global warming," Gallup said. "It may be that the continuing doubts about global warming put forth by conservatives and others are having an effect."
The poll feeds into fears among some environmentalists that the furore over the hacked emails has given new fuel to opponents of action on climate change, and stopped short the momentum in Congress for passage of a clean energy law.
A troika of Senators trying to draft a compromise climate bill that could get broad support said this week they may not be able to produce a draft until after the Easter recess, further reducing the chances of enacting legislation in 2010.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration faces lawsuits from Virginia, Texas, Alabama and a dozen business lobbies challenging its authority to act on greenhouse gas emissions through the Environmental Protection Agency.
Tim Wirth, a former Colorado senator who led the campaign against acid rain, told a conference call the science squabbles resembled a re-run of efforts to discredit that earlier effort for an environmental clean-up.
He said the scientists who worked on the IPCC report were woefully outmanoeuvred in PR by business groups which have the funds to employ legions of lobbyists and communications experts. "It's not a fair fight," he said. "The IPCC is just a tiny secretariat next to this giant denier machine."
A majority of Americans continues to believe that climate change is real, but they are less convinced of its urgency. Only 32% believe they will be directly affected by the consequences of a warming atmosphere, despite a major report by the Obama administration last year that climate change could bring flooding, heat waves, drought and loss of wildlife to the US.“In the span of an hour they had gotten into the house through the roof and gone through all of our rooms," says CIT Group managing director Kevin Khanna, whose villa was robbed Monday.
Festgoers beware: The Cannes crime spree isn't over. Following last week’s news of the high-profile $1 million Chopard heist and the burglary of Zhang Qiang’s rented apartment, there are reports of new victims.
CIT Group managing director Kevin Khanna and Silver Pictures co-president Steve Richards returned to their five-bedroom villa behind the Majestic Hotel on Monday to find all of their valuables missing.
PHOTOS: Radiant 'X-Men' Star Fan Bingbing Honored at Glittery Cannes Fest
“In the span of an hour they had gotten into the house through the roof and gone through all of our rooms,” said Khanna. “They only took cash, laptops, iPads and women’s jewelry but left our passports and credit cards. They were very professional.”
Khanna’s group reported the incident to the police, who said “nothing could be done and that these robberies happen all the time,” said Khanna. “They told us we were lucky that we weren’t in the house and that no one got hurt."
But physical attacks are being reported as well. Banker Charles Heaphy was mugged late at night near the Cannes train station a few days ago. Apparently, police told Heaphy he was lucky he wasn’t stabbed.
STORY: Cannes Jewel Heist: Inside Job Suspected, Hotel Employees Being Questioned
Gersh agent Jay Cohen and Waterstone Entertainment’s Stephen Bowen and Jeff Kalligheri were also accosted as they left the Palm Beach casino early Sunday morning, at around 3 a.m. Three men started to push and grab at them, attempting to lift a wallet and watch.
“They followed us for ten minutes, then snuck up on us, and I put my umbrella in my hand like a punching glove,” said Cohen. “Jeff told them we were sober so they may not want to do this, and eventually we got them away. The funny part was none of them were very large. But they want to take advantage of drunk people coming out of clubs.”
Film Tree execs Graham Begg and Ed Sharp had a robbery at their Cannes apartment as well. "Laptops, iPads, money, credit cards, clothes were among the items stolen," said Begg. "They left our passports."
“There have always been issues with this sort of thing during the festival,” said Khanna, “But it seems like there is more of it this year. I think it’s tied to the poor economic conditions.”In the second annual Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education Top Colleges ranking UCLA has been selected as the No. 1 public institution in the country. In addition, of the more than 1,000 public and private institutions that were assessed, UCLA tied for No. 8 overall in the area of campus diversity and inclusion and ranked No. 25 overall.
This is the third time in recent weeks that UCLA has captured the preeminent public position in leading international and national college rankings. Earlier in September, UCLA was named the No. 1 public university in both the U.S News and World Report Best Colleges rankings and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
Unlike the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, which focus on universities’ research performance, this latest ranking measures student engagement, student outcomes, resources and learning environments. The ranking incorporated the results of the Times Higher Education U.S. Student Survey, which collected the opinions of more than 200,000 current university students, government data sources and findings from the Times Higher Education Academic Reputation Survey.
Leading the overall list of colleges in this most recent “Top Colleges” ranking were Harvard University (No. 1), Columbia University (No. 2) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford (tied for No. 3). Among leading public universities, UCLA was followed by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, second (No. 27 overall), and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, third (No. 33 overall).
“The fact that there are only two publics in the top 30 is part of the narrative that there is a crisis in public higher education,” said Phil Baty, Times Higher Education rankings editor, in a story in the Wall Street Journal about the rankings. “We are seeing some real challenges in terms of resources, and I think this kind of inequality, this defunding of great American public schools, is a serious issue.”
Other University of California campuses included in the Top 10 public universities were Berkeley, fourth (tied for No. 40 overall), followed by Davis, sixth (No. 46 overall), and San Diego, seventh (No. 47 overall).
Note: A link above points to the Wall Street Journal rankings page, which includes content that is available only to subscribers.Cub Foods store director Randy Drescher was hanging signs near the store's front entrance at 60th Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis Thursday when his quiet morning literally exploded.
"All we saw was a big pile of dirt fly up into the air about 50 feet," he said. "And the flames came shortly after."
The blaze on 60th Street just north of Hwy. 62 was caused by a leak in an underground natural gas pipe that ignited, blowing a crater in the road and sending flames several stories into the air.
The Crosstown and Interstate 35W were closed for several hours, tangling rush hour traffic. Authorities asked residents of parts of south Minneapolis and Richfield to leave their homes as a precaution, sending a parade of people in pajamas and flip-flops into the streets.
"The firefighters were running down the street and banging on doors," said Mirah Ammal. "We took our four cats and ran out the door."
CenterPoint Energy spokesperson Becca Virden said the cause of the fire, which started shortly after 8 a.m. and burned until almost 10 a.m., had not been determined late Thursday afternoon. She said the company did not know if there had actually been an explosion in the 20-inch steel pipe, which dated from 1994.
"It's still under investigation," she said. "Our underground pipeline had a leak in it, and it got ignited somehow."
Virden said reports of blasts may have stemmed from manhole covers being blown off streets from heat and pressure. Two natural gas lines serve the area, so no one lost service, she said.
Fire and hissing gas
Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad, was driving from a tire shop in the area when he saw what he first thought was a house on fire.
"I could feel the heat through the car windows six or seven blocks away," Stephens said. He drove down Nicollet Avenue past the blaze, shooting video on his iPhone through his open car window. He said flames shot at least 100 feet into the air, and he could hear escaping gas hissing as he drove by.
As he headed to work, fire trucks with blaring sirens passed. Barely 10 minutes later, Stephens' wife called him and said firefighters had already visited their home 10 blocks from the fire and asked her to evacuate.
"I am very impressed with the way this was handled," Stephens said.
Though the fire was more than 100 feet from the Cub Foods, the temperature was so searing at the front of the store that customers and employees were forced to run out the back exit. In the parking lot, tires melted and paint blistered on vehicles. Power lines and utility poles were damaged. Amazingly, no one was hurt.
Brad Solem, service leader at Bobby & Steve's at 5801 Nicollet Ave. S., was outside the back of his shop when he heard what he assumed was an explosion just a block or so away.
"Just a 'boom,' and then the flames instantly shot sky high," he said. "You could instantly feel heat on your face."
Firefighters and police knocked on doors in south Minneapolis and Richfield in an area bordered by Diamond Lake Road, Harriet and Portland Avenues and 66th Street. About 9,000 people live in the area's 4,500 housing units, including apartments. Evacuation was voluntary, but many people grabbed children and pets and hurried away from the area.
A hurried evacuation
Richard Ojar walked north on Nicollet in a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. "I didn't have time to get anything else," he said.
Bob and Marilyn Harris were eating breakfast in their home on 2nd Av. S., next to the freeway, when she spotted a "light like the sun" over the freeway noise wall. They assumed a car was on fire.
"We opened the door and it was very hot," she said. Shortly after, the pair --he's 80, she's 79 -- were asked to leave by a firefighter.
Robert Barth, 79, walked a block, aided by his cane, to get outside the evacuation zone after a warning from a firefighter. "She said [the gas] may come in through our sewers," Barth said.
The last thing he'd seen like the gas fire, he said, was the burning napalm he saw as a serviceman in Korea.
Some of the people who left their homes took refuge in a Metro Transit bus until they were allowed to return home around 11 a.m. The Cub Foods reopened in the afternoon.
Students at Windom School, the school closest to the fire, were moved west to Kenny School, Minneapolis school district officials said. Kenny and Armatage elementary schools and Susan B. Anthony Middle School were placed on lockdown, meaning students were required to remain in the building for the balance of the school day.
Northbound and southbound lanes of 35W reopened late Thursday morning, though the southbound ramp at 60th Street remained closed, MnDOT said. The bridge that goes from southbound 35W to Hwy 62 and spans 60th Street was inspected and determined to be safe. Nicollet Avenue between E. 59th and E. 61st Streets was expected to remain closed while the fire is investigated.Jonathan Chait and Aaron Carroll both have fun with Elizabeth Cheney‘s bonkers op-ed about how Obamacare will destroy our freedom.
As both note, the stirring quote from Ronald Reagan the younger Vader uses comes from the recording he made for Operation Coffee Cup, a 1961 project organized by the AMA to mobilize doctors’ wives and their friends against the looming horror of Medicare, which would clearly turn American into a totalitarian state.
However, neither Chair nor Carroll mention what seems to me to be an obvious parallel, which is with the whole Hayekian notion that the welfare state sets us on the slippery slope to Stalinism. Yes, I’m aware that defenders of Hayek claim that this wasn’t what he said — but as far as I can tell their argument is very weak, and anyway more or less irrelevant to the role Hayek plays in American political discourse. Even if that isn’t what Hayek meant to say (in which case, what exactly was his point?), it’s the message American conservatives chose to take from his work.
And with Hayek, as with Reagan, the truly amazing thing is that we have people citing as a source of wisdom someone who has been as thoroughly refuted by history as anyone can be. Three generations into the modern welfare state, and western democracies look less Stalinist than ever.
Of course, you can still say that social insurance destroys freedom if you define freedom as the absence of social insurance — which isn’t quite what these guys are doing, but may capture the spirit of the thing.Transformers Collectors’ Club Figure Subscription Service 3.0 is available for pre-order beginning today, through 11:59pm (central time) October 2. Cost is $297 (plus shipping) and includes Krok, Nacelle, Tarantulas, Carzap, Serpent O.R., and G2 Starscream. A bonus 7th figure will also be mailed with your final shipment!
An official promo image of Krok is on the official TF Club Twitter account. While you wait for additional previous of the toys over the next few days, you can see them all again from our previously reported Botcon gallery.
The full announcement from Brian at Transformers Collectors’ Club:
Hello all, Starting today, you can now place your pre-order for the Transformers Collectors’ Club Figure Subscription Service for version 3.0! The order period will be open through October 2nd. The service is available to anyone who is a member of the Transformers Collectors’ Club. The cost of this additional service is $297 (plus shipping). You can pay all at once or in 3 installments. The 6 toys that make up the TFSS 3.0 are: KROK, NACELLE, TARANTULAS, CARZAP, SERPENT O.R. and G2 STARSCREAM. In addition to that you will receive a BONUS 7th figure to be mailed out with your final shipment. Please watch TransformersClub.com over the upcoming days to see mock up images of all six figures figures (except the secret 7th free figure)! The service is available to anyone who is a member of the Transformers Collectors’ Club. The cost of this additional service is $297 (plus shipping). You can pay all at once or in 3 installments. The 6 toys that make up the TFSS 3.0 are: KROK, NACELLE, TARANTULAS, CARZAP, SERPENT O.R. and G2 STARSCREAM. In addition to that you will receive a BONUS 7th figure to be mailed out with your final shipment.
Keep an eye on TransformersClub.com and on our official Facebook and Twitter pages for additional details. You can order now or wait until you have seen all six final mock up figures. The choice is yours as again, anyone who orders by ….. is guaranteed the complete set of toys upon completion of full payment.
Log in now to order TFSS 3.0 Thanks! Brian
Like this: Like Loading...Working with Spatial Databases and R
And how to trick your database into using the index.
Josh Izzard Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 20, 2017
A map of Time Warner Cable Serviceability from broadbandmap.gov
Intro
This blog post describes how we achieved much faster and more accurate estimates of historical serviceability for a prospect customer by using the GIS capabilities in SQL Server, and how we were able to speed up our queries through cunningly tricking the query optimizer into using the index.
Context
At Red Ventures, we have partners in several business verticals, one of which the home services industry — television, internet, phones, etc. We both market and acquire customers on behalf of these partners. One metric we’re very interested in is a prospect customer’s propensity to be serviceable for a particular service or partner — if you move into a new neighborhood, you have to figure out which of the cable companies has actually laid the wire that can reach your house and bring you internet.
Starting with the breakup of Ma Bell in 1982, ISP serviceability in the US is segregated geographically — your house can be serviced by either company Time Warner Cable or Comcast, but not both. We partner with several ISPs, and so when a new customer gives us their address we have two options:
Run a serviceability check for this address against multiple ISPs, and advise the customer as to who they are serviceable for. Query our historical data for an estimated serviceability propensity (“of the 5 closest houses to you that we know about, 4 are serviceable for company X, so we think there’s an 80% chance you too are serviceable for company X”).
Option (1) provides us with the definitive truth — they either are or are not serviceable for this company. However, option (2) is much faster — often service checks take 30-60 seconds to run, and if you’re waiting on a website watching that wheel spin for 60 seconds, you’re probably leaving that website pretty soon.
However, traditional SQL isn’t optimized for questions like “give me the 5 nearest houses to this address.” To do that you have to do calculations like the one below for every address in your database (you can probably get around some of the latency with an index on the lat and long columns on your table, but meh).
Disclaimer: I do not have any sort of DBA or software engineering background. But I google real good. So I started looking into GIS database capabilities to see if we could find databases that have functions like that built in.Human Interface - Nakamura Tower is a board game that is a unique combination of many elements known from tactical and skirmish games, RPG’s and board games. The game is based on a struggle between two powerful megacorporations that takes place in the title tower.
HINT is designed for 2+ people but through different scenarios can be played alone, in cooperation or against other players. The story happens in the near future when the world is dominated by new technologies.
Would like to see how the game mechanic works?
Follow the PDF tutorial link or BETA version of rules.
The HINT game promo movie
The HINT tutorial movie ONE - game component
The HINT tutorial movie TWO - game mechanics
In HINT you will lead a team of selected professionals of a given faction. Each of them has unique skills and abilities, each one can be given weapons and other equipment, be enhanced genetically or cybernetically. All characteristics and modifiers are presented on special character and equipment cards (you don’t need to constantly flick through the rulebook). Each character card has a limited amount of slots that can be filled with equipment and modifications. The player can purchase additional equipment to replace the current item depending on the “group’s assets”. You may like your heroes or hate them but they will no longer be just anonymous pawns.
Figures make HINT stand out among other games. During the design process we strived to consider the latest trends and capture the cyberpunk atmosphere. Our miniatures offer different poses and best quality. Miniatures will be make in METAL. The scale is 32 mm.
The game is played on a board showing the interior of the Nakamura corporate tower that is under attack by its rivals. The characters are moved using spaces on the board. This eliminates the need to measure distance when moving and fighting thus quickening the pace of the game and allowing to avoid misunderstandings. Each space presents a specific tactical situation that influences the characters placed on it.
We placed all important information on cards so you don’t need to check the rulebook all the time. Character, equipment, cyberation and scenario cards have all the descriptions and modifiers you need to play the game. This way all important information is always at hand and presented in an attractive form. Also the well developed Cyber-warfare is based on cards.
What makes HINT so unique is the division of events on those that happen in the real world (on the board) and those that take place in virtual reality. Both influence one another and an advantage in the cybernet grants a significant bonus to actions that take place in reality.
Cyberations and chips granting advantage on the battlefield are the essence of the characters. But nothing comes for free! Each modification increases the vulnerability to cybershock, crossing of the border beyond which our characters are no longer human. A failed test increases the level of cyberpsychosis and crossing the limit will turn the character into a mindless drone. The cybershock resistance level is marked on each card and is different for every character.
Two main factions are available in the basic version of the game (Mercenaries and Corporation), each with characters possessing unique abilities. The third party playing against both players is the tower’s defensive system that went out of control (see the storyline). Its elements move and attack all player characters according to an algorithm. The game also offers a single-player option. In such case you play against the board and its mechanics.
Game mechanics are fairly easy as we wanted to achieve a perfect balance between a fun game and rules that enable a lot of tactical possibilities. The basic rules are easy to learn but the possibilities of their use grow significantly in combination with the characters’ skills and capabilities of equipment. The characters are defined by their basic physical and mental abilities and modifiers, which make it easier or more difficult to perform some tasks, that make them unique. These modifiers result from their skills, special training or cyberations and other equipment. The rules do not use any dice and the testing mechanics are based on cards that we call CanDo. The description on the card, its value and colour influence the final result of the test. The numerical value also states the location of a hit and additional effects connected to it.
There are plans for expansions that |
is frequently dubbed as the gateway song for the band.
The catchy riff and the bad ass solo zips this as a necessity if you’re a Strokes fan.
2. I’ll Try Anything Once (Demo)
The fact that this is not even a song, rather a demo and it still makes the list speaks volumes about the song.
If you’re victim is not into hard guitar solos and electric stuff, this is your rig.
3. Someday
In Julian’s (vocalist) own words – “If we’re subjected to a rather subdued crowd, which is rare, this song is what we resort to. Its a total crowd pleaser, works all the time”
And following a Julian Casablancas quote is not my cup of tea, thank you very much.
4. You Only Live Only Once
Easily the catchiest guitar song on the list. For those who are more into the tune and not into the lyrics and shit, this is the go to song. You don’t need to listen to the song carefully to like it, that’s the beauty of it.
5. Is This It?
The Killers lead vocalist Brandon Flowers said he was depressed when he looked into the type of music The Killers were working on when he first heard this song. Subsequently he wiped off all the songs The Killers had recorded for the album then except “Mr Brightside”. Talk about a stroke of genius?
There you are. The most infectious of The Strokes’ songs. Keep in mind that by no means, are these the best The Strokes songs. Just those which I think are the most easy to appreciate.
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“Prisoner of the Moment” – this is a common theme among fantasy football players throughout the season. A player gets an opportunity, starts, puts up ridiculous stats and immediately he’s a “must own.” This is something we must all be careful with, especially when you’re playing in dynasty leagues. The last thing you want to do is add a flavor of the week and drop a player who’s riding your bench with better long term value. It’s all patience and it’s a virtue.
This brings me to Colin Kaepernick.
The second year quarterback started in week eleven against the Bears, played a great game and never looked back. Since Jim Harbaugh committed to his hand picked quarterback, “Kaep” performed amazingly well. From week eleven to week sixteen, he was the QB7 in most standard fantasy leagues. Even when he took over for an injured Alex Smith in week ten, he posted a solid stat line of 11/17 for 117 yards and ran eight times for 66 yards and a touchdown – not too shabby for a second year player with minimal playing time.
Now, not everyone will be on board with him and here are some arguments you might hear as to why you should be selling on him.
First, it’s his first year with meaningful playing time and come the 2013 season, defenses will know exactly what to expect from him. The game planning will be different and he won’t be able to get away with as much. Also, he’s a running quarterback who could get hurt at any time. So you should be scared every time he gets a chance to run down field. Last, but not least, some will think he’s just a flash in the pan and won’t be anything more than what he is now.
And now for the defense.
Of course defenses will game plan for him next year – it comes with the territory of being a successful new quarterback. Just like defenses will game plan for Kaepernick, the offense will make adjustments to execute their game plan. Not to mention the second year player is very talented and has shown the ability to make smart decisions with the football. On being a running quarterback, if you’ve paid attention to the Niners at all, you’ve seen Harbaugh hasn’t exactly let Kaep off the leash. San Francisco is balanced and when running the read option and Kaepernick only makes plays when he has to and thus far has executed it extremely well and wisely. This is a good thing as the young player moves forward and gives you an element of surprise from game to game. If you dare him to beat you with his legs, he will (as the Packers found out) and his cannon of an arm should scare any secondary. As a side note, injuries can happen with any player. It’s the chance we all take.
What you also have to like about Kaepernick next season, and for his future, are the weapons he’ll have around him. The chemistry he has with wideout Michael Crabtree will only get better. Crabs has seen resurgence with Kaep under center and the former first round pick is finally playing up to his potential. Before his injury, Mario Manningham was coming along in the passing game and he’ll play an important part of Kaep’s continuing development. Rookie AJ Jenkins didn’t have much of an impact, but his usefulness will come into play as the years go on. The running game isn’t going anywhere – the Niners are a run first team and this likely isn’t going to change. Frank Gore will still be around next year and their constant rotation of the backfield has only lengthened his career. With the addition of LaMichael James this past season, combined with getting Kendall Hunter back, the Niners will have a strong and balanced run attack.
In a startup draft, I’d still take guys like Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Cam Newton and Matt Stafford over him. After that, it could get a little interesting. I can definitely see him falling into a tier with guys like Andrew Luck, Russell Wilson, and RG3. If you can pair him with a top guy like Brady, Brees or Rodgers, you’ll be sitting pretty. Pairing him with one of the top quarterbacks will also give you an added advantage of debating whether or not you should start him weekly. I’m not saying I don’t trust him; the whole point of this is to get him on your roster. However, allowing yourself to watch his maturation with a veteran signal caller in tow will calm any skepticism you may have.
One thing is for certain, I believe Kaepernick is more than just a flash in the pan or flavor of the week. He’s a player who Harbaugh took a gamble on and its paid off. To a dynasty owner, all we want to see from a quarterback like him is week in and week out production. With his play to finish the season and through the playoffs thus far, he has established himself as a top ten fantasy quarterback. Don’t consider this a “prisoner of the moment” type of a feeling – Kaepernick will only get better, so make sure you get him on your roster and enjoy the ride.
You can follow Pete on twitter – @PacingPete.Coming Soon
Tales of the City
Middle-aged Mary Ann returns to San Francisco and the eccentric friends she left behind. Based on Armistead Maupin's books and starring Laura Linney.
Dead to Me
A powerful friendship blossoms between a tightly wound widow and a free spirit with a shocking secret in this darkly comic series.
Shimmers
In this supernatural eco-thriller, five teens at an isolated school in northern Thailand are haunted by their pasts -- and a much more sinister force.
Chip & Potato
A loveable pug and her mouse BFF start kindergarten, welcome new siblings and learn to become part of their community in this series for preschoolers.
Pacific Rim
As monsters emerge from the sea to attack Earth, humanity fights back using giant robot warriors in this anime adaptation of the blockbuster film.
KAOS
This genre-bending series puts a modern twist on Greek and Roman mythology, exploring themes of gender politics, power and life in the underworld.
Kid Cosmic
In this animated series from the creator of "The Powerpuff Girls," an odd, imaginative boy acquires superpowers after finding five cosmic rings.
Cowboy Bebop
A ragtag crew of bounty hunters chases down the galaxy's most dangerous criminals. They'll save the world... for the right price.While the domestic box office was down a sobering 4 percent, the foreign take grew by 7 percent to $22.4 billion; China now second-biggest international market after Japan.
The foreign box office rescued Hollywood in 2011, with international ticket sales reaching $22.4 billion, a healthy 7 percent increase over 2010, according to the MPAA's annual Theatrical Market Statistics report.
Globally, ticket sales reached $32.6 billion in 2011, only a 3 percent gain. That's due to a marked downturn at the North American box office, where revenue reached $10.2 billion, down 4 percent over 2010. International reveneus made up nearly 69 percent of the pie.
"The figures on box office reflect only one indicator of an extremely complex and evolving movie industry," MPAA chairman and CEO Chris Dodd said. "We're working harder and smarter to keep moviegoers coming back for more, whether at the cinema, at home or on the go."
The North American box office is showing strong signs of recovery this year, helping to soothe concerns over 2011's woes.
"In mature markets such as the United States, the business can more cyclical in the short term, driven by product supply and distribution patterns," National Association of Theatre Owners president John Fithian said. "In the long term, however, domestic revenues continue to grow. Though the 2011 U.S. box office was down 4 percent, 2012 looks to be another growth year. Box office is up nearly 14 percent year-to-date, with a strong slate of summer movies coming."
Overseas, box office was up across almost all markets in 2011. China saw enormous growth, with ticket sales reaching $2 billion -- second only to Japan, where revenue reached $2.3 billion. Japan was flat last year because of the earthquake and tsunami in March.
France virtually tied with China in reporting $2 billion in ticket sales, followed by the U.K. with $1.7 billion and India with $1.4 billion.
In confirming last year's troubled domestic box office, the MPAA said admissions were down 4 percent in 2011, with 1.28 billion tickets sold--the lowest level in a decade. The national average of tickets sold per person also lagged, topping out at 3.9, compared with 4.1 in 2010 and 4.3 in 2009.
The average cinema ticket price increased by 4 cents in North America, a 1 percent increase, compared with a 3 percent increase in inflation, according to the report.
More than two-thirds of the population in the U.S. and Canada, 221.2 million people, went to the movies at least once in 2011. Frequent moviegoers -- defined as those going to the cinema once or more a month -- continued to drive the domestic box office, buying half of all movie tickets sold in 2011, even though they only made up 10 percent of the population.
Frequent moviegoers in 2011 were older, reflecting the widely reported dip in attendance among younger demos. In the 25-39 age group, more people went to the movies frequently (9.7 million versus 7.7 million in 2010). In contrast, the number of frequent moviegoers in the 18-24 age group fell by nearly 1 million, particularly among females.
In terms of gender, females and males showed up in equal numbers overall. Among ethnicities, Hispanics continued to overindex in terms of moviegoing.
Part of the reason for the downturn in domestic revenue was a noticeable dip in attendance for 3D films, for which revenue fell by $400 million year-over-year.
Globally, the number of cinema screens grew by 3 percent, thanks in large part to the boom in new theaters in markets including China and Russia. Growth in the number of new 3D screens slowed in 2011 overall but increased by a massive 97 percent in Latin America and 58 percent in Asia Pacific markets.
One bright spot: Movie theaters in North America continued to draw more people than theme parks and U.S. sports combined, according to the MPAA report.The all-Democratic Massachusetts congressional delegation is unanimously calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to step down amid revelations he twice talked with Russia’s ambassador during the presidential campaign — and denied having such contact during his confirmation hearings earlier this year.
"The fact that our own government and our own sitting attorney general is part of that effort to block an investigation and that he himself gave false testimony in response to questions around the Russian interference in our election is deeply, deeply troubling," U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, a South Boston Democrat who serves on the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told Boston Herald Radio today, referring to Sessions' under-oath questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee. "He compromised himself. He could have come out with this during the confirmation hearings – I think it would have raised a lot of eyebrows – but he chose to be untruthful and there have to be consequences to that."
Asked by Herald radio host Jaclyn Cashman if Sessions was a liar, Lynch said, "Yeah. When you say something that you know is totally false and you do it under oath, yeah, you're a liar, you're a perjurer."
“I believe Attorney General Sessions should resign. It’s not a statement I make lightly as a person who was a district attorney himself for 12 years, I realize the magnitude of that statement,” U.S. Rep. William P. Keating told reporters at Logan Airport after stepping off a plane this afternoon from D.C. “The credibility of Attorney General Sessions going forward is not there and you cannot be effective and serve your country well under those conditions.”
The Justice Department confirmed to the Washington Post that Sessions' met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in July and September last year, while he was serving as a U.S. senator and as a key advisor to the Trump campaign. The meetings occurred as Russia was engaged in a wide-ranging campaign to tilt the presidential election in Trump's favor through cyberattacks, intelligence officials have said.
During his confirmation hearing in January, Sessions told Democratic Sen. Al Franken he was not aware of any official in the Trump campaign having contact with the Russians and then added “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”
The former Alabama U.S. Sen. then responded with a simple “no” when asked in writing by Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary committee, if he had been in contact with the Russian government about the 2016 election.
President Trump today backed Sessions and said he had “total confidence” in the AG amid more than 100 calls for his resignation from Democratic lawmakers. The president added he was not aware of Sessions’ contact with the Russians during the campaign.
“There was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer,” Sarah Isgur Flores, Sessions’ spokeswoman, told the Post last night. “He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee."
“I am shocked by this whole turn of events and that there continues to be a bizarre relationship between this administration and Russia,” said U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark at Logan. “I think the American people deserve to have an attorney general who is honest with them and honest with Congress, especially when he is under oath. … I think we will be seeing that shortly, I think this is a dramatic turn of events for this administration and this attorney general,” Clark said.
Trump's national security advisor Mike Flynn last month was forced to resign after lying about his talks with Kislyak regarding sanctions the Obama administration levied on Russia for the attempts to influence the election.
U.S. Reps Joseph P. Kennedy III, James P. McGovern, and Seth Moulton all released statements today calling for Sessions’ resignation.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren took to Twitter, where she said “We need a special prosecutor totally independent of the AG. We need a real, bipartisan, transparent Congressional investigation into Russia,” and followed that up with a tweet saying “And we need Attorney General Jeff Sessions – who should have never been confirmed in the first place – to resign. We need it now.”
"AG #Sessions should resign," U.S. Sen. Markey tweeted. "This is exactly why we need an independent special counsel to investigate #TrumpRussia.”
U.S. Rep. Richard Neal initially said Sessions should recuse himself from any investigation into Trump- Russia ties. About 45 minutes later, he joined the rest of the delegation, tweeting,” After misleading Congress under oath about secret talks with Russians, AG #Sessions should now resign.”
U.S. Rep. Michael E. Capuano, who also was at Logan today, said he would have been fine with Sessions simply rescuing himself, but now feels the AG needs to resign.
Asked about Trump’s expression of confidence in Sessions, the Somerville Democrat said, “didn't he say he had total confidence in Gen. Flynn 2 days before he left?”
“I guess they are going to try to stem the tide, but this has nothing to do with partisan politics and honestly, if Sessions cared about the Trump Administration, if he cared about the reputation of the attorney general, he’d do it,” Capuano added. “I think America deserves better.”
Asked if Sessions does not step down whether Congress should proceed with impeachment, Lynch responded: "Absolutely. He lied during his confirmation proceedings. And on a very, very pertinent and important question. And he is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America. so yeah, definitely there would be impeachment grounds, I believe. And unfortunately I think his misstatements were material to his fitness to serve."
If Sessions recused himself from the Russian investigation, the responsibility would fall on the president or Congress to appoint a special prosecutor.
Lynch noted in Congress, Republicans would have to join with Democrats to reach the 218-vote threshold.
"There would be pushback," he said.
You can listen to the interview live here.As my Santa did not contact me nor mark his gift as shipped (Santa, please do that - I don't want you to have any trouble just because you forgot to tick that box), I gradually lost hope that I'm going to receive something - until today, when I was pulled from cracking countless walnuts for Christmas cakes by my mom, who announced that I received some package - and here it was! There was a single skein of yarn and a chocolate (Which I ate immediately, sorry).
I mentioned in my preferences that I'd love some yarn, but I did not expect yarn this awesome! Just by touching it I can see that it will make the best scarf I ever had (I love the colours too!). I almost want to drop everything and use this gift already, but I'm in the middle of Christmas preparations and I'd be probably decapitated by my siblings if I left my duties right now. xD
I'm sorry I couldn't make a better photo, it's dark already so the lighting is crap. :CHey everyone, welcome back! Not much to announce this month, but lots of thanks to my patrons for their continued support, and to my new patrons for motivating me all over again to make this story the best it can be. I'm still working on the second chapter of Guardian too, and hope to finish it by next month. Thanks for reading, and all feedback appreciated as usual, either in reviews or on /r/rational!
Chapter 49: The Paradox of Choice
Red goes to meet Kanto's "Mistress of Psychic Pokemon" at a cafe in the richer western portions of the city, where the buildings are all clean and gleaming, and there are noticeably fewer construction projects going on. As Red navigates the busy streets on his bike, he calls Psychic Ayane to get some quick advice for keeping secrets hidden when meeting with a powerful psychic. Bill's human storage activity is the only real bit of information he has that he doesn't want getting out... and not just because it's not his secret to tell.
"Besides, you're a smart kid. I don't actually have to explain how hard I can make your life if you give me reason to, do I?"
Red curses as the phone goes to voicemail, and doesn't bother leaving a message, simply switching to the next best thing.
"Hello, Red! How's Vermilion City? Did your Research license arrive?"
"Hi Professor!" Red half shouts as he weaves through some pedestrian traffic and onto the bike lane in the road. "Yes, it's awesome, but sorry, no time to chat, important question!"
"One moment." There's the sound of footsteps, then a door closing. "Go ahead, Red. What's wrong?"
"I'm meeting Leader Sabrina in about ten minutes. Any advice would be highly appreciated!"
Professor Oak is silent for the time it takes for Red to ride back onto some sidewalk and cut across a shopping strip, then asks, "How much do you know about Sabrina?"
"Nothing, really. Saffron Gym Leader, powerful psychic despite her age… uh… I think that's it."
"Do you know how she became Leader?"
Red recalls something Blue said about it at some point. "She beat the last one there, right? When it was a Fighting Gym?"
"Yes. People believe it was easier for her than it might normally be, since her affinity for Psychics gave her a natural advantage against the previous Leader's Fighting pokemon. This is obviously not the whole story."
"Right," Red says as he checks the map and turning onto the road that leads to the cafe. "Otherwise someone who's good with Dark pokemon would just move in on her instead. I figured Gym Leaders would use their best pokemon, and a mix of Types, if being challenged for Leadership, wouldn't they?"
"You're right, though for most, their strongest pokemon will often be the type their Gym focuses on. However, the battle between Sabrina and Leader Kiyo had layers beneath the surface. Kiyo was an enormously skilled trainer, but not a particularly effective Leader. He was adequate at best in teaching his Gym members, and his grasp of wider strategy outside of individual pokemon battles was… lackluster. There were a number of incidents that made people question his capability to protect the city, but anyone who challenged him for Leadership was beaten. He became more and more draconian as people turned against him, and his gym lost members. In battles with challengers, his pokemon began to cripple and even kill their opponents on a somewhat regular basis, until people completely stopped attempting to supplant him, not wanting to risk their pokemon."
Red's eyes widen. A Leader may not be the best at everything, but a competent one would at least raise up other trainers who can advise them well. One that lets their ego get in the way, and then loses control of their temper like that, or worse does it intentionally... That's the kinds of things villains in shows did, almost as bad as being a Renegade. "What happened?"
"There was something of a final exodus among his gym members, and over time, Saffron city and the outlying areas were hit with a number of pokemon attacks it was unable to contain. The neighboring cities and local Rangers did their best to pick up the slack, but it got to the point that people began asking when the League would intercede: I happen to know that Elite Bruno was preparing to challenge Kiyo, and step down from the Elite Four to take over Saffron Gym, when instead Sabrina, who was well known by that point for her powerful psychic abilities and devastating psychic pokemon, stepped in."
"And beat him."
"And destroyed him. I don't use that word lightly, Red: it should not have happened. Sabrina was a powerful trainer with a handful of badges to her name, and she had type advantage for most of her team, but Leader Kiyo was a monstrous opponent. He wouldn't have kept his position for so long otherwise. His defeat was so complete that there were suspicions, even amid the relief of the city and region, that the fight was fixed, or that he or his pokemon were sabotaged in some way."
Red is so caught up in the story he forgets to check the map in time, and doesn't realize until after he passes the place. He curses under his breath and skids to a stop, then turns his bike around, breathing hard. "And what do you think?"
"My best guess? Nothing so blatant. But by the end, Kiyo was a broken man, and I believe Sabrina knew when that point came. She did not arrive in the city before her challenge: she had been there for months, meeting with gym members and ex-gym members, organizing trainers in the city during nearby incidents, even opening her own classes, both for psychics and for training pokemon, within the city."
"So she did bring about his downfall, in some purposeful way."
"I doubt she gave him the alcohol that he allegedly took to bed every night, but… yes, that's my belief. And I suspect she had advice and financial aid from some other Gym Leader, possibly multiple. Those in the nearby cities certainly had incentive to no longer carry the extra weight. Whoever was involved, it does seem that Sabrina worked purposefully to undermine Kiyo until only his most obstinate and incompetent supporters remained, his Gym all but collapsed around him. Her preliminary matches were painful to watch."
Red sees the cafe, and quickly stops and dismounts a block away. "Okay. I appreciate the history lesson, but I'm still not sure what to take away from this. I don't think I have anything she wants enough to turn my friends against me or drive me to drink, but in general, I should be aware that she's manipulative?"
"A strong word, but perhaps fair. And I don't want to give you the wrong impression: I have met her a handful of times, and believe her to be a good person, or I would suggest you not meet her at all. What she did to Kiyo, if she did it, was perhaps the best outcome for the city, and likely necessary for the region to avoid the embarrassment of requiring League intercession. I still do not know if the plan was hers, or someone else's… I was in contact with the League fairly often then, and do not believe any of them assisted her." Professor Oak sighs. "But regardless of all that, yes, most powerful psychics appear, ah,'socially strategic' to some degree: I suppose it's inevitable when you have so much more information than most do about those you interact with. So whatever Sabrina wants from you, be aware that she can be subtle, even if she offers something that seems fair in return."
"Got it. Expect to get something out of this, but watch out for manipulation, or a long con," Red says, heart pounding both from the quick ride and anxiety over the coming meeting. He takes his helmet off, then shucks his knee and arm pads into the box with the bike.
"She probably won't try and corner you in any way, but if she makes you want to give it to her, you will be easier to deal with. As long as the exchange seems equitable, well and good. But I thought it was worth warning you, either way."
"I understand. Thanks, Professor." He checks the time and sees he has four minutes left. "I gotta go."
"Good luck, Red."
Red hangs up, and only then remembers that he didn't ask for advice on keeping her out of his head.
It's okay. I can do this. He closes his eyes, and takes a few deep breaths, ignoring the few pedestrians that pass by and letting himself calm down little by little. Eventually his pulse returns to a normal rate, thoughts clearing as he feels more centered.
So. While I now have to worry about getting manipulated, my first priority is still to avoid spilling Bill's secret. What do I know about keeping thoughts secure?
Few psychics are powerful enough to actually pick up words or full ideas from others' minds, rather than just emotional states… but Sabrina is one of them, by all accounts. Still, the target has to be thinking about whatever it is for her to pick it up, and now that Red knows how psychic powers work, he understands that she would be joining her mind with his, which he would notice.
Or at least, that's the common understanding. Red doesn't actually know what the limits of psychic powers are, the best research is spotty and inconsistent, which means he doesn't know what Sabrina's limits are. If she can pick up more than just surface thoughts without merging their minds, it's not in her interest to make that common knowledge.
Which means Red will need something to distract more than just his surface thoughts. He takes out his supply list and searches through it for anything that can help him. Whatever it is, it would preferably be something subtle, so he can't just blare music into his earphones when he wants to...
Red is scanning through the Ts and pauses when he sees thumbtacks between thermos and toiletries. He remembers looking around his room and trying to come up with some obscure use for anything he saw that didn't have too much mass, but he can't remember what he thought justified bringing thumbtacks. Putting sheets of paper up on trees to leave directions? Something like that.
Red considers taking one out and putting it in the end of his shoe, carefully angled so he can prod himself with it if needed. If the pain registers on his face or in his mind, he might be able to play it off as having an injury… but that would be a lie, and she would probably be able to detect that if nothing else…
Forget painful things, do something pleasant instead. Maybe if he buys some cookies when he goes inside...
Red's watch beeps, and he sighs. Out of time, and any benefits from further thinking would be marginal compared to potentially irritating her by arriving late. He quickly takes out some wet wipes for the dried sweat on his face and neck, then straighten his collar and puts his hat on. He stares at his reflection in a curtained window to make sure he looks presentable, then puts everything away and walks to the cafe.
The interior is bright and clean, its walls lined with colorful booths and its front counter displaying all sorts of delicious pastries. Red sees some of the booths are in alcoves with curtains over them, and wonders if anyone is in them: if not, the place is empty save for the young man working the counter, an older man in a long coat and woolen hat, and the Gym Leader sitting across from him.
Sabrina is immediately recognizable, even dressed casually in a pink tank top and white pants, her dark hair sweeping down and out above her shoulders. It feels weird seeing a Leader in a cafe, fancy as it is, and he hesitates at the entrance of the sitting area, not wanting to interrupt. She glances at him and holds a finger up, and he nods and steps back toward the front counter, scanning their menu for something to use as a distraction.
Ah! Perfect...
A few minutes later his chocolate milkshake is ready, and the cashier refuses any payment, gesturing to the Gym Leader. Red turns to see Sabrina's guest rising from his seat. He takes her hand and bows, muttering something, then leaves. Red waits until he's out of the shop, then approaches again, feeling nervous butterflies in his stomach. He recognizes that he's feeling a little star struck, like he was upon meeting Bill, then quickly takes a sip of his drink, letting the cold, overwhelming sweetness fill his mouth. Damn. That's good milkshake. He'll have to be careful not to finish it too quickly.
"Hello, Mr. Verres." Sabrina inclines her head, stirring tea in a porcelain cup with a lotus on it. "Please join me."
Red sits across from her and meets her gaze for the first time. Despite knowing she's somewhere in her mid-twenties, as soon as Red notices the unusual rose-quartz color of her eyes, he feels what he did with Psychic Narud: a sense of weight, of years layered on top of each other, that makes him suddenly feel like he's in the presence of someone much older. Red shifts his gaze to her nose, wondering why he never felt something similar with Ayane or Ranna.
"It's an honor to meet you, Leader. Thank you for the drink. How can I be of assistance?" He sips the milkshake again, letting the flavor fill his mouth and mind. He's tempted to bring his mental shields up too, but decides against it: even if it would work on her, it would be too distracting to maintain, and she might even consider it rude.
"First, I'd like to congratulate you on your Researcher's License," Sabrina says. "I'm curious, do you intend to continue pursuing psychic phenomena in particular?"
"Oh. Thank you. Uh, for now, yeah. I don't want to limit myself, if something else comes up I might change tracks, but I think it's worth pursuing at the moment."
"May I ask why?"
Red wonders how much detail he should go into. "That's kind of a long answer."
"You're worried I'll be bored, despite me specifically seeking you out to speak with?" Sabrina sips from her cup, smiling slightly.
Red blinks, processing this. The gym leader seems very much at ease, and her gaze stays mostly on him without feeling oppressive, occasionally letting her gaze wander to her cup, or the window behind him. Red makes himself relax, settling into his seat and going through a quick calming technique.
"Good awareness and response time," she says, taking him by surprise and causing him to become flustered. "Oh, and now I've ruined it. I apologize."
"That's okay," he says automatically, and tries to concentrate on relaxing again. It's a little harder, but as he breathes in and out, he lets his mind wander to his research until it calms. "Well, the short version is I want to discover the origin of pokemon species. Any deeper and more fundamental understanding of them will help with that, such as what makes them so different. We know that natural selection creates variation in species, but there are also pokemon that seem to spontaneously arise out of their environment. So did the pokemon we know already do the same, in ancient history? Or did they come about from biological changes over time?"
"Biological changes. You mean coming from the same ancestor, such as mew?" she muses, sipping her tea.
"I was thinking of even simpler life forms, but if mew existed, and was really the first pokemon, then yeah, learning about psychic pokemon might be important."
"Then your interest in psychics is incidental to your interest in biology."
"A little. The type system often seems incomplete or misleading, but psychic phenomena, and the related Dark type, are something we humans seem to share with pokemon, so it's probably fundamental in a way that, say, studying Fire or Plant pokemon wouldn't be." Also discovering how psychic phenomena work might help develop technology that mimics it and allow Bill to make something that spurs better machine understanding of human values mmmmm chocolate...
"Yes, I see." Sabrina's gaze is distant, and Red ignores her as best he can, gulping down his milkshake until he suddenly feels the sharp pain of brain freeze. He grimaces and stops drinking, one hand rising to rub his forehead.
Sabrina chuckles. "I apologize if that was on my account. I don't mean to make you nervous, and have no intention of trying to connect deeper with your mind. If your emotional mood itself is what you fear me sensing, then we can end the conversation. I hope you didn't feel pressured into coming."
"Oh, no," Red says as he puts his cup aside, cheeks flushed. "I'm just… still new to interacting with other psychics."
"Why do you not simply use your shield? Or was I misinformed about your having one?"
Red shifts. "Would you mind me asking first, how did you find out about that?"
She smiles. "The psychic community is rather interconnected, for all our layers and divisions. My Third asked me if I ever knew of someone who could shield their mind while sensing others probing it, and I told him I had not and asked why. He reported that someone had asked him the same question, and from there it wasn't hard to discover that Psychic Ayane's new student had apparently exhibited the ability. Am I to take the question as confirmation of it?"
Red nods. "Yeah, I can do it. Or I did with Ayane, anyway. The reason I'm not using it now is I don't know if it's rude or not." He hesitates, then says, "Or to be honest if it would do any good against a psychic of your caliber."
"An understandable fear. But such a breach should be felt even by someone with a regular shield, and if such a thing were to happen, you could simply throw your drink in my face and run."
She says it so matter-of-fact that Red grins. "I wouldn't do that."
"Oh? And what would you do, then, if a psychic were to force a merge?"
Red considers this a moment, then purposefully remembers what it felt like to be attacked by his Spinarak. But while the memory isn't pleasant, there's no sudden, sweeping reliving of it. Using that as a double edged defense wouldn't work.
But there is something that still has that power over him, however much he's gotten better at dealing with it.
"I'd probably try drowning them in grief," he says, smile fading. "Assuming I could tell they were doing it at all." It's not like she has an incentive to tell him the truth if she can breach people's shields without them knowing…
Sabrina sighs, the age behind her eyes becoming more pronounced. "I see you understand why many psychics' lives can be… difficult."
Red is lost for a moment, then realizes she probably picked up on his suspicion. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Trust is a valuable thing, and it is completely understandable that others would withhold it from those who have power over them. But without it, true and meaningful relationships are difficult… and so the suspicion and discomfort that psychics face throughout their lives, particularly powerful ones, can often be quite isolating. Even from one another."
Sabrina's face is still calm, but there's something in her words that makes him feel how personal this topic is for her. Red wonders who she's thinking of, and feels wretched for being so suspicious of her even as he knows he shouldn't, that this too can simply be an additional manipulation. Red suddenly wonders if she's the reason the cafe |
the party wrote in a political programme.
The Sweden Democrats entered parliament for the first time in 2010 on an anti-immigration, eurosceptic platform, and the party hopes to win even more seats in September 2014 legislative elections.
The latest opinion polls show the party has around 12 percent support among voters.
According to the party, in a section of the programme entitled “fight against criminality”, there are two types of beggars in Sweden.
The main reason beggars come to Sweden is to beg in a professional manner. We can compare them to Swedish beggars who often beg because of their homelessness or addiction to alcohol or drugs.
“The Sweden Democrats think that professional begging has no place here in Sweden. We also feel that Swedish social protection must first of all be directed towards, and take care of, our fellow citizens,” according to the document.
Sweden has relatively few homeless people, however their number has increased as a result of the economic crisis in Europe.
The government in 2012 counted 370 homeless European Union citizens in the country, most of whom were men or Roma.
- © AFP 2013.This Animated GIF cannot display all the colors properly and shrinking it to fit this blog, destroys the sharpness - but the animation still looks decent.
The Excel workbook demonstrates advanced Excel techniques to dynamically slice through gobs of data. The data sheet has nearly 6,000 records and watching the animation, I find myself wishing there were more years of data so that the animation would last longer!
Not only is the world getting fatter and this includes virtually every country, but women are leading the way. That's not comforting!
With the slider you can choose which country to highlight. You can choose to watch the animation at this normal speed or in slow motion.
All in all, this Excel animated business chart works well, and the Excel implementation is very instructive.
Here is the workbook:
Get Trained!
Sophisticated chart animation is just one of literally dozens of advanced methods that my students in the inaugural class of the Excel Hero Academy are learning.
I've received dozens of messages from students telling me that the academy is the best Excel training they have ever found at any price and that it is possibly the best investment they've ever made. Wow.
This Spring I will be offering the course again. There's already 200 people on the interest list for the next class. Why not join us? Just fill the form below and I'll send you more information as we get closer!
Here's a list of other animated charts on Excel Hero:
If you liked this article, please share it!
Recently I stumbled across a very interesting Flash based Body Mass Index chart at The Washington Post. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to emulate the chart in Excel. I think it really captures the essence of the original.0
If you play video games even semi-regularly, then you’re likely aware that Red Dead Redemption is, quite simply, one of the best games of the 21st century. While Rockstar Games had carved out quite a niche with its highly popular Grand Theft Auto series, it turned its attention to the Old West with Red Dead Revolver, and the game’s 2004 release was met with enthusiasm. However, it was the 2009 sequel Red Dead Redemption that really took off, with an involving story, incredible gameplay, and a tremendous sandbox that resulted in an impeccable gaming experience. Naturally, as with all things popular, fans began clamoring for a sequel. It’s now been over seven years since Red Dead’s initial release, but it appears it might finally be time for Rockstar to confirm Red Dead Redemption 2 is on the way.
Earlier today, Rockstar’s Twitter account changed its header to a semi-faded red logo while also tweeting out a picture of the new image, and Rockstar’s Facebook page and official website also boast the new logo. Rumors about Red Dead Redemption 2 have been swirling as of late, when concept art of a new game in the series leaked online this past April. Rockstar recently made Red Dead Redemption available as a download for Xbox One, and that would certainly serve as the perfect way to build hype for an upcoming sequel.
Rockstar hasn’t confirmed anything just yet, but all signs point to Red Dead Redemption 2 coming sooner rather than later. And that is very, very good news. For gamers like myself, who disappeared into the likes of Red Dead Redemption, Skyrim, and Fallout for months on end, I’ve been clamoring for the next iteration of said games. Moreover, the Western setting of Red Dead makes it wholly unique, and something no one’s been able to replicate as well as Rockstar did.
What say you, folks? Are you ready for Red Dead Redemption 2? Sound off in the comments below.Smartphone apps that help you find a ride in a driver's personal car have emerged in Columbus amid a national debate over whether the out-of-state companies behind them have adequate insurance. While UberX and Lyft have started using their apps to connect Columbus passengers to a stable of drivers using their own vehicles, questions have emerged about who is responsible if a driver causes a crash.
Smartphone apps that help you find a ride in a driver�s personal car have emerged in Columbus amid a national debate over whether the out-of-state companies behind them have adequate insurance.
While UberX and Lyft have started using their apps to connect Columbus passengers to a stable of drivers using their own vehicles, questions have emerged about who is responsible if a driver causes a crash.
On New Year�s Eve, an Uber driver struck and killed a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco. The company has said it is not responsible because the driver was between fares, but it faces a lawsuit in the death, according to The New York Times.
Critics say a similar situation could crop up in Columbus, but the companies say they carry more commercial liability insurance than the city requires for taxis and limos. A typical personal auto-insurance policy won�t cover a driver who is working, insurance experts say.
�I would encourage any driver who wants to be a part of one of these services to look at their insurance policies,� said Amanda Ford, spokeswoman for the Columbus Department of Public Safety. � They have a risk of being dropped by their insurance company if they�re involved in an incident."
Columbus officials say they were blindsided by the Uber and Lyft launches, and regulations that would require the companies and their drivers to obtain local licenses won�t be finished until the end of March. Insurance requirements are among the code changes Columbus is considering.
Cities across the country are trying to figure out whether these ride-sharing companies should be regulated like taxicabs or some altogether different type of company.
Drivers use personal vehicles and log into the app to troll for fares during a shift. Passengers use the app to request rides and pay through their phones using a credit card.
�This is a new model not accounted for by existing regulations,� said Erin Simpson, a Lyft spokeswoman.
In Columbus, taxi and livery companies are required to carry $300,000 and $500,000, respectively, in commercial liability coverage for their drivers, Ford said. Lyft and Uber tout $1 million in coverage. The taxi and livery policies also cover drivers between fares.
But if the Uber and Lyft policies are defined as �excess� coverage, drivers and their passengers risk not being covered at all, said Bob Passmore, a senior director of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.
Personal auto-insurance policies typically have exemptions for commercial activity, he said, and excess coverage kicks in only if a primary insurance plan is in place.
�They have to have coverage that�s specific to this activity because a personal auto policy doesn�t do it,� he said.
Uber�s policy would cover drivers as a primary insurer if a driver�s individual policy would not, said James Ondrey, general manager for Uber Ohio.
Lyft driver Sabrina Garman said her insurer, Grange Insurance, already has assured her that she would be covered in a crash, and she�s confident that Lyft�s policy would fill in any gaps.
She drives her 2013 Kia Soul for the company as a second job when she�s not coordinating bone-marrow transplants at the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital. Garman, 33, said riders have been enthusiastic about the service.
Lyft started in Columbus on Feb. 21; Uber launched its service last week. Both companies were working with city officials to help develop regulations for the industry, but they started operating before the city could finalize its rules.
Ford said the regulations likely will require both the companies and the drivers to obtain local licenses and submission of background checks and traffic records for each driver. Until the code revisions are finished, Uber and Lyft drivers who charge for rides are operating illegally, she said.
�They�re blatantly telling you that we�re going to be out here violating the law,� said David Herring, operations manager of Acme Taxi. �And we�re still going to create laws to license them? I don�t understand that.�
rrouan@dispatch.com
@RickRouan
@CrawlumbusJohn Tavares is due for a new contract at the end of this season. Will the New York Islanders re-sign their captain and leading man, or will J.T. take his talents to another NHL town?
There are some absolute titans up for unrestricted free agency next summer – Joe Thornton, Rick Nash, the Sedin twins – but they’re in the twilight stage of their careers. Younger UFAs in the class will have a bigger impact, whether they re-sign with their current team or test the open market. Who are the top five who will have NHL GMs – and fans – salivating?
John Tavares, New York Islanders (current cap hit: $5.5 million)
This is the big one. Speculation has run rampant on J.T. for more than a year already, mostly because the Islanders’ arena situation has been such a gong show. Tavares, the team captain and leading man, has been committed to the organization for a long time and has always done more than his share both on and off the ice. But will this latest arena kerfuffle finally push him away?
James van Riemsdyk, Toronto Maple Leafs (current cap hit: $4.2 million)
He’s been a bargain in Toronto, but that won’t last if ‘JVR’ hits the open market. Since he arrived in the NHL so early, van Riemsdyk, 28, can become a free agent while still in the prime of his career, which makes him an attractive UFA option. Thanks to his size and hands, van Riemsdyk brings a net-front presence most teams could really use.
Kyle Turris, Ottawa Senators (current cap hit: $3.5 million)
A solid faceoff man and two-way producer, Turris is underpaid right now and due for a significant raise. He teeters between being a top-line center and a second-line center, depending on the cast around him, but he is undoubtedly a key contributor in Ottawa. If the Senators want to keep him, it’ll cost them.
Cam Atkinson, Columbus Blue Jackets (current cap hit: $3.5 million)
Atkinson has seen his production climb steadily the past few seasons and happens to be cresting just when he needs a new contract. Undersized but effective thanks to his speed and hockey sense, he’s the type of player who is no longer overlooked by teams, and the Blue Jackets will have to pay a pretty penny to keep him from being lured away by outside suitors.
John Carlson, Washington Capitals (current cap hit: $4 million)
The top defenseman available, Carlson gets a bonus push on that alone. He gets another bump for being a right-handed shot, plus his Capitals already have three other blueliners under contract for more than $5 million each this season and in 2018-19. Can Washington hold on to this two-way gem, or will Carlson continue the exodus out of D.C.?ChanmanV Profile Joined December 2010 United States 1152 Posts Last Edited: 2013-06-02 17:25:05 #1
Do you loves Star Strikers like I do? If you said yes, it's time to prove it with your favorite pros and personalities around the community. SuperStar Strikers is an 8 team 4 v 4 Star Strikers tournament that mixes your favorite pro/personalities with you the community. I made a quick video with some more details:
Tournament Announcement
Do you loves Star Strikers like I do? If you said yes, it's time to prove it with your favorite pros and personalities around the community.is an 8 team 4 v 4 Star Strikers tournament that mixes your favorite pro/personalities with you the community. I made a quick video with some more details:Tournament Announcement
Groups and Team Banner Reveal
Groups and Team Banner Reveal
Game
Strikers! in the SC2 Arcade
Event Date/Time
Sunday 06/02/2013
3:00pm PDT / 6:00pm EDT
Schedule and Results
http://playigl.com/minievent/6
Format
- 8 Teams
- 2 groups of 4 (tiebreaker is H2H record, total goals scores, 2nd tiebreaker goals against) Best of 1 each match
- Top 2 of each group move on to a Bo1 semi finals. Winner of that moves on to the finals with Best of 3 to determine the champion.
Prize
- The winning team and roster will be added to the loading page of Strikers! as the reigning champion so everyone that plays the game will be reminded everyday.
Main Stream
http://twitch.tv/chanmanv
Team Makeup
- 2 Pro/Personalities + 2 members of the community
- The pro/personalities will select the 2 members of the community from the "Star Strikers" BattleNet Group on the day of the event. Be sure to join this group too since it's the official Star Strikers group on BattleNet.
Rules
- Default settings - 8 minute halves
THE TEAMS - Team Banners By Miggie
Team Day[P]McDaniel - Day9 (c), JP McDaniel (c), Maestro, and ooter
Team Kings of Tin - DJWheat (c), WackSteven (c), Kaioken, and Spunkx
Team Sexbots - EG.Suppy (c), coL.Sasquatch (c), djmuchie, and Escaho
Team 2Rax - LivinPink (c), Tara Babcock (c), Montisumo, and ColdButKind
Team Protoss My Salad - EG.Huk (c), desRow (c), ROOTBigGun, Sniper
Team Raining Kappa - ROOT.Nathanias (c) and ROOT.puCK (c)
Team Beanie Brigade - EG.Machine (c), iSTemp0 (c), Nanocloud, and Yume
Team Big Daddy and Sons - Select (c) and mouzIllusion (c)
Leave comments and suggestions in this thread. See you on Sunday!
Courtesy of ChanmanV Productions
[Edit: Team Names and Confirmed Participants, vetoes removed] Strikers! in the SC2 ArcadeSunday 06/02/20133:00pm PDT / 6:00pm EDT- 8 Teams- 2 groups of 4 (tiebreaker is H2H record, total goals scores, 2nd tiebreaker goals against) Best of 1 each match- Top 2 of each group move on to a Bo1 semi finals. Winner of that moves on to the finals with Best of 3 to determine the champion.- The winning team and roster will be added to the loading page of Strikers! as the reigning champion so everyone that plays the game will be reminded everyday.- 2 Pro/Personalities + 2 members of the community- The pro/personalities will select the 2 members of the community from the "Star Strikers" BattleNet Group on the day of the event. Be sure to join this group too since it's the official Star Strikers group on BattleNet.- Default settings - 8 minute halvesTeam Day[P]McDaniel - Day9 (c), JP McDaniel (c), Maestro, and ooterTeam Kings of Tin - DJWheat (c), WackSteven (c), Kaioken, and SpunkxTeam Sexbots - EG.Suppy (c), coL.Sasquatch (c), djmuchie, and EscahoTeam 2Rax - LivinPink (c), Tara Babcock (c), Montisumo, and ColdButKindTeam Protoss My Salad - EG.Huk (c), desRow (c), ROOTBigGun, SniperTeam Raining Kappa - ROOT.Nathanias (c) and ROOT.puCK (c)Team Beanie Brigade - EG.Machine (c), iSTemp0 (c), Nanocloud, and YumeTeam Big Daddy and Sons - Select (c) and mouzIllusion (c)Leave comments and suggestions in this thread. See you on Sunday![Edit: Team Names and Confirmed Participants, vetoes removed]Editor's note: After a correction is made, it can take some time for it to show up on all platforms and devices. Google is aware of the issue and is working on it."
When people in the digital mapping world learned the plight of Pete and Maggie Stoner, stuck with hundreds of strangers showing up at their private ranch because of a bad Google Map, it took only a few hours and three "edits" to fix the problem. Then Google staff jumped in and made sure it stayed fixed.
I was like, 'Oh! Poor guy! - Alex Duffield, regional reviewer for Google Maps
The bad map had plagued Stoner since 2012 and complaints to Google Maps went nowhere.
When people in the crowd-sourced Google Maps world learned, they leapt to edit the map within hours of CBC's interview with the frustrated Red Rock rancher.
Here are the correct directions to Fort George Canyon Provincial Park after three edits fixed a four-year-old mistake. (Google Maps)
"My daughter emailed me and said 'Hey can you fix this?' and I said I might be able to," said Alex Duffield a Google Maps regional reviewer who works at incontrolsolutions in Kelowna B.C.
"I was like 'Oh! The poor guy!" said Duffield.
He made one edit, marking the Stoners' driveway private and then approved two other edits to fix the map.
"That seemed to get the job done," said Duffield.
Problem solved
The blue line on the Google Map to Fort George Canyon Provincial Park no longer takes strangers and tourists to a private ranch instead of the trailhead of the park, says Google.
"The correction is live," wrote Nicole Bell of Google.
There were a few glitches, with the map reverting back as new changes were added yesterday by people eager to help.
"I wanted to update you that the issue in Google Maps regarding access to the trailhead for Fort George Canyon Provincial Park that was routing through private property has been fixed." Bell wrote in an email today.
"Overall, this provides a very comprehensive and up-to-date map of Canada, but we recognize that there may be occasional inaccuracies that could arise... We encourage users to let us know when something is incorrect by using our "Report a Problem" tool, found at the bottom right corner of the map," she added.
Maggie Stoner said she was thrilled, and her husband would be ecstatic.
"It's wonderful!" she said.
Pete Stoner says hikers arrive at his house again and again, thinking it's how to get into the park only to be disappointed. (Andrew Kurjata/CBC)
The Stoners were tired of large groups showing up ready to hike, not realizing they had two hours ahead of them to backtrack to Prince George and find the trail head they were looking for.
"We had to put up a gate and do our utmost to keep it closed to try to discourage people to come down," said Maggie.
"I couldn't find a way to correct it, but I put comments in," she added.
Google Maps fixes
CBC got several calls and emails promising help after people heard the Stoners' story.
"I have some contacts in Google, whom I have pinged already," said Will Cadell, CEO of Sparkgeo in Prince George B.C.
The Google Maps community is crowd-sourced, drawing on local knowledge of people who go to the map and make suggested edits. Then an approved reviewer goes over those edits and verifies them and makes them so.
He said the Google community is very open and helpful, and anybody can pitch in. Google Maps is all based on local knowledge. For example anybody can go in and mark a business closed or a road change, which is later checked and approved if it's correct.
Travellers ended up misled by Google Maps if they headed down Highway 97 to try to get access to Fort George Canyon Provincial Park. (Google Maps)
"It's actually not that hard," said Duffield, who earned the right to approve edits in Map Maker after years of suggesting his own edits and earning a certain status for his work.
"I went in there and I was like that's the only way to get to that park, even from the other side of the river there isn't any way to really get into that park," he said. "It's an odd circumstance."
So a trail was added and marked in and that was enough to get directions and see a more sensible path to the trail head. After that was done, Google's algorithm was able to see the path and make it closer.
The Old map
They were going into our property and it didn't matter what I said. - Pete Stoner
Before the fix, the popular online mapping system directed visitors along Highway 97 south of Prince George B.C. to a trailhead for Fort George Canyon Provincial Park. The problem was they ended up on private property with a river and a cliff between them and their desired destination — even if they did cut through the Stoner's field and climb a rock wall.
Visitors who follow Google Maps directions to Fort George Canyon Provincial Park end up at this sign and have to turn back. (Andrew Kurjata/CBC)
"They would have a hundred foot rock wall, and if they kept going they'd be in the river," said Pete Stoner.
He ended up dealing with carloads of people lured by the promise of hiking trails along the Fraser River, where old sternwheeler boats used to run.
Instead, they were left staring at a no trespassing sign — and facing another two-hour journey, if they really wanted to get to the park.
The Stoners run a small sawmill and grow hay at this scenic Red Rock ranch where they would like to make it clear: There is no access to any trail head. (Andrew Kurjata/CBC)
With files from Andrew Kurjata
To hear the full story check out the audio labelled: Google Maps glitchSeen from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter, a line of cargo trucks crosses from the Mexican side of the border into the U.S. port of entry at Otay Mesa in November near San Diego. (Photo: John Moore Getty Images)
U.S. exports hit an all-time record in October, pushing down the U.S. trade deficit, the Commerce Department said Wednesday.
After falling three straight months, exports rose 1.7% to a record $192.7 billion. Higher shipments of industrial supplies, including oil, liquid natural gas and chemicals, partly drove the increase. Auto exports dipped.
Imports also jumped 0.5% to a 19-month high of $233.3 billion on sales to the U.S. of industrial supplies and consumer goods.
The trade gap fell 5.4% from September to $40.6 billion. A narrower trade deficit boosts U.S. economic growth as American manufacturers and services companies sell more products overseas and U.S. consumers buy relatively fewer foreign goods and services.
A healthy increase in U.S. exports over the past three months "is an encouraging sign for both U.S. manufacturing growth and the state of global demand," RDQ Economics said in a research note.
However, an upward revision to the September trade deficit prompted the research firm to cut its estimate of third-quarter economic growth to 3% from 3.2%. The government's second estimate of third-quarter growth is scheduled to be released Thursday. Its initial estimate was 2.8%.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1bgfbLyThe BJP’s massive victory in the UP elections has been followed by the RSS registering its highest growth ever. Within a fortnight of the March 11 result, the Sangh saw a flood of online applications seeking entry. Sangh records accessed by The Indian Express show it received 22,432 online applications between March 16 and March 31, a fortnightly record so far. Of these, 8,919 applications, or over a third, were from UP and 1,680 from Delhi. From April 1 to April 15, the Sangh received 9,205 online applications, of which 2,778 were from UP.
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“This is the highest growth we have ever achieved. This is just online. Add to this those who joined us through efforts of swayamsevaks at the shakha level and this growth is phenomenal,” said a senior RSS functionary. For the last three years, since Narendra Modi became PM, the Sangh has received around 7,000 applications a month. In the month since Adityanath’s appointment, said a Sangh leader, it has received 31,637 applications, over four times the surge recorded after Modi’s election. From January 1 to March 31, it has received 41,134 applications.
This year, the Sangh also registered a record growth in West Bengal, where it received 3,422 applications from January 1 to April 15. The RSS has divided West Bengal into two prants (states) — uttar (north) and dakshin (south). “We are growing fast in Bengal. Our central body passed a resolution on Bengal this year,” said the leader, underlining expansion plans in the state.
With the Sangh receiving a modest 28,424 applications in 2013, its first major push came after the 2014 Lok Sabha results, when it saw a sudden spike in applications, receiving 97,047 of them that year, followed by 81,620 in 2015 and 84,941 in 2016. This year, it has already got 50,339 applications until April 15.
“Our popularity is increasing across states — Kerala, the Northeast and Bengal. This confirms that people are accepting our ideology and work,” said a leader.
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At present, the RSS holds 57,233 shakhas across the country, besides smaller units of milans (14,650) and mandalis (7,790). In terms of shakhas, the Sangh had registered its highest growth in 2015-16. The year saw 5,527 new shakhas at 3,644 places across the country.NORTH Korea has broadcast images of the moment Jang Song-Thaek - the once-powerful uncle of young leader Kim Jong-un - was turned on.
NORTH Korea has broadcast images of the moment Jang Song-Thaek - the once-powerful uncle of young leader Kim Jong-un - was turned on.
Jang has been purged and some reports suggest he has been executed.
State TV on Monday showed photos of Jang being dragged out of his seat at a meeting by two officers - an extremely rare publication of humiliating images involving a senior official. It was not certain if the incident happened at Sunday's meeting. But the TV aired other photos from Sunday showing a stony-faced Kim sitting at the podium with other top officials.
North Korea has also edited Jang out of official images and propaganda documentaries.
The official news agency KCNA accused the man once seen as the power behind the throne of being a corrupt, drug-taking womaniser bent on building his own faction in the ruling party.
South Korean analysts predicted a sweeping purge would follow, leaving Kim as the undisputed centre of power.
Free North Korea Radio - a Seoul-based radio station run by North Korean defectors - claimed Jang has already been executed. Citing high-level sources in the North, it claims Jang and six other party and military cadres who were close to him had been executed on Thursday in the capital Pyongyang.
KCNA said Jang, once seen as his nephew's mentor, had been stripped of all his posts and of party membership for committing criminal acts and leading a "counter-revolutionary faction".
Analysts said Jang's main role had been to ensure a smooth transition after the inexperienced Kim Jong-un came to power following the death of his father Kim Jong-il in December 2011. But they said Jang had become increasingly resented by the leader, who is aged about 30.
"Jong-un has built a solid power base for the past two years, and he no longer needed a regent who appeared to be increasingly powerful and threatening," said Paik Hak-Soon, a researcher at the South's Sejong Institute think tank.
KCNA said the meeting on Sunday confirmed it had "eliminated Jang and purged his group, unable to remain an onlooker to its acts any longer".
The regime said it removed Jang and his associates for trying to build a faction within the party, and for appointing his followers to top positions to serve his own political ends.
The KCNA report said Jang "had improper relations with several women and was wined and dined at back parlours of deluxe restaurants", becoming "affected by the capitalist way of living".
Jang was also accused of hindering North Korea's state-run production of iron, fertilisers and vinalon - a homemade synthetic fibre - by selling off resources at cheap prices and "throwing the state financial management system into confusion".
Jang has fallen out of favour before. In 2004 he was understood to have undergone "re-education" as a steel mill labourer because of suspected corruption, but he made a comeback the following year. Jang expanded his influence rapidly after Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke in 2008, leaving his health impaired.
He was appointed vice chairman of the nation's top body, the National Defence Commission, in 2010.
His wife Kim Kyong-Hui, who is Kim Jong-il's sister, has also long been at the centre of power. She was promoted to four-star general at the same time as Kim Jong-un in 2010.
The pair were once viewed as the ultimate power couple in Pyongyang. But in the past year Kim Kyong-Hui has been less visible, with reports that she was seriously ill and had sought hospital treatment in Singapore.
"This time, Jang is gone for good. He'll never be allowed into politics again," said Paik from the Sejong Institute.
Seoul was "closely monitoring" the situation in the North, said unification ministry spokesman Kim Eui-Do.Police in Abbotsford, B.C., are trying a new tactic this holiday season to get chronic criminals to turn their lives around — Christmas cards featuring a Santa Claus dressed like a member of a SWAT team.
The Santa figure is wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet marked "Police," and wielding an automatic rifle.
The text on the front of the card reads, "Which list will you be on next year?"
In an effort dubbed Operation Resolution, officers will send out the greeting cards to prolific offenders in the hope they will have an epiphany, said Const. Ian Macdonald.
Some repeat offenders in the Abbotsford, B.C., area will be getting a card from police this Christmas. (Abbotsford Police Department)
"We're hoping that either through the helpline phone number contained in the card or just based on their own reflection that some of these individuals will make a different choice — for different behaviour come 2013," MacDonald said.
He said this is the first year the department is trying the jolly new approach.
He said several dozen people will be getting the cards in the mail.Lax U.S. rules and real estate industry’s no-questions-asked approach make it easy for dodgy characters to funnel wealth through high-end Manhattan apartments.
One day during Chen Shui-bian’s second term as Taiwan’s president, several people lugged what a witness described as “five or six” fruit boxes into the presidential residence in Taipei. Inside the crates, the witness later said, was 200 million in New Taiwan Dollars, equal to about $6 million in U.S. currency.
The cash was a bribe intended for first lady Wu Shu-jen, a sweetener encouraging her to prod her husband to provide regulatory relief to a securities firm involved in a contested merger, according to court claims by U.S. and Taiwanese authorities. Pulling strings in such situations, the witness said, required getting “consent from Madam.”
Documents in U.S. District Court in Manhattan describe the circuitous path that authorities believe the cash followed after it was unpacked from the fruit boxes: First it was stored in a bank vault in Taipei along with other piles of loose cash that the first lady described as political donations. Later much of the cash in the vault was stuffed into seven suitcases and stored in a basement at the home of an executive involved in the corporate merger. After a time it was moved, in a roundabout way, through banks in Hong Kong and the U.S. and into a Swiss account controlled by the first couple’s son.
In the spring of 2008, a chunk of that money was wired into an account in Miami. U.S. authorities claim that on May 29, 2008 — nine days after Chen had completed his second and final term as Taiwan’s president — money from the Miami account was used to buy a prime piece of a real estate in yet another destination in the money’s global odyssey.
The property: a $1.575 million apartment in Manhattan’s Onyx Chelsea, a glass and metal tower “steps away,” as real estate promoters say, from Chelsea Park and Madison Square Garden.
The movement of dirty money from fruit boxes in Taipei into America’s real estate capital illustrates, in vivid detail, one of New York’s dirty secrets: High-end New York real estate is an alluring destination for corrupt politicians, tax dodgers and money launderers around the globe.
New York is among an elite group of destinations — along with Miami, London, Dubai and a few other cities around the world — that attract large numbers of international property buyers. Manhattan condos are popular with wealthy Chinese, Russians and South Americans. Since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in pricey Manhattan developments have been to buyers who listed an international address or bought in the name of a limited liability company or some other corporate entity, a maneuver often employed by foreign purchasers.
Because many buyers go to great lengths to hide their interests in New York properties, it’s impossible to put a number on what proportion of buyers from overseas are laundering ill-gotten gains. Many act in an above-board manner and use tax loopholes that are legal in their home countries. But it’s clear that New York’s public officials and its real estate industry embrace the wealthy and powerful without much thought to where their money comes from.
During his time in office, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a cheerleader for encouraging the mega-wealthy to relocate to the city. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?” he told New York magazine in September.
Combine that give-us-your-rich ethos with state and local policies that lavish tax breaks on Manhattan’s wealthiest homeowners and federal policies that allow real estate agents to close their eyes to whether their clients are trafficking in illicit money, and the results are predictable: New York is a magnet for the super-rich homebuyers from other lands bearing money of sometimes dubious provenance. The flood of foreign capital pouring into New York properties makes it easy for suspect figures to hide their fortunes amid Manhattan’s residential gold rush, according to interviews with money laundering experts and court documents and secret offshore records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Jaikumar Ramaswamy, chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s anti-money-laundering section, says oligarchs and despots like to put their money into high-end real estate for a number of reasons: they need an escape option if things take a turn for them in their home countries, they want to park their assets in an investment that’s known to preserve value, and they want to be able to enjoy and flaunt their wealth. “They’re not buying real estate in Detroit,” he says. “They’re buying in places that give them some sort of status: London, Paris, New York, Malibu.”
Many walk a fine line between showing off and staying on the down low. Instead of putting property in their own names, they may arrange to put the names of their spouses, children, lawyers or other proxies on property deeds. Often, the buyer of record isn’t even a flesh-and-blood person — it’s an anonymous limited liability company set up in a U.S. state, or an offshore company established in the British Virgin Islands or some other overseas haven.
The offshore maze
The story of the Manhattan apartment purchased by Taiwan’s former first family illustrates how offshore structures are used to steer ill-gotten gains into real estate. Along with passing through a tangle of bank accounts, the bribe money’s origins and the identities of the people associated with it were obscured by the use of offshore entities, including a trust registered on the Island of Nevis and shell companies in the British Virgin Islands.
As a final step, a Miami-based wealth advisor, a German national named Stefan R. Seuss, set up a New York company, West 28th Street LLC, that stood in as the Chelsea condo’s owner of record. Any check of the LLC’s ownership would have traced back to one of the British Virgin Islands companies and hit a dead end.
A screenshot from the Onyx Chelsea promotional website
Financial crime experts have a name for the process of creating mazes of bank accounts and offshore companies to move and hide money: layering. When the layers are laid down skillfully, it’s often impossible for authorities to detect flows of illicit cash. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that as little as one-fifth of 1 percent of money that’s laundered around the world is identified and intercepted.
In the case of Taiwan’s former first couple, though, an amateurish blunder in the laundering process – having the corporate executive store the cash in his basement – may have helped unravel the scheme. The executive later provided evidence against the ex-president and first lady, who were eventually sentenced to lengthy prison terms on an array of corruption charges.
Court records indicate that Seuss, the wealth advisor, also betrayed the presidential family’s secrets — acknowledging that the first couple’s son and daughter-in-law had asked him to help them buy real estate in New York and Virginia but conceal their ownership of the properties. It appears Seuss provided this inside information to the government sometime after he was indicted in 200 |
� γ ) 2 sin ( β + γ ), {\displaystyle T={\frac {a^{2}}{2(\cot \beta +\cot \gamma )}}={\frac {a^{2}(\sin \beta )(\sin \gamma )}{2\sin(\beta +\gamma )}},}
and analogously if the known side is b or c.
Using Heron's formula
The shape of the triangle is determined by the lengths of the sides. Therefore, the area can also be derived from the lengths of the sides. By Heron's formula:
T = s ( s − a ) ( s − b ) ( s − c ) {\displaystyle T={\sqrt {s(s-a)(s-b)(s-c)}}}
where s = a + b + c 2 {\displaystyle s={\tfrac {a+b+c}{2}}} is the semiperimeter, or half of the triangle's perimeter.
Three other equivalent ways of writing Heron's formula are
T = 1 4 ( a 2 + b 2 + c 2 ) 2 − 2 ( a 4 + b 4 + c 4 ) {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{4}}{\sqrt {(a^{2}+b^{2}+c^{2})^{2}-2(a^{4}+b^{4}+c^{4})}}} T = 1 4 2 ( a 2 b 2 + a 2 c 2 + b 2 c 2 ) − ( a 4 + b 4 + c 4 ) {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{4}}{\sqrt {2(a^{2}b^{2}+a^{2}c^{2}+b^{2}c^{2})-(a^{4}+b^{4}+c^{4})}}} T = 1 4 ( a + b − c ) ( a − b + c ) ( − a + b + c ) ( a + b + c ). {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{4}}{\sqrt {(a+b-c)(a-b+c)(-a+b+c)(a+b+c)}}.}
Using vectors
The area of a parallelogram embedded in a three-dimensional Euclidean space can be calculated using vectors. Let vectors AB and AC point respectively from A to B and from A to C. The area of parallelogram ABDC is then
| A B × A C |, {\displaystyle |\mathbf {AB} \times \mathbf {AC} |,}
which is the magnitude of the cross product of vectors AB and AC. The area of triangle ABC is half of this,
1 2 | A B × A C |. {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{2}}|\mathbf {AB} \times \mathbf {AC} |.}
The area of triangle ABC can also be expressed in terms of dot products as follows:
1 2 ( A B ⋅ A B ) ( A C ⋅ A C ) − ( A B ⋅ A C ) 2 = 1 2 | A B | 2 | A C | 2 − ( A B ⋅ A C ) 2. {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{2}}{\sqrt {(\mathbf {AB} \cdot \mathbf {AB} )(\mathbf {AC} \cdot \mathbf {AC} )-(\mathbf {AB} \cdot \mathbf {AC} )^{2}}}={\frac {1}{2}}{\sqrt {|\mathbf {AB} |^{2}|\mathbf {AC} |^{2}-(\mathbf {AB} \cdot \mathbf {AC} )^{2}}}.\,}
In two-dimensional Euclidean space, expressing vector AB as a free vector in Cartesian space equal to (x 1,y 1 ) and AC as (x 2,y 2 ), this can be rewritten as:
1 2 | x 1 y 2 − x 2 y 1 |. {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{2}}\,|x_{1}y_{2}-x_{2}y_{1}|.\,}
Using coordinates
If vertex A is located at the origin (0, 0) of a Cartesian coordinate system and the coordinates of the other two vertices are given by B = (x B, y B ) and C = (x C, y C ), then the area can be computed as 1⁄ 2 times the absolute value of the determinant
T = 1 2 | det ( x B x C y B y C ) | = 1 2 | x B y C − x C y B |. {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{2}}\left|\det {\begin{pmatrix}x_{B}&x_{C}\\y_{B}&y_{C}\end{pmatrix}}\right|={\frac {1}{2}}|x_{B}y_{C}-x_{C}y_{B}|.}
For three general vertices, the equation is:
T = 1 2 | det ( x A x B x C y A y B y C 1 1 1 ) | = 1 2 | x A y B − x A y C + x B y C − x B y A + x C y A − x C y B |, {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{2}}\left|\det {\begin{pmatrix}x_{A}&x_{B}&x_{C}\\y_{A}&y_{B}&y_{C}\\1&1&1\end{pmatrix}}\right|={\frac {1}{2}}{\big |}x_{A}y_{B}-x_{A}y_{C}+x_{B}y_{C}-x_{B}y_{A}+x_{C}y_{A}-x_{C}y_{B}{\big |},}
which can be written as
T = 1 2 | ( x A − x C ) ( y B − y A ) − ( x A − x B ) ( y C − y A ) |. {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{2}}{\big |}(x_{A}-x_{C})(y_{B}-y_{A})-(x_{A}-x_{B})(y_{C}-y_{A}){\big |}.}
If the points are labeled sequentially in the counterclockwise direction, the above determinant expressions are positive and the absolute value signs can be omitted.[13] The above formula is known as the shoelace formula or the surveyor's formula.
If we locate the vertices in the complex plane and denote them in counterclockwise sequence as a = x A + y A i, b = x B + y B i, and c = x C + y C i, and denote their complex conjugates as a ¯ {\displaystyle {\bar {a}}}, b ¯ {\displaystyle {\bar {b}}}, and c ¯ {\displaystyle {\bar {c}}}, then the formula
T = i 4 | a a ¯ 1 b b ¯ 1 c c ¯ 1 | {\displaystyle T={\frac {i}{4}}{\begin{vmatrix}a&{\bar {a}}&1\\b&{\bar {b}}&1\\c&{\bar {c}}&1\end{vmatrix}}}
is equivalent to the shoelace formula.
In three dimensions, the area of a general triangle A = (x A, y A, z A ), B = (x B, y B, z B ) and C = (x C, y C, z C ) is the Pythagorean sum of the areas of the respective projections on the three principal planes (i.e. x = 0, y = 0 and z = 0):
T = 1 2 | x A x B x C y A y B y C 1 1 1 | 2 + | y A y B y C z A z B z C 1 1 1 | 2 + | z A z B z C x A x B x C 1 1 1 | 2. {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{2}}{\sqrt {{\begin{vmatrix}x_{A}&x_{B}&x_{C}\\y_{A}&y_{B}&y_{C}\\1&1&1\end{vmatrix}}^{2}+{\begin{vmatrix}y_{A}&y_{B}&y_{C}\\z_{A}&z_{B}&z_{C}\\1&1&1\end{vmatrix}}^{2}+{\begin{vmatrix}z_{A}&z_{B}&z_{C}\\x_{A}&x_{B}&x_{C}\\1&1&1\end{vmatrix}}^{2}}}.}
Using line integrals
The area within any closed curve, such as a triangle, is given by the line integral around the curve of the algebraic or signed distance of a point on the curve from an arbitrary oriented straight line L. Points to the right of L as oriented are taken to be at negative distance from L, while the weight for the integral is taken to be the component of arc length parallel to L rather than arc length itself.
This method is well suited to computation of the area of an arbitrary polygon. Taking L to be the x-axis, the line integral between consecutive vertices (x i,y i ) and (x i+1,y i+1 ) is given by the base times the mean height, namely (x i+1 − x i )(y i + y i+1 )/2. The sign of the area is an overall indicator of the direction of traversal, with negative area indicating counterclockwise traversal. The area of a triangle then falls out as the case of a polygon with three sides.
While the line integral method has in common with other coordinate-based methods the arbitrary choice of a coordinate system, unlike the others it makes no arbitrary choice of vertex of the triangle as origin or of side as base. Furthermore, the choice of coordinate system defined by L commits to only two degrees of freedom rather than the usual three, since the weight is a local distance (e.g. x i+1 − x i in the above) whence the method does not require choosing an axis normal to L.
When working in polar coordinates it is not necessary to convert to Cartesian coordinates to use line integration, since the line integral between consecutive vertices (r i,θ i ) and (r i+1,θ i+1 ) of a polygon is given directly by r i r i+1 sin(θ i+1 − θ i )/2. This is valid for all values of θ, with some decrease in numerical accuracy when |θ| is many orders of magnitude greater than π. With this formulation negative area indicates clockwise traversal, which should be kept in mind when mixing polar and cartesian coordinates. Just as the choice of y-axis (x = 0) is immaterial for line integration in cartesian coordinates, so is the choice of zero heading (θ = 0) immaterial here.
Formulas resembling Heron's formula
Three formulas have the same structure as Heron's formula but are expressed in terms of different variables. First, denoting the medians from sides a, b, and c respectively as m a, m b, and m c and their semi-sum (m a + m b + m c )/2 as σ, we have[14]
T = 4 3 σ ( σ − m a ) ( σ − m b ) ( σ − m c ). {\displaystyle T={\frac {4}{3}}{\sqrt {\sigma (\sigma -m_{a})(\sigma -m_{b})(\sigma -m_{c})}}.}
Next, denoting the altitudes from sides a, b, and c respectively as h a, h b, and h c, and denoting the semi-sum of the reciprocals of the altitudes as H = ( h a − 1 + h b − 1 + h c − 1 ) / 2 {\displaystyle H=(h_{a}^{-1}+h_{b}^{-1}+h_{c}^{-1})/2} we have[15]
T − 1 = 4 H ( H − h a − 1 ) ( H − h b − 1 ) ( H − h c − 1 ). {\displaystyle T^{-1}=4{\sqrt {H(H-h_{a}^{-1})(H-h_{b}^{-1})(H-h_{c}^{-1})}}.}
And denoting the semi-sum of the angles' sines as S = [(sin α) + (sin β) + (sin γ)]/2, we have[16]
T = D 2 S ( S − sin α ) ( S − sin β ) ( S − sin γ ) {\displaystyle T=D^{2}{\sqrt {S(S-\sin \alpha )(S-\sin \beta )(S-\sin \gamma )}}}
where D is the diameter of the circumcircle: D = a sin α = b sin β = c sin γ. {\displaystyle D={\tfrac {a}{\sin \alpha }}={\tfrac {b}{\sin \beta }}={\tfrac {c}{\sin \gamma }}.}
Using Pick's theorem
See Pick's theorem for a technique for finding the area of any arbitrary lattice polygon (one drawn on a grid with vertically and horizontally adjacent lattice points at equal distances, and with vertices on lattice points).
The theorem states:
T = I + 1 2 B − 1 {\displaystyle T=I+{\frac {1}{2}}B-1}
where I {\displaystyle I} is the number of internal lattice points and B is the number of lattice points lying on the border of the polygon.
Other area formulas
Numerous other area formulas exist, such as
T = r ⋅ s, {\displaystyle T=r\cdot s,}
where r is the inradius, and s is the semiperimeter (in fact, this formula holds for all tangential polygons), and[17]:Lemma 2
T = r a ( s − a ) = r b ( s − b ) = r c ( s − c ) {\displaystyle T=r_{a}(s-a)=r_{b}(s-b)=r_{c}(s-c)}
where r a, r b, r c {\displaystyle r_{a},\,r_{b},\,r_{c}} are the radii of the excircles tangent to sides a, b, c respectively.
We also have
T = 1 2 D 2 ( sin α ) ( sin β ) ( sin γ ) {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{2}}D^{2}(\sin \alpha )(\sin \beta )(\sin \gamma )}
and[18]
T = a b c 2 D = a b c 4 R {\displaystyle T={\frac {abc}{2D}}={\frac {abc}{4R}}}
for circumdiameter D; and[19]
T = tan α 4 ( b 2 + c 2 − a 2 ) {\displaystyle T={\frac {\tan \alpha }{4}}(b^{2}+c^{2}-a^{2})}
for angle α ≠ 90°.
The area can also be expressed as[20]
T = r r a r b r c. {\displaystyle T={\sqrt {rr_{a}r_{b}r_{c}}}.}
In 1885, Baker[21] gave a collection of over a hundred distinct area formulas for the triangle. These include:
T = 1 2 [ a b c h a h b h c ] 1 / 3, {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{2}}[abch_{a}h_{b}h_{c}]^{1/3},} T = 1 2 a b h a h b, {\displaystyle T={\frac {1}{2}}{\sqrt {abh_{a}h_{b}}},} T = a + b 2 ( h a − 1 + h b − 1 ), {\displaystyle T={\frac {a+b}{2(h_{a}^{-1}+h_{b}^{-1})}},} T = R h b h c a {\displaystyle T={\frac {Rh_{b}h_{c}}{a}}}
for circumradius (radius of the circumcircle) R, and
T = h a h b 2 sin γ. {\displaystyle T={\frac {h_{a}h_{b}}{2\sin \gamma }}.}
Upper bound on the area
The area T of any triangle with perimeter p satisfies
T ≤ p 2 12 3, {\displaystyle T\leq {\tfrac {p^{2}}{12{\sqrt {3}}}},}
with equality holding if and only if the triangle is equilateral.[22][23]:657
Other upper bounds on the area T are given by[24]:p.290
4 3 T ≤ a 2 + b 2 + c 2 {\displaystyle 4{\sqrt {3}}T\leq a^{2}+b^{2}+c^{2}}
and
4 3 T ≤ 9 a b c a + b + c, {\displaystyle 4{\sqrt {3}}T\leq {\frac {9abc}{a+b+c}},}
both again holding if and only if the triangle is equilateral.
Bisecting the area
There are infinitely many lines that bisect the area of a triangle.[25] Three of them are the medians, which are the only area bisectors that go through the centroid. Three other area bisectors are parallel to the triangle's sides.
Any line through a triangle that splits both the triangle's area and its perimeter in half goes through the triangle's incenter. There can be one, two, or three of these for any given triangle.
Further formulas for general Euclidean triangles
The formulas in this section are true for all Euclidean triangles.
Medians, angle bisectors, perpendicular side bisectors, and altitudes
The medians and the sides are related by[26]:p.70
3 4 ( a 2 + b 2 + c 2 ) = m a 2 + m b 2 + m c 2 {\displaystyle {\frac {3}{4}}(a^{2}+b^{2}+c^{2})=m_{a}^{2}+m_{b}^{2}+m_{c}^{2}}
and
m a = 1 2 2 b 2 + 2 c 2 − a 2 = 1 2 ( a 2 + b 2 + c 2 ) − 3 4 a 2 {\displaystyle m_{a}={\frac {1}{2}}{\sqrt {2b^{2}+2c^{2}-a^{2}}}={\sqrt {{\frac {1}{2}}(a^{2}+b^{2}+c^{2})-{\frac {3}{4}}a^{2}}}}
and equivalently for m b and m c.
For angle A opposite side a, the length of the internal angle bisector is given by[27]
w A = 2 b c s ( s − a ) b + c = b c [ 1 − a 2 ( b + c ) 2 ] = 2 b c b + c cos A 2, {\displaystyle w_{A}={\frac {2{\sqrt {bcs(s-a)}}}{b+c}}={\sqrt {bc\left[1-{\frac {a^{2}}{(b+c)^{2}}}\right]}}={\frac {2bc}{b+c}}\cos {\frac {A}{2}},}
for semiperimeter s, where the bisector length is measured from the vertex to where it meets the opposite side.
The interior perpendicular bisectors are given by
p a = 2 a T a 2 + b 2 − c 2, {\displaystyle p_{a}={\frac {2aT}{a^{2}+b^{2}-c^{2}}},} p b = 2 b T a 2 + b 2 − c 2, {\displaystyle p_{b}={\frac {2bT}{a^{2}+b^{2}-c^{2}}},} p c = 2 c T a 2 − b 2 + c 2, {\displaystyle p_{c}={\frac {2cT}{a^{2}-b^{2}+c^{2}}},}
where the sides are a ≥ b ≥ c {\displaystyle a\geq b\geq c} and the area is T. {\displaystyle T.} [28]:Thm 2
The altitude from, for example, the side of length a is
h a = 2 T a. {\displaystyle h_{a}={\frac {2T}{a}}.}
Circumradius and inradius
The following formulas involve the circumradius R and the inradius r:
R = a 2 b 2 c 2 ( a + b + c ) ( − a + b + c ) ( a − b + c ) ( a + b − c ) ; {\displaystyle R={\sqrt {\frac {a^{2}b^{2}c^{2}}{(a+b+c)(-a+b+c)(a-b+c)(a+b-c)}}};} r = ( − a + b + c ) ( a − b + c ) ( a + b − c ) 4 ( a + b + c ) ; {\displaystyle r={\sqrt {\frac {(-a+b+c)(a-b+c)(a+b-c)}{4(a+b+c)}}};} 1 r = 1 h a + 1 h b + 1 h c {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{r}}={\frac {1}{h_{a}}}+{\frac {1}{h_{b}}}+{\frac {1}{h_{c}}}}
where h a etc. are the altitudes to the subscripted sides;[26]:p.79
r R = 4 T 2 s a b c = cos α + cos β + cos γ − 1 ; {\displaystyle {\frac {r}{R}}={\frac {4T^{2}}{sabc}}=\cos \alpha +\cos \beta +\cos \gamma -1;} [7]
and
2 R r = a b c a + b + c {\displaystyle 2Rr={\frac {abc}{a+b+c}}}
The product of two sides of a triangle equals the altitude to the third side times the diameter D of the circumcircle:[26]:p.64
a b = h c D, b c = h a D, c a = h b D. {\displaystyle ab=h_{c}D,\quad \quad bc=h_{a}D,\quad ca=h_{b}D.}
Adjacent triangles
Suppose two adjacent but non-overlapping triangles share the same side of length f and share the same circumcircle, so that the side of length f is a chord of the circumcircle and the triangles have side lengths (a, b, f) and (c, d, f), with the two triangles together forming a cyclic quadrilateral with side lengths in sequence (a, b, c, d). Then[29]:84
f 2 = ( a c + b d ) ( a d + b c ) ( a b + c d ). {\displaystyle f^{2}={\frac {(ac+bd)(ad+bc)}{(ab+cd)}}.\,}
Centroid
Let G be the centroid of a triangle with vertices A, B, and C, and let P be any interior point. Then the distances between the points are related by[29]:174
( P A ) 2 + ( P B ) 2 + ( P C ) 2 = ( G A ) 2 + ( G B ) 2 + ( G C ) 2 + 3 ( P G ) 2. {\displaystyle (PA)^{2}+(PB)^{2}+(PC)^{2}=(GA)^{2}+(GB)^{2}+(GC)^{2}+3(PG)^{2}.\,}
The sum of the squares of the triangle's sides equals three times the sum of the squared distances of the centroid from the vertices:
A B 2 + B C 2 + C A 2 = 3 ( G A 2 + G B 2 + G C 2 ). {\displaystyle AB^{2}+BC^{2}+CA^{2}=3(GA^{2}+GB^{2}+GC^{2}).} [30]
Let q a, q b, and q c be the distances from the centroid to the sides of lengths a, b, and c. Then[29]:173
q a q b = b a, q b q c = c b, q a q c = c a {\displaystyle {\frac {q_{a}}{q_{b}}}={\frac {b}{a}},\quad \quad {\frac {q_{b}}{q_{c}}}={\frac {c}{b}},\quad \quad {\frac {q_{a}}{q_{c}}}={\frac {c}{a}}\,}
and
q a ⋅ a = q b ⋅ b = q c ⋅ c = 2 3 T {\displaystyle q_{a}\cdot a=q_{b}\cdot b=q_{c}\cdot c={\frac {2}{3}}T\,}
for area T.
Circumcenter, incenter, and orthocenter
Carnot's Theorem states that the sum of the distances from the circumcenter to the three sides equals the sum of the circumradius and the inradius.[26]:p.83 Here a segment's length is considered to be negative if and only if the segment lies entirely outside the triangle. This method is especially useful for deducing the properties of more abstract forms of triangles, such as the ones induced by Lie algebras, that otherwise have the same properties as usual triangles.
Euler's theorem states that the distance d between the circumcenter and the incenter is given by[26]:p.85
d 2 = R ( R − 2 r ) {\displaystyle \displaystyle d^{2}=R(R-2r)}
or equivalently
1 R − d + 1 R + d = 1 r, {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{R-d}}+{\frac {1}{R+d}}={\frac {1}{r}},}
where R is the circumradius and r is the inradius. Thus for all triangles R ≥ 2r, with equality holding for equilateral triangles.
If we denote that the orthocenter divides one altitude into segments of lengths u and v, another altitude into segment lengths w and x, and the third altitude into segment lengths y and z, then uv = wx = yz.[26]:p.94
The distance from a side to the circumcenter equals half the distance from the opposite vertex to the orthocenter.[26]:p.99
The sum of the squares of the distances from the vertices to the orthocenter H plus the sum of the squares of the sides equals twelve times the square of the circumradius:[26]:p.102
A H 2 + B H 2 + C H 2 + a 2 + b 2 + c 2 = 12 R 2. {\displaystyle AH^{2}+BH^{2}+CH^{2}+a^{2}+b^{2}+c^{2}=12R^{2}.}
Angles
In addition to the law of sines, the law of cosines, the law of tangents, and the trigonometric existence conditions given earlier, for any triangle
a = b cos C + c cos B, b = c cos A + a cos C, c = a cos B + b cos A. {\displaystyle a=b\cos C+c\cos B,\quad b=c\cos A+a\cos C,\quad c=a\cos B+b\cos A.}
Morley's trisector theorem
The Morley triangle, resulting from the trisection of each interior angle. This is an example of a finite subdivision rule
Morley's trisector theorem states that in any triangle, the three points of intersection of the adjacent angle trisectors form an equilateral triangle, called the Morley triangle.
Figures inscribed in a triangle
Conics
As discussed above, every triangle has a unique inscribed circle (incircle) that is interior to the triangle and tangent to all three sides.
Every triangle has a unique Steiner inellipse which is interior to the triangle and tangent at the midpoints of the sides. Marden's theorem shows how to find the foci of this ellipse.[31] This ellipse has the greatest area of any ellipse tangent to all three sides of the triangle.
The Mandart inellipse of a triangle is the ellipse inscribed within the triangle tangent to its sides at the contact points of its excircles.
For any ellipse inscribed in a triangle ABC, let the foci be P and Q. Then[32]
P A ¯ ⋅ Q A ¯ C A ¯ ⋅ A B ¯ + P B ¯ ⋅ Q B ¯ A B ¯ ⋅ B C ¯ + P C ¯ ⋅ Q C ¯ B C ¯ ⋅ C A ¯ = 1. {\displaystyle {\frac {{\overline {PA}}\cdot {\overline {QA}}}{{\overline {CA}}\cdot {\overline {AB}}}}+{\frac {{\overline {PB}}\cdot {\overline {QB}}}{{\overline {AB}}\cdot {\overline {BC}}}}+{\frac {{\overline {PC}}\cdot {\overline {QC}}}{{\overline {BC}}\cdot {\overline {CA}}}}=1.}
Convex polygon
Every convex polygon with area T can be inscribed in a triangle of area at most equal to 2T. Equality holds (exclusively) for a parallelogram.[33]
Hexagon
The Lemoine hexagon is a cyclic hexagon with vertices given by the six intersections of the sides of a triangle with the three lines that are parallel to the sides and that pass through its symmedian point. In either its simple form or its self-intersecting form, the Lemoine hexagon is interior to the triangle with two vertices on each side of the triangle.
Squares
Every acute triangle has three inscribed squares (squares in its interior such that all four of a square's vertices lie on a side of the triangle, so two of them lie on the same side and hence one side of the square coincides with part of a side of the triangle). In a right triangle two of the squares coincide and have a vertex at the triangle's right angle, so a right triangle has only two distinct inscribed squares. An obtuse triangle has only one inscribed square, with a side coinciding with part of the triangle's longest side. Within a given triangle, a longer common side is associated with a smaller inscribed square. If an inscribed square has side of length q a and the triangle has a side of length a, part of which side coincides with a side of the square, then q a, a, the altitude h a from the side a, and the triangle's area T are related according to[34][35]
q a = 2 T a a 2 + 2 T = a h a a + h a. {\displaystyle q_{a}={\frac {2Ta}{a^{2}+2T}}={\frac {ah_{a}}{a+h_{a}}}.}
The largest possible ratio of the area of the inscribed square to the area of the triangle is 1/2, which occurs when a2 = 2T, q = a/2, and the altitude of the triangle from the base of length a is equal to a. The smallest possible ratio of the side of one inscribed square to the side of another in the same non-obtuse triangle is 2 2 / 3 = 0.94.... {\displaystyle 2{\sqrt {2}}/3=0.94....} [35] Both of these extreme cases occur for the isosceles right triangle.
Triangles
From an interior point in a reference triangle, the nearest points on the three sides serve as the vertices of the pedal triangle of that point. If the interior point is the circumcenter of the reference triangle, the vertices of the pedal triangle are the midpoints of the reference triangle's sides, and so the pedal triangle is called the midpoint triangle or medial triangle. The midpoint triangle subdivides the reference triangle into four congruent triangles which are similar to the reference triangle.
The Gergonne triangle or intouch triangle of a reference triangle has its vertices at the three points of tangency of the reference triangle's sides with its incircle. The extouch triangle of a reference triangle has its vertices at the points of tangency of the reference triangle's excircles with its sides (not extended).
Figures circumscribed about a triangle
The tangential triangle of a reference triangle (other than a right triangle) is the triangle whose sides are on the tangent lines to the reference triangle's circumcircle at its vertices.
As mentioned above, every triangle has a unique circumcircle, a circle passing through all three vertices, whose center is the intersection of the perpendicular bisectors of the triangle's sides.
Further, every triangle has a unique Steiner circumellipse, which passes through the triangle's vertices and has its center at the triangle's centroid. Of all ellipses going through the triangle's vertices, it has the smallest area.
The Kiepert hyperbola is the unique conic which passes through the triangle's three vertices, its centroid, and its circumcenter.
Of all triangles contained in a given convex polygon, there exists a triangle with maximal area whose vertices are all vertices of the given polygon.[36]
Specifying the location of a point in a triangle
One way to identify locations of points in (or outside) a triangle is to place the triangle in an arbitrary location and orientation in the Cartesian plane, and to use Cartesian coordinates. While convenient for many purposes, this approach has the disadvantage of all points' coordinate values being dependent on the arbitrary placement in the plane.
Two systems avoid that feature, so that the coordinates of a point are not affected by moving the triangle, rotating it, or reflecting it as in a mirror, any of which give a congruent triangle, or even by rescaling it to give a similar triangle:
Trilinear coordinates specify the relative distances of a point from the sides, so that coordinates x : y : z {\displaystyle x:y:z} x : y {\displaystyle x:y}
Barycentric coordinates of the form α : β : γ {\displaystyle \alpha :\beta :\gamma }
Non-planar triangles
A non-planar triangle is a triangle which is not contained in a (flat) plane. Some examples of non-planar triangles in non-Euclidean geometries are spherical triangles in spherical geometry and hyperbolic triangles in hyperbolic geometry.
While the measures of the internal angles in planar triangles always sum to 180°, a hyperbolic triangle has measures of angles that sum to less than 180°, and a spherical triangle has measures of angles that sum to more than 180°. A hyperbolic triangle can be obtained by drawing on a negatively curved surface, such as a saddle surface, and a spherical triangle can be obtained by drawing on a positively curved surface such as a sphere. Thus, if one draws a giant triangle on the surface of the Earth, one will find that the sum of the measures of its angles is greater than 180°; in fact it will be between 180° and 540°.[37] In particular it is possible to draw a triangle on a sphere such that the measure of each of its internal angles is equal to 90°, adding up to a total of 270°.
Specifically, on a sphere the sum of the angles of a triangle is
180° × (1 + 4f),
where f is the fraction of the sphere's area which is enclosed by the triangle. For example, suppose that we draw a triangle on the Earth's surface with vertices at the North Pole, at a point on the equator at 0° longitude, and a point on the equator at 90° West longitude. The great circle line between the latter two points is the equator, and the great circle line between either of those points and the North Pole is a line of longitude; so there are right angles at the two points on the equator. Moreover, the angle at the North Pole is also 90° because the other two vertices differ by 90° of longitude. So the sum of the angles in this triangle is 90° + 90° + 90° = 270°. The triangle encloses 1/4 of the northern hemisphere (90°/360° as viewed from the North Pole) and therefore 1/8 of the Earth's surface, so in the formula f = 1/8; thus the formula correctly gives the sum of the triangle's angles as 270°.
From the above angle sum formula we can also see that the Earth's surface is locally flat: If we draw an arbitrarily small triangle in the neighborhood of one point on the Earth's surface, the fraction f of the Earth's surface which is enclosed by the triangle will be arbitrarily close to zero. In this case the angle sum formula simplifies to 180°, which we know is what Euclidean geometry tells us for triangles on a flat surface.
Triangles in |
cdc8ab194f204aaee5de9b4cd741ae4e3d6673cf960408c2ba723af02022ee SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-dvd1.iso) = 61d501f67217705c1875af05b2b59bb594993e6c37209cd53b78ed8aee91443b SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-dvd1.iso.xz) = a531f8fdd6b669abe2d1e809a60eabe2d4250354e431879552827c6546e746c5 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-memstick.img) = 01bd77bea01088e025a7021c0f103625af07c70489c63e49e0ad76e8a0e0e3d8 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-memstick.img.xz) = c89651f5fdf03654269850007b9bec518c36ec0c5d2c59f901b8a9e16e175179 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-mini-memstick.img) = cea3405ed4adcdaf49a48f407415b898d88c6c46bd26fb2c461ad2090876f353 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-mini-memstick.img.xz) = 7715bc142f13a1e3e98212f60005e55bb488c3add53d3af1c98a8207a1e4863a
powerpc64:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-bootonly.iso) = b42084942b270a6ff83d3581a54f2e773250647954abf8e01f871704fa5e798f81fa69ef5fe657402274b18e5abb508b560e16bbc77e71fcdc51d439de94df18 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-bootonly.iso.xz) = 3b4fbce3ed6544b9c8cf691f57b03104881424a59eb614ebe187df68bf6ab4b5bfa20becb1d82c91cc1aabb36af5bac02b64b7ca99d58778ea5b0a0cb571b0aa SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-disc1.iso) = 6a83956f2fcb4e304939ad5d8720e77929a503b44bf9b14268c9d569b4962422cf5f5480b7fc3c164164adf85219cb5f2b2c23dc8f33ec433c49626f17c6fb01 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-disc1.iso.xz) = 282588b1b12e3bc086297c5ee2642939eb1ea2bd82f030def0f596925905744b27414d9f7d95c34946dbb557fb8e3d6eec9c840ae43f0d2305e0718ce70ef62f SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-dvd1.iso) = 8b22c024391e07683bf9694481f36c6a3307615f913ac76d80307815f62f95e761d084b5acd8d35f91bdb751ba3530450893d62a0ce7f694c0d651247cc7f623 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-dvd1.iso.xz) = 702cf923cd4bf1b5915b0ed8db831ec5827ed85f18270ed36cb063ae1c63abe6a0603f79b4a06c95376d8d8fc8a88772ce11c65e1935cf736bf0f54926bd8d48 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-memstick.img) = 99dc11dc1559921a25cf3845254f0824eede6adf923f0c96bf996c0c49a66d0638d9d88e4d7f6e1ee22b69e78db78c544ae485fc5bb605534984bce7bd96a0dd SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-memstick.img.xz) = 62eefcfdf8590e0df940c1e16bdd809f2297d92869a5280f30806a3a8f15d1bdde322b5bd33313f9a27ae764a144c85cc23d48c42dcb8aa4bd60cccdcbde3b17 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-mini-memstick.img) = 68a95ad190b58c8a02d2b327f713812e845df2d6b5af1486e4cd3c59ea50f3cac91ceca16f1bc11fec2f8b22e2dabb839179d3750b14e52f2b5416afa981460b SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-mini-memstick.img.xz) = a164608cd9bb8e9de01ac7533e19774d5fc2f0ccf544f1ca6223242124f2b23a7dc98efe2abe344f1df7ec7570edb29f6082df12848efc12fcbc3b2d9ee1dd7c
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-bootonly.iso) = e5686a66f2cd2ac11d71e5aa191fc5c2eb84c52fc22f3f1d1874e41dcc8f9634 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-bootonly.iso.xz) = 4cb9a5a1f19d1df89e48c5fa8dbc2f728b68c2ee843d387a055654ec43214e00 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-disc1.iso) = 9d9d547a5836e6a80d512e7be232795f7e784057903a787bab22cccf3808ccb1 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-disc1.iso.xz) = 069847372258993b087acb5e83ebfe89501eb7a61d68dd0d6b7204cd1ae26f54 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-dvd1.iso) = d2c5562f69827e0874d9516121cdc984ef511a435a594f9eaecdef55966b266c SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-dvd1.iso.xz) = 40bcedef1dd952d411b5d59a052789a6b34507f031fdda2e1bd11d04ed62db7d SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-memstick.img) = 2467a40de6102a539420e6bbf4be470be650cd8dd1956585b26a306977688f67 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-memstick.img.xz) = 334ee611b07b51835a7245479bda0c9d98dee6fb5ee5063ac4869480d52ac49e SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-mini-memstick.img) = d3b531e2e2be9d6a782344f8fdc176007ef27a265ac458e986987c6612f784ac SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-mini-memstick.img.xz) = 8ffb19bd1303fa9adfa2b0eaa64fe1eb3405b836dd9d7106cfa8896dc4a1c83a
sparc64:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = de59c9614c2a432e4c820df905a7446bf57f4390b56679d71d3e53080bc794c430e79a3ec2f22abe9e5cb215efea971d5a4a1ca19cec1b3ad0420f83b831bf8c SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-bootonly.iso.xz) = ea9d49c5437d6bb37d886f39017b373bd902cb69b93873520b20c8955b6b7e6cc3076d41d615baa142208da0e44953669467820804e98736a66e8302127bdf0f SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-disc1.iso) = a37960372a1ffde8f7822d0b86224079e7798943b6b4421debed3ee1d0e7f70f878b2d06ffaecf714cb8600cc747863c927a799b4efd3946801edfe7eff279d8 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-disc1.iso.xz) = 03a3e62ae16ef82604d0685b1dfdbdbb55305ff79ef321654802d5a3bb224a844a9df16f69bdde56eab93194cf92824216d1fde94cd4c52d6e9b15777fec9b27 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-dvd1.iso) = 9083db8e16155cb5599a613b63bf2507fd0625028a94689b0d13dd09645dc5f7f182c609ec3c5a9d2bc9a04831f11aabcd5b1dba1bc3b94ad3c6135b3885ffa9 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-dvd1.iso.xz) = 0bd8318a710f2df1f8321dc5516c6a1259911c5317880114adfdc9358ca54953eba80b1f4a1f75b445d654f93115300079cff004050d21f2201d3b717f375c1f
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = e76165d20f2215c05f63201d88289cc91d5af654a2b1ad940f9f634e56d9992c SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-bootonly.iso.xz) = 793a0b4b5c0a759a647964a48479b24baf31e2a88330042474cb479cb46a3780 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-disc1.iso) = 8d8fdb03ef10405ea222addf35d5273a4a1c034b563193c183a55dbf14fa15c8 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-disc1.iso.xz) = 9599ca5b7c002eac5b0849a044c893bc161d9d7f681eae415e49ec3520485775 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-dvd1.iso) = 3f1af43e4159963257b8fc83a97ca421fbc4ffc8641e31dfe25d832a06a7c7e6 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-sparc64-dvd1.iso.xz) = a97263c62e98c77c2e96af44b45da536817e56b97d89a2fda702b992fe33794a
aarch64:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-memstick.img) = 8643121512cd0c559042f9a80a239a44eda5a5817755203d54ed963b06e1afc20a623a82c62cb5fdccee42aa6fe79a33dff765f44deaaeef1b368aecbb76c859 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-memstick.img.xz) = efb22179e89482eb7bf1cf7a9e53ea882c47ef599f45b7b5fbb153d99667de1b5fef2da109559e9224db06d9913c456d29ccc8f14c51eeafb9a3bc2c9b1623ca SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-mini-memstick.img) = 5eb5d3e2e5586524bdc1a54f8234da854aeb870ca52f99d645cff98f72f894b4a6252a04eb8430cfe03e03ecff2f478f8cd43bca91e95204e569300fe70286d3 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-mini-memstick.img.xz) = 6b157359aee8537320a3b0fc68b7a4a5cc80c29821f8252b7fab2ecdfe5b4a78e37d39bba7aae9e79e0be14e1c76168cb05c800ded6d1a9560d7c04cc8cdcac3
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-memstick.img) = c8f60b7376b8ba48379d658da3cfce07552461ff11b92717f8b6e652591e8684 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-memstick.img.xz) = 883d4523c1b035f268587f1b7613dd6e616e6f48d4a5beff7e87e526a4a6fbb2 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-mini-memstick.img) = 61d2a29631b5ed4661a93dc2fb377eeab5651bf893ba468c6e0c211c99baa3f8 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-mini-memstick.img.xz) = 2ffe85b6ba20ede3736204fc6959d87925c4b31f42f15684ba8766b6481493f0
armv6 BANANAPI:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-BANANAPI.img.xz) = e61c8c7bd4ba16590d3afc1805a2a08bff86c12f5561eaf1be0236bc510d6ee3315a94d3cedf7034182fb9b88d5beaae764cb94f20bcbf5ebaf56b9ed9a0a3e7
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-BANANAPI.img.xz) = d85540e9f6af6d5bd12b2c1f95b67cba1997cbf5e27ee4b520ff99ef8489bd86
armv6 BEAGLEBONE:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-BEAGLEBONE.img.xz) = 9ebe1aad5675657c5b22e445c397826b3f7cca837c02de10f6115e30a2d1b9d3a1d7411c93aeb1791c196bcc34ce3704320d53535e3e819a524197efb0e192b0
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-BEAGLEBONE.img.xz) = 66fb05143c93f6b4290c79aac41623a097140be6fd8e95639dfcecfc7486b2a6
armv6 CUBIEBOARD:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-CUBIEBOARD.img.xz) = 0e0bf9fc8541feb224bbe0b80270985cf65141007047bbe4825ad81641d4fa10af79ec1ab7f6b4a9eb173566099e755f1d2662420ce90dd0a273dbc65e957a4f
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-CUBIEBOARD.img.xz) = c2ada7cba57126d55523ca47aba15b58a612ead90435870f65ef4239f916645c
armv6 CUBIEBOARD2:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-CUBIEBOARD2.img.xz) = 4dc1abeb8e779797fef5f034f427461f33d0fcbae86f94ddacb6bc2766e141aa250f9240e6903c99bfe9d1e64cba2dd6566ad760ff061314e8404f87e39f40fb
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-CUBIEBOARD2.img.xz) = 8ca59f6d5ad6608866f99a51b69dc029588058e0f1ee951ce7074fc37d65fe84
armv6 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD.img.xz) = 7634db1a425a92e3cbeef699a516633e2acc3af84a65927d1759d5ea157be0a5c812736a1af76aa3afd73ec044a0dab6758750469efd9675123ad448bcf30c3f
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD.img.xz) = b2de919a118dd0c9dc70a123245af5ec5cb1b80f7ff774d9437ddafc90bea7e4
armv6 GUMSTIX:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-GUMSTIX.img.xz) = 5a9244419d4b8188ea0dd7eec8d79443465ecc62eb4d6964f8231ccd0455ebbc744da0919fd57979d0d45bb011ea9699b96be15a5bc443feb6f3b718fb968bbf
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-GUMSTIX.img.xz) = 6dcd75e4b223fd6a641138885d381ac77e93b3fe4de00f170b488a7187a1d45b
armv6 RPI-B:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-RPI-B.img.xz) = 6afc1640e0c857bca73bfccbf7d21cb88cea76fcc082825a3cfe82bd45dbcc989fe6b54af76dfaac7c3cc794b55e74147290caa114dd7effd62e5699ed9ef5eb
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-RPI-B.img.xz) = e222992064d6db616dc3112d58429b8e31a627140901c57cbd1a302730d5714b
armv6 RPI2:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-RPI2.img.xz) = c7c74243c31569e90ec22f71f8d5780c647b53409752182483f6570b8a4b42b5fd456a57223a2d3e6502c8351ebfcdd9500884737457920e932c0fb134f1dffc
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-RPI2.img.xz) = 7376a533f8368d4841e3d81476ada4b0684870a03818e3dd30aea8ab2504626e
armv6 PANDABOARD:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-PANDABOARD.img.xz) = c8c7ffeaaf8d60882a16dee828078266b1a522a56ae77ac2c4539393958542dcc77b5240a8463922929c07690b8dc9824cb6174abaaf7a8d1f27730f2aa2b4c0
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-PANDABOARD.img.xz) = d72e3c6e529b2b46f12f08367b9c23b48f0ee006594d8c6c3beefcc8197502c7
armv6 WANDBOARD:
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-WANDBOARD.img.xz) = f074f75054e575f7b6a3d1b8e8912dec7f0ef1842dbab4d4456a8a9b67ee4c5d18f408ee9a809b3ec5a223ff21a23f83380927343de5951a115c1ce469e37f3d
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-WANDBOARD.img.xz) = 6a4239b9f87ac8b0d4c767cf2bfa38405fad198c5b8a4044e1151855d0fe18a6
Virtual Machine Disk Image Checksums
amd64 (x86_64):
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64.qcow2.xz) = 88e0d88058d2748732706f88c1d27b51447430968f1acbb645749d3201c9766eba31046784148355b7a0ecbbf87ac159363d3a38a65b19482e0900e2d97fd05a SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64.raw.xz) = c569776334131fdc85cd25a2a0d5aecafdc3e4b2e6e010dffaa2488d934293ce4f091f23481079dd91ad20dfd2dfc3d3487707096c59448f1d8914c5d7d6b582 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64.vhd.xz) = 2c63d0d515e6bb02001847d83c302cf3d1a32ab21062b2b98fa30a1524315e1680c3f5099944b30f7d24e512dcc78bdd922fe7a821ffa5a1b5ea6947f34fc2ca SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64.vmdk.xz) = aeb43f94a8e6dfa663f1bc69f53317a49a073a376bfa707ea5df02b94ae58edb3c127eb4f791803232f19c99a505feab67225a512ea2cc3bed41577e178d0089
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64.qcow2.xz) = 9e9f0fe9c7e3be2dc8b742f416541eedff2f005a0a2dda61a959cb2789ce78a9 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64.raw.xz) = 233c6b269a29c1ce38bb4eb861251d1c74643846c1de937b8e31cc0316632bc0 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64.vhd.xz) = 4e287c0504f0ecb63fc9140901c1bc31baf1fe74a6d2314426afaa73886dae58 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64.vmdk.xz) = 373c606f065c5850e722fcc92a1cbdb3ce72fbdf4162916e4c1281363a13e5b6
i386 (x86):
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-i386.qcow2.xz) = 50a62e269d5e64e31cb8d10d9c5ff52fd3035375ba5a7c9f07f99f94db2d97bc02a9e0498e6e2d6ca7ccba34ceb71c2cf0fec75c88f75b66468de73bfdf996a2 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-i386.raw.xz) = cbe00b009953845c9d968a8a7d4334f173f5d92654b643cec0fa03a979049a520c0e20d52d57b9907e8bc6c3678100fda936e6fed8a77a96d6d46c894b0de706 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-i386.vhd.xz) = 07c276988cc3e4c29ed61508ccefde2948a427d0df0fb4a816982c46b5694d74448fc422b3323c825922405aeadb0a56e7947251e3422b3436b10ec1f19cbb3b SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-i386.vmdk.xz) = 1904b85abf75e9b164ec22f88b72ae4942d6391b7b275c412b9561ca8d76b7f0218d4b950a39846a3d421245a5bf10d062203ea4a745f485a4bc469f9b461411
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-i386.qcow2.xz) = 693e64a76c3097d83500a907ee48daf5d8c08c8e19d96d73516873775f7a6948 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-i386.raw.xz) = 22708a4d63607e16a3714887b32dec12111a04bf9e2a8cb25dc3faa9eed99b49 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-i386.vhd.xz) = 8f614d5771e98f7bd5db4dc2903d6abbcb5c0b1a2a47e778892111774a5e91f2 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-i386.vmdk.xz) = 61fc5ac92a4563d4a1e1d9841440e021b776cedac90f7c65a3cf0e91499bae13
aarch64 (arm64):
SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.qcow2.xz) = d633eee589c0d4fdede6973608749bff5014e52ce7ad18086fab70f4315494e14764a6789eeccc02aec868a1d56dcd61aa3085a69dcede927a9a9264883b0cf7 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.raw.xz) = 34d878de3a9040fae18192ad34d6f4dfe2e0bf52c3f06a918368d4c7ca5e4133897fdc09e91e420b9caab0b6c4ee86dd63d68026c7faaf204c7f547bce2ac418 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.vhd.xz) = 37edc26e1dce16a598b2feb0fbd9b1e3f56e0fb05088ab8f6f9ca13816912d40e0a65f0f72e43202c287f2b099941f539cbd10d2c4225695b5097ac217d17537 SHA512 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.vmdk.xz) = e1cc7ca416d0bea78da9588634afd62797344f0fcf2d409825e1f1b7a5b01a954a3c87c213fc1bfdcacd249da0a511ead1f9555b241c20178d3566c04945c7b5
SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.qcow2.xz) = e4dccf7ed908c73ba6a8f68ad15dbbb548c5a3dacde35c39b24ba47044111d51 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.raw.xz) = 46e69462cf394578b9526a7ff88c3925eab740286546e91db8bb23732146d287 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.vhd.xz) = fe2ee8e0c0434be2cdaf038d2463062fa68f9a82dd5b97e066c0c9d6e915d7c3 SHA256 (FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.vmdk.xz) = 5d735a2d35672d617ff13cf200612bd106a26e54032e67bbd0a68fd6c97749f2
Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to The FreeBSD Foundation!We're big fans of charming, ungainly Solar Impulse, and of Captain Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg's quest to circumnavigate the globe in a solar-powered plane. In case you missed the live stream: the Swiss flier just got a little closer to that goal by completing its first international flight, taking off near Berne, Switzerland and landing in Brussels, Belgium, just under 13 hours later. That's half the flight time of an earlier test, in which the craft's 200-foot wingspan, covered with 12,000 photovoltaic solar cells, kept it aloft for 26 hours. Of course, a controlled test flight is one thing -- making solar-powered flight commercially viable means proving your plane can successfully navigate busy airspace. To see Solar Impulse come in for a smooth landing, peep the video after the break.The legendary Phoenix addon has been reborn as the Bennu Kodi addon, a new playlist addon for your Kodi setup. Install it via our guide below.
October 25th: The Bennu Kodi addon was updated to yesterday’s date, 2017.10.24. The update brings better Hebrew language support and the updating of 6 providers for added streams in the playlists..
NOTE: In order for Bennu to work again you must go into your video addons, click the menu button on Bennu, select Settings, select ‘Clear Cache’ in the General Settings, click Yes, then click Ok.
This version of the addon has the following changes:
Croatian language menus added.
Custom colors updated in settings
Sources & providers updated
October 14th: Another nice update from the Bennu team. Check out the changes:
Choose the colour that premium sources (Debrid) show up in.
Added 4 new providers.
___
After going offline at the beginning of May, Phoenix has been reborn with the brand new Bennu Kodi addon.
For those who don’t know, Phoenix was a very popular playlist Kodi addon. A playlist addon has content contributed to it by one or more playlisters, who each keep track of their own playlists worth of content. Like Phoenix, the Bennu addon has an impressive list of playlisters from the Kodi community:
Taurus
Dr. Stream
Crusader
Excalibur
Zodiac
Ra Live Streams
Cerus
In addition to the playlist sections, Bennu also has an overall TV show and movies section for new releases. Each playlister has their own niche worth of content, from movie and TV specialty sections, documentaries, music, live TV, and more. There is tons to check out in the Bennu Kodi addon.
NOTE: Bennu stores no content within the addon. It only knows how to search the public internet for data and information.
The Bennu Kodi addon can be found in the Colossus Repository.
How to Install Bennu Kodi Addon
This addon is a third-party Kodi addon not supported by the Kodi Foundation. Though Kodi add-ons don’t store any files or host any content, streams from this addon are scraped from websites that fall in a grey legal area.
Because it is not legal to stream this content in every country and location, we are not posting a how-to guide on this website. We believe that this is the safest move for KodiTips.com because we know that there are parties looking to crack down on websites promoting piracy and we are not one of those.
KodiTips.com has plenty of add-on installation guides for things that are completely legal and we encourage you to check out our home page for more information.
Let us know on Twitter or Facebook if we can help you out!What does "Modern C++" really mean?
published at 13.10.2016 16:03 by Jens Weller
I submitted a talk to CppCon with Modern C++ in the title: CppCon 2016 - Jens Weller “Writing applications in modern C++ and Qt". It seemed a good title, and I think it still is. Yet it made me interested in the term "modern C++", as its used so often. And I have heard so many things what it is, and what it isn't.
So lets say, you're in a job interview, things going quite good. Last question: define what modern C++ is. This is a very mean question, as you now have no idea, if you better match the interviewers definition (is it an HR person, a C++ Dev or just a random manager?) or openly say what you think it is. Or something in between.
When preparing my talk, I was in a similar situation, is the audience perception of modern C++ the same as mine? While talking at CppCon on this, I better know where the term originated from, and what people expect about it. Maybe if we go to the roots there is a definition already? And if so, would that be the one to follow? First thing in my research to get a wider view on the beliefs on modern C++ was to ask my twitter audience in a poll:
With a little research to come up with 4 meaning full options, as twitter is only giving me 4 options. The earliest time I met the term was in 2003, when I bought Alexandrescus book "Modern C++ Design". Hence the 3. Option. A lot of people also replied to me when asking about the origins, that they would connect it with the new book from Scott Meyers most. Hence Scott could also be a good lead to |
.) makes him extremely useful in a Modern Age filled with Ant-Men and Elast-Girls. Honestly, I can’t think of a time when we had more useful, viable “Tiny Size” pieces then right now.
This Baxter’s only five clicks long, and his dial alternates between Tertiary Attacker and Support piece, but his mobility and his ability to potentially transport an entire Tiny-Sized army up to 12 Squares at a time is the best reason to play him.
7. Baxter Stockman — 30 Points — Uncommon: Potentially one of the best taxis ever cre–wait a minute, I just did a Baxter Stockman write-up! Oooooohhh, this is the “evil robotics genius” Baxter, as opposed to the freaky half-man, half-fly version.
So why is this version even better? Well, in addition to Stealth and Outwit, his Trait (I DON’T NEED ANYONE EXCEPT MY MOUSERS!: When a friendly character named Mouser is KO’ed by an opponent’s attack, roll a d6. 4-6: You may place adjacent a TMNT #005 Mouser from outside the game if no other friendly character did.) will let you flood the board with ever-reincarnating Mousers, but the real reason you’ll want to play him is his Special Attack Power (ROBOTICS GENIUS: Give Baxter Stockman a free action to heal an adjacent friendly character with the Robot keyword 1 click. If it can’t be healed, modify its speed and attack values by +1 this turn instead.).
In a world where Juston Seyfert exists [EDITOR’S NOTE: Uh, like ours? Ohhh, I see what you did there. Nice.)], Baxter here is the perfect complementary role player!
6. TMNT012 Casey Jones — 30 Points — Uncommon: Yes, he tops out with a Damage Value of 2. His Defense Value isn’t great either (it’s a 17). But his with a little help from someone’s Outwit, or if you just send him after support figures with little or no damage absorption, Casey Jones can actually get by as a Secondary Attacker… for just 30 Points!! How? His top dial Attack Special (GOONGALA GOONGALA: Give Casey Jones a close action and make a close attack. If he hits, after actions resolve move him up to two squares automatically breaking away, then make another close attack with his attack and damage values modified by +1.), that’s how.
This is probably the most dangerous 30 Point melee piece we’ve seen since Fear Itself Loki!
(Oh, and if you want to go the Outwit route to cancel opposing defenses, might we suggest Ms. O’Neil from slot number 10? She combos nicely with Casey.)
Click here for more info on this awesome Jason Flowers TMNT print.
5. TMNT034 Donatello — 75 Points — Chase:
4. TMNT035 Leonardo — 75 Points — Chase:
3. TMNT033 Michaelangelo — 75 Points — Chase:
2. TMNT032 Raphael — 75 Points — Chase:
Okay, we’re gonna talk about these four Chase pieces all together since they’re all really similar pieces. Each Turtle again has their signature Weapon Special, and they all share the same two Traits (we’ll use Mikey’s card as an example, since he was always my favorite Turtle): (SHELL TO SHELL DEFENSE: Michelangelo can use Stealth. If Michelangelo is adjacent to a character named Raphael, Donatello, or Leonardo, he can use Impervious.) and (ADVANCED TURTLE TECHNIQUE: When Michelangelo hits one or more opposing characters, after actions resolve Michelangelo can move up to 2 squares automatically breaking away, and then may make a close attack targeting a character he has not attacked this turn.).
So each Chase Turtle gives you six highly efficient Clicks for 75 Points that get even BETTER when played with each other.
Getting melee pieces to their targets in one piece has always and will always be a problem in Heroclix, but giving Stealth and Impervious to these Turtles when they advance in pairs is a huge advantage!
1. TMNT031 Krang — 170 Points — Super Rare: Wow. For everyone who looked at Super Rare Prime Ragnarok from Avengers Assemble and said, “Sure he can unleash unholy destruction when paired with Juston Seyfert, but I wish he was, like, 30 Points cheaper…,” well, now you have your wish.
Yup, Krang has the “Robot” keyword. He has other keywords as well, I’m sure, but who cares? “Robot” is all Juston needs to go crazy with him.
Krang’s Trait (MOLECULAR AMPLIFICATION CHIP: Give Krang a free action and he has (Giant Damage Symbol) and modifies his combat values by +1 until your next turn. At the end of your turn, deal him 1 unavoidable damage. Give Krang a free action and he has Colossal and modifies his combat values by +2 until your next turn. At the end of your turn, deal him 2 unavoidable damage. You may only activate one of these powers each turn.) is really what all the fuss is about. By making him Colossal, you end up with even better stats than what Ragnarok starts with, and Krang also has top dial Charge, Impervious and Prob Control.
Not a bad little package… but it gets much better! His Attack Special (SHAPESHIFTING HANDS: Give Krang a free action to choose a standard attack power or (Wing Movement Symbol). Krang can use the chosen power or symbol until you choose again.) also gives him a TON of flexibility over how he’s going to kill you.
And if you do manage to knock him off of his first Click, he simply gains a Damage Special Power (IQ OF 968 – UNTIL HE GETS MAD: Krang can use Outwit and Probability Control. His powers can’t be countered by a character on an equal or higher click number.) that makes it REALLY hard to damage him again!
Oh, and speaking of damage, how about we just pair him with “Scientist” Baxter Stockman (number 7 on our list) and let him heal damage every freaking turn… for free!
I will be shocked if Krang doesn’t make a significant impact on the Meta!
Okay, that’s all for today. In the coming days and weeks we will be gearing up for our dual Top Ten Set Reviews for Uncanny X-Men, and Ninwashui has a special Meta Build article he’s working on wherein he brainstorms a way to counter everyone’s favorite gun-toting uncle, Nick Fury!!
Until then, Stay Safe, and Watch Where You Draw Your Lines of Fire!!
AdvertisementsAtheist Sam Harris Attacks Accomplished NIH Scientist Dr. Francis Collins for Being Christian
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Atheist author and activist Sam Harris has taken aim at the head of the National Institutes of Health, arguing that he's an example of an intelligent person pushing religion.
In a recent podcast, Harris cited former director of the Human Genome Research Institute, Dr. Francis Collins, as "a bit of a Bible-thumper."
"He believes in evolution, thankfully, but he also believes that immortal souls and free will were just downloaded onto the hard drive of only one species of primate at some point in history by an almighty God," Harris commented.
"I think we should be even more critical, in some sense, of people like Francis Collins, the so-called nuanced religious person."
Harris also argued that while Collins is "obviously a very smart guy who has made real contributions to science," his religious convictions are a point of intellectual concern.
"[Collins], I think, is sensitive to how unseemly it is for the head of the NIH to talk about these things. So when you ask him for details, he says, 'Well, this is all very complicated and you should consult the work of John Polkinghorne and N.T. Wright,'" Harris asserted.
"And when you consult their work, you get just pure madness. It is just a word salad, which is foisted on scientifically illiterate people by scientifically literate people for reasons that are patently emotional."
This is not the first time that Harris has been critical of Collins. Back in 2009, Collins had a column published in The New York Times expressing concern over President Barack Obama's appointment of Collins as head of the NIH.
"Francis Collins is an accomplished scientist and a man who is sincere in his beliefs. And that is precisely what makes me so uncomfortable about his nomination," Harris wrote. "Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?"
Due to his accomplishments, much has been made about Collins being both a man of science and a man of strong religious convictions.
In the PBS special "The Question of God," Collins was interviewed about his walk of faith, which includes being raised in the Episcopal Church, losing his faith during college, and regaining it after reading works like Mere Christianity by CS Lewis.
"I don't see that any of the issues that people raise as points of contention between science and faith are all that difficult to resolve," remarked Collins. "So where, then, is the discordancy that causes so many people to see these views of science and of spirit as being incompatible? In me, they both exist."Nearly two years after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency had penetrated the internal systems of Facebook, Google and other companies, tech executives still harbor hard feelings. That's led to a strained relationship with the Pentagon. “The Snowden issue clouds things,” United States Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter acknowledged during a visit to WIRED’s New York offices Monday.
Nevertheless, with cyberterrorism on the rise, the Pentagon has never needed tech’s know-how more.
To be fair, Snowden's explosive revelations are not the only reason Silicon Valley and the Pentagon don't always get along. For one thing, the institutions that reside within each world operate very differently. The military moves slowly, while startups move quickly. Military personnel adhere to an immutable job hierarchy, respecting traditional career paths, while techies often skip college, change jobs frequently, and start their own companies.
Carter has made it his mission to build a stronger working relationship between the Defense Department and techies. His visit to Silicon Valley last week, in which he delivered a speech at Stanford and stopped in at Facebook and Andreessen Horowitz, marked the first time in nearly 20 years that a defense secretary has toured Silicon Valley.
Carter has suggested reforming the military’s personnel system so he can take better advantage of private sector talent. And he wants to make it easier for the Pentagon to approve outside contractors, a process that currently takes up to two years. “For many companies, that’s an eternity when you are living on a shoestring budget,” he told WIRED. As a result, the defense department too often works with legacy vendors skilled in winning its contracts. “If what we reward in terms of federal moneys are people who have the knack for working with us rather than people who do the best job, that’s a disaster.”
A New Strategy
Carter’s tech forward perspective comes from personal experience. The physicist-turned-Pentagon chief had just moved to the West Coast, where he was a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a lecturer at the university, when President Obama called him back to Washington DC in February to serve as defense secretary. Before that, he spent part of 2014 advising large investment firms on technology and defense investments as a senior partner with the consulting firm Global Technology Partners.
While Carter was speaking at Stanford, the DOD revealed details of a new cyber strategy—the first update since 2011—that calls for 133 teams of military, civilian, and defense contractors to be in place by 2018. To help its recruiting efforts, Carter is creating a Silicon Valley office, the Defense Innovation Unit X, not far from Google’s headquarters. The outpost will scout for new and emerging technologies, help startups find new ways of working with the military, and serve as a West Coast base for recruits.
If what we reward in terms of federal moneys are people who have the knack for working with us rather than people who do the best job, that’s a disaster. Ashton Carter, Secretary of Defense
The Pentagon also has established a branch of the U.S. Digital Service, which puts techies to work on tough government problems for short periods. Already, 16 people are helping out in three teams. One, for example, is focused on making the health-record systems of the DOD and the Department of Veteran Affairs interoperable. “The technical community likes the problems we work on,” Carter said. “I’ve been taking them in on a temporary basis, saying, ‘Come do this for a year. You don’t have to be with us forever.’”
Carter also is helping the Pentagon invest in new technologies. He pointed out that the government can’t keep up with VC firms, but nonetheless, “I want to get more in that business.” Right now, the Pentagon makes small investments through In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit that has worked with the intelligence community to fund start-up companies working on security-related emerging technologies. “If that’s successful we’ll scale that up,” he said.
Meanwhile, Carter is addressing the legacy of Snowden’s actions by engaging tech’s leaders in conversation. The two communities need each other, he said, and his initiatives are, in part, a way he hopes to improve the relationship.Epic Pictures Group CEO Patrick Ewald and co-founder/COO Shaked Berenson unveiled the official trailer for their film Tales Of Halloween in front of a packed house at Comic Con today — and their panel of actors and directors all saw it for the first time. The horror anthology from 11 directors will bow in theaters October 16.
The panel was moderated by one of the film’s co-stars, Clare Kramer, who spoke to four of the Tales directors — Neil Marshall (Game Of Thrones), Dave Parker (Masters Of Horror) and Paul Solet and Mike Mendez (Big Ass Spider) — along with several of the film’s stars including Barry Bostwick, Lin Shaye, John Savage, Pat Healy, BooBoo Stewart, Grace Phipps, Alex Esso and Kristina Klebe. There are also cameos from dozens of notables, including Joe Dante John Landis and Adrienne Barbeau.
Tales Of Halloween will have its world premiere July 24 at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. It was also selected as the opening-night film at Wizard World Chicago as well as FrightFest UK, where it will close the annual event August 31, tying it into a European premiere. Watch the trailer above.By Melissa Lee Phillips
Neuroscience for Kids Consultant
July 10, 2002 In the years before he became president, Abraham Lincoln exhibited many behaviors inconsistent with his dignified image. According to writings of some of his friends and acquaintances, Lincoln was prone to highly unpredictable moodiness, to fits of extreme rage, and to unexplained bizarre actions. Most of these behaviors stopped soon after his inauguration. Researchers, led by medical historian and retired physician Norbert Hirschhorn, published a report in 2001 hypothesizing that Lincoln suffered from mercury poisoning for years prior to his presidency. For many years, Lincoln took pills referred to as " blue mass." The main ingredient in blue mass was elemental mercury. In the 1800s, these blue pills were commonly prescribed for a wide variety of conditions, including worms, tuberculosis, toothaches, and cholera. They also were often prescribed for "hypochondriasis," a very general medical term that was used to describe many different physical and mental problems. Lincoln was said to have suffered from one condition often attributed to hypochondriasis: melancholia or depression. It is likely that a physician recommended that Lincoln take these blue pills for his depression. Physicians in the 1800s did not know that mercury is a powerful neurotoxin. Once ingested, mercury binds to molecules in the central nervous system and can cause behavioral problems. Common symptoms of mercury poisoning are irritability, anxiety, hostility, depression, insomnia, memory loss, nerve damage, tremor, and problems with dexterity. Lincoln apparently suffered many of these symptoms during the time he is believed to have taken mercury pills. Dr. Hirschhorn and his colleagues wanted to know approximately how much mercury Lincoln's body would have absorbed when he took blue mass. They recreated some of these pills using a common 19th-century recipe. Using a mortar and pestle (with modern safety precautions to protect themselves from inhaling mercury vapors), they combined the ingredients used to make blue mass: mercury, licorice root, rosewater, honey, sugar, and dead rose petals. Next, they crushed the pills in an acidic solution similar to the acid present in the stomach. The solution was then run through a filter designed to imitate the membrane of the intestinal wall. They found that for each blue pill, about 750 micrograms of mercury would be absorbed into the body. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states that adults should consume no more than 21 micrograms of mercury in one day. A person who took the recommended dosage of two or three pills per day would be at significant risk for mercury poisoning. Fortunately, many of the toxic effects of mercury are reversible. If mercury consumption stops, eventually some of the adverse symptoms stop too. A friend of Lincoln's wrote that Lincoln stopped taking blue pills about five months after the presidential inauguration. Lincoln felt that the pills made him "cross." After that, Lincoln's behavior changed: the rage attacks ceased, he remained calm in stressful situations, and the deep melancholy seemed to subside. Hirschhorn and the other researchers point out some uncertainties in their conclusions. First, most of the written evidence for Lincoln's strange behaviors came from just one person. Second, no one knows how many years Lincoln took the blue pills. It is also unclear exactly how much mercury he consumed or precisely how much was absorbed into his bloodstream. In spite of these unanswered questions, mercury poisoning seems likely to have affected part of Abraham Lincoln's life. It is relatively certain that he consumed mercury for many years and many of his reported behaviors are consistent with the neurobehavioral effects of mercury poisoning. This possibility of mercury poisoning could generate new insight into Lincoln's life and his influence on the history of the United States. It seems incredibly fortunate that he recognized the pills' ill effects and stopped taking them before the difficult years of his presidency.A month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, New York passed a set of gun control laws that proponents touted as the toughest in the nation. Chris Glorioso reports. (Published Thursday, May 8, 2014)
After NY Gun Law, Assault Rifles Only Look Different
A month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, New York passed a set of gun control laws that proponents touted as the toughest in the nation.
Now some critics say one part of the law – the assault rifle ban – is not effective because new models being made to comply with the law are almost entirely the same as those that were banned.
"The guns are exact," said Long Island gun dealer Martin Tretola.
Tretola took the I-Team to the gun range to demonstrate what he says are merely cosmetic changes the SAFE Act imposed on one of America's most popular type of rifle, the AR-15.
Under the law, bayonet mounts, flash suppressors and telescoping stocks are banned, and rifles cannot have a pistol grip.
But the new modified rifle is still semi-automatic. That means each squeeze of the trigger automatically loads the next round into the chamber.
NYU law professor James Jacobs, who has written extensively on gun control issues, praises portions of the SAFE Act, including expanded background checks.
But he says the the assault rifle ban has resulted in a remodeled gun that is no less dangerous – just less scary looking.
"It differs only in how it looks, not in how it functions," Jacobs said.
The law redefined an assault weapon as a semi-automatic rifle that can accept a detachable magazine and has one military-style feature such as a pistol grip or folding stock.
Tretola told the I-Team those features are less about killing, and more about comfort.
"The pistol grip? That's just so you can hold it better,” he said. “The collapsible stock is actually so if a shorter person than I am is shooting, they could bring it in and make it shorter."
Yet gun control advocates say a less comfortable rifle is also a less deadly weapon.
"The legal gun looks a lot like the illegal gun," said Leah Gunn Barrett, the executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. "Does that make this law essentially cosmetic? No. These features all have specific functions."
For example, Gunn Barrett said a forward-leaning pistol grip might give a mass shooter better control over his rifle.
.
"The gun is still lethal,” Gunn Barrett said. “Yes, it can still kill people. But it is not as easy to manipulate and fire accurately than it would be if you had a forward-leaning pistol grip."
Some families of gun violence victims say they are frustrated by what they believe are efforts to skirt the gun control law.
"Here we go again,” said Joyce Gorycki, who lost her husband in the 1993 Long Island Rail Road massacre. “This is what they always do. It's just a terrible thing. The gun manufacturers. I just don't understand them."
Mark Malkowski, owner at Connecticut-based Stag Arms, which makes the Safe Act-compliant gun that Tretola shot at the range, said he’s happy that he’s come up with new models for his customers who want AR-15–style rifles. But he said he has had to sacrifice some comfort, and he doesn’t understand why it was necessary.
“It definitely didn’t make us safer,” he said.Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" video Men who objectify their female partners are more likely to coerce them into having sex Research shows that objectified women tend to internalize the belief that they exist solely for another's pleasure
Sexually objectifying women is bad. It promotes the noxious idea that women are not actually people deserving of respect or autonomy, which is harmful to everyone -- and now, there's some empirical research to prove it.
According to a study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, the more a male partner objectifies a female partner, the more likely he is to sexually coerce or pressure her. Researchers Laura R. Ramsey and Tiffany Hoyt evaluated 119 men and 162 women, and found that heterosexual relationships suffered immensely when one partner was effectively treated like a toy. From the study's press release:
Advertisement:
They found that men who frequently objectify their partner's bodies by excessively focusing on their appearance are more likely to feel shame about the shape and size of their partner's body which in turn is related to increased sexual pressure (i.e., the belief that men expect sex and that it is a woman's role to provide sex for her partner) and sexual coercion, both in general and through violence and manipulation. "Being more aware of how and when one thinks of their partner as an object, sexually or otherwise, could help relationship partners avoid sexual pressure and coercion and increase communication and respect within their relationship," the researchers wrote. The data also supported the idea that women internalize objectification from their partners. This internalization is related to feeling shame about their bodies, a decrease in asserting themselves, and a decrease in expressing what they do and do not want to do sexually.
Objectification: Bad news all around. The good news, however, is that the findings show how clinical intervention can be valuable in decreasing both objectification and sexual coercion in opposite-sex relationships. The researchers note that by making women aware of the repercussions of objectification -- namely the removal of their agency and usually their sexual pleasure -- women can learn to overcome the dangers of being treated like playthings. But, Ramsey and Hoyt smartly note, it isn't just on women to put an end to their own objectification.
"As male objectification of women is more common than female objectification of men, the onus is on men to reduce objectification and sexual violence," the researchers writer. "It is of utmost importance that activists and educators work with men to reduce the objectification of women, both in general and in the context of romantic relationships."The world's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, today stands accused of routinely flouting its workers' human rights through a sophisticated strategy of harassing union organisers, discriminating against long-term staff and indoctrinating employees with misleading propaganda.
In a forensic indictment based on two years' research, the Washington-based pressure group Human Rights Watch lifts the lid on Wal-Mart's aggressive tactic of stamping on the slightest sign that workers are organising representation.
Evidence in Discounting Rights includes examples of workers forced into unpaid overtime and an alleged strategy of squeezing out long-serving staff who are more costly than low-wage, temporary, younger workers.
It reveals that Wal-Mart, which owns Britain's Asda, has elaborate tactics to stop staff from coming together to fight for better conditions. The company is accused of focusing security cameras on areas where staff congregate and shifting around loyal workers in "unit packing" tactics to ensure votes for union recognition are defeated.
American store bosses get a "manager's toolbox" - a manual which openly describes itself as a guide on "how to remain free in the event union organisers choose your facility as their next target".
They are told to phone a special "union hotline" if they suspect staff. Teams of union busters are then sent from Wal-Mart's Arkansas headquarters who regale workers with vitriolic presentations on the perils of unionisation.
Carol Price, author of the report, said: "Wal-Mart's aggressive and sophisticated anti-union strategy is based out of its headquarters. This is not a store-by-store problem - the violations are a direct result of the company's philosophy."
With $351bn (£176bn) in annual revenue and 1.8m staff worldwide, Wal-Mart was named America's largest company in the latest Fortune 500 rankings but its controversial business practices have caused increasing political unease. Unions organised a nationwide protest bus tour last year and prominent politicians have been getting on board.
The Norwegian government has ordered its state pension fund not to invest in Wal-Mart shares because of workers' rights violations. Hillary Clinton last week pointedly refused to endorse the company when asked during a presidential debate whether she considered it to be good or bad for America.
"It's a mixed blessing," Mrs Clinton said. Although Wal-Mart provides many jobs in rundown areas of her former home state of Arkansas, she said its behaviour raises "serious questions about the responsibility of corporations" in providing healthcare, safe working conditions and an environment of equality.
Combining documentary evidence with interviews of dozens of past and present Wal-Mart employees, Human Rights Watch has built a picture of a company which goes to great lengths to minimise the freedom of its staff.
Healthcare programmes are often limited to "catastrophic coverage" for accidents and emergencies, rather than preventative medicines. The company faces the biggest class action lawsuit in US history in which 1.5m women claim the company discriminated against female staff in pay, promotions and assignments.
In a breach of US law, Wal-Mart has allegedly banned union organisers from distributing flyers outside its stores and has confiscated literature found on the premises. Since Wal-Mart began in 1962, there has only been one successful formation of a union - among meat cutters in Texas seven years ago. The department was subsequently shut down - an act ruled illegal by US labour authorities.
Faced with increasingly vocal opposition, Wal-Mart's chief executive, Lee Scott, has been trying to improve the company's image. It has introduced more upmarket items and is testing environmentally friendly initiatives at two experimental green stores. Mr Scott has pledged to improve healthcare coverage and, in a significant breakthrough, he held a meeting in February with one of the company's most outspoken critics - Andy Stern, the head of the Service Employees International Union. The company has even distributed voting information to all its 1.3m US staff encouraging them to register for a voice at the next presidential election.
Wal-Mart had not responded to repeated requests for comment by the time the Guardian went to press last night.
Film campaign
Need to bash a union? A video production company discreetly tucked away in a 113-year-old former general store in America's rural deep south can help.
Paul French & Partners specialises in making bespoke, glossy films dramatising the so-called impact of union recognition - strikes, redundancies and uncompetitive, failing businesses.
Wal-Mart uses Paul French to produce films ostensibly to explain "the facts" to workers about union membership. But the Georgia-based firm's website makes no bones about its true purpose - to prevent union recruitment drives.
A sample film made for a valves company, DeZurik, is ironically entitled "It couldn't happen here" and bombards the viewer with examples of disruptive strikes by unions.
Another, for Delta Mechanics, depicts organisers as silky-tongued manipulators who pressurise staff around the clock until they join.
A third film for Allied Holdings dramatises the pain of redundancies caused when union-negotiated pay rises make a company uncompetitive.
When contacted by phone, the firm's founder, Paul French, was reluctant to talk about such films: "A small number of our pieces are on that subject. I would rather talk to you about [films on] sexual harassment and violence in the workplace."
When asked whether he had any qualms about union-bashing films, Mr French simply said: "No".
Paul French boasts a blue-chip client list including General Electric, Fruit of the Loom, Lockheed Martin and Wrangler, although the type of work it carries out is not disclosed.
Persuasive videos are a relatively common tactic for employers in America - the Scottish bus company FirstGroup recently angered the mighty Teamsters union by using videos to "inform" its US staff about the impact of signing up.US defense secretary says military has been ‘more forthcoming and transparent’ recently but 62% of women service members say they experienced retaliation
Chuck Hagel criticized the US military for a culture of retaliation towards service members who report sexual assault in a speech on Friday, in what is likely to be one of the last public addresses he will make as secretary of defense.
Hagel said the military needs to create an environment where social retaliation is not “unfairly put on victims”, in closing remarks for the US Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Summit at Joint Base Andrews naval air facility in Maryland.
Of the women who reported a sexual assault to the military in 2014, 62% said they experienced a form of retaliation, according to a Pentagon report released in December.
“You could pass all the laws you want, that isn’t going to fix the problem of retaliation,” said Hagel. “Retaliation comes in an environment because the personal commitment of the individual allows it to happen, then it won’t get fixed. We’ve got to come at it in every way.”
Pentagon: rape reports increase among 19,000 estimated military victims Read more
Active duty officers, air national guard and reserve members who are stationed across the globe participated in the five-day summit. The event includes speakers and break-out discussions about topics related to sexual assault like alcohol abuse in the military.
Summit attendees wore civilian clothes and did not address each other by rank. About 150 air force members attended the first day of the summit.
Hagel announced in November that he would be stepping down from his post, reportedly under pressure from the Obama administration. He concluded his speech acknowledging that his time in office is coming to an end. “I can’t tell you how proud I’ve been to serve with you and be part of your team the last two years and I wish you much success,” said Hagel.
President Barack Obama announced last month that Ashton Carter is the nominee to take over the secretary of defense post. The Senate must confirm the nomination before Carter can take over.
When are we going to address the military sexual assault epidemic? | Amy Goodman Read more
Carter will be pushed to address criticisms of the military’s response to sexual assault, which Hagel said is not where it needs to be.
Defense department leaders have in recent years become more active in addressing the long-existing problem of sexual assault in the military after a number of high-profile cases led to intense criticism of the government’s response to the crisis.
Hagel said that institutions like college campuses are looking to the military to see how they can address systemic sexual assault, claiming that it has been the most open institution in the country in addressing the issue. “We’ve been more forthcoming, more direct, more transparent – than any institution, certainly in this country, probably in the world.”
Reports of sexual assault filed by military members jumped 50% from the fiscal year ending in 2012 to the fiscal year ending in 2013, according to Pentagon data released in May 2014. Whether this increase was due to an increase in assaults or more people coming forward with claims is unclear.
Hagel said the most significant thing that military personnel can do is to protect each other and intervene if they sense a dangerous situation.
“If you see something, if you sense something, it is your responsibility to step in and deal with it,” Hagel said. “Stop it. If you can’t stop it, get somebody who will stop it. Be aware. Don’t walk away.”Update: On September 25, Avast confirmed that of the 18 companies targeted, a total of 40 computers were successfully infected with a secondary malware installation at the following companies: Samsung, Sony, Asus, Intel, VMWare, O2, Singtel, Gauselmann, Dyn, Chunghwa and Fujitsu.
Hundreds of thousands of computers getting penetrated by a corrupted version of an ultra-common piece of security software was never going to end well. But now it's becoming clear exactly how bad the results of the recent CCleaner malware outbreak may be. Researchers now believe that the hackers behind it were bent not only on mass infections, but on targeted espionage that tried to gain access to the networks of at least 18 tech firms.
Earlier this week, security firms Morphisec and Cisco revealed that CCleaner, a piece of security software distributed by Czech company Avast, had been hijacked by hackers and loaded with a backdoor that evaded the company's security checks. It wound up installed on more than 700,000 computers. On Wednesday, researchers at Cisco's Talos security division revealed that they've now analyzed the hackers' "command-and-control" server to which those malicious versions of CCleaner connected.
On that server, they found evidence that the hackers had attempted to filter their collection of backdoored victim machines to find computers inside the networks of 18 tech firms, including Intel, Google, Microsoft, Akamai, Samsung, Sony, VMware, HTC, Linksys, D-Link and Cisco itself. In about half of those cases, says Talos research manager Craig Williams, the hackers successfully found a machine they'd compromised within the company's network, and used their backdoor to infect it with another piece of malware intended to serve as a deeper foothold, one that Cisco now believes was likely intended for industrial espionage.2
"When we found this initially, we knew it had infected a lot of companies," says Williams. "Now we know this was being used as a dragnet to target these [companies] worldwide...to get footholds in companies that have valuable things to steal, including Cisco unfortunately."
A Wide Net
Cisco says it obtained a digital copy of the hackers' command-and-control server from an unnamed source involved in the CCleaner investigation. The server contained a database of every backdoored computer that had "phoned home" to the hackers' machine between September 12 and 16. That included over 700,000 PCs, just as Avast has said in the days since it first revealed its CCleaner debacle. (Initially the company put the number much higher, at 2.27 million.) But the database also showed a list of specific domains onto which the hackers sought to install their secondary malware payload, as well as which ones received that second infection.
The secondary payload targeted 18 companies in all, but Williams notes that some companies had more than one computer compromised, and some had none. He declined to say which of the targets had in fact been breached, but Cisco says it's alerted all the affected companies to the attack.
Williams also notes the target list Cisco found likely isn't comprehensive; it appears to have been "trimmed," he says. It may have included evidence of other targets, successfully breached or not, that the hackers had sought to infect with their secondary payload earlier in the month-long period when the corrupted version of CCleaner was being distributed. "It’s very likely they modified this through the monthlong campaign, and it’s almost certain that they changed the list around as they progressed and probably targeted even more companies," says Williams.
In an update post Thursday morning, Avast backed Cisco's findings, and confirmed that eight of the 18 known target companies had been breached by the hackers. But it also wrote that the total number of victim firms "was likely at least in the order of hundreds."1
That target list presents a new wrinkle in the unfolding analysis of the CCleaner attack, one that shifts it from what might have otherwise been a run-of-the-mill mass cybercrime scheme to a potentially state-sponsored spying operation that cast a wide net, and then filtered it for specific tech-industry victims. Cisco and security firm Kaspersky have both pointed out that the malware element in the tainted version of CCleaner shares some code with a sophisticated hacking group known as Group 72, or Axiom, which security firm Novetta named a Chinese government operation in 2015.
Cisco concedes that code reuse alone doesn't represent a definitive link between the CCleaner attack and Axiom, not to mention China. But it also notes that one configuration file on the attackers' server was set for China's time zone—while still acknowledging that's not enough for attribution.
Supply Chain Woes
For any company that may have had computers running the corrupted version of CCleaner on their network, Cisco warns that its findings mean merely deleting that application is no guarantee the CCleaner backdoor wasn't used to plant a secondary piece of malware on their network, one with its own, still-active command and control server. Instead, the researchers recommend that anyone affected fully restore their machines from backup versions prior to the installation of Avast's tainted security program. "If you didn’t restore your system from backup, you’re at high risk of not having cleaned this up," Williams says.
The exact dimensions of the CCleaner attack will likely continue to be redrawn, as analysis continues. But it already represents another serious example in the string of software supply-chain attacks that have recently rocked the internet. Two months earlier, hackers hijacked the update mechanism of the Ukrainian accounting software MeDoc to deliver a destructive piece of software known as NotPetya, causing massive damage to companies in Ukraine as well as in Europe and the United States. In that case, as in the CCleaner attack, victims installed |
great show each and every night is unparalleled, and that is reflected in the large amount of viewers who tune in — he frequently outrates the broadcast competition combined. We are proud of his accomplishments on and off camera and look forward to working with him for many years to come.”
In August, NBC extended Fallon’s contract an additional 3½ years to fall 2021.
If the October 2015 issue of Vanity Fair is any indication, Fallon is aware of his reputation.
In the magazine, he’s seen photographed alongside all the other men of late night — each of them holding a drink, save for Fallon.
“The Jimmy thing was a little interesting, because I don’t know that everyone got the memo that we were going to have drinks,” says Sam Jones, who photographed the TV hosts with bottles or glasses of liquor (and “The Late Late Show” host James Corden with a juice box, for giggles).
“We ended up shooting that a few different ways and... in the end he decided, ‘I don’t want to have a drink in the picture,’ ” says Jones.
The omission could speak volumes to those worried about Fallon.
But it doesn’t fix the inherent stresses of his high-ranking gig.
“Each one of those people... doesn’t really have anyone to share the pressures of the job with, or how difficult it is or how relentless it is,” says Jones.
“There’s a sort of loneliness to being a late night host.”Book Now for Next Week's Hillary Clinton Act of Spontaneity! by Mark Steyn • Sep 8, 2015 at 11:31 pm https://www.steynonline.com/7160/book-now-for-next-week-hillary-clinton-act On Tuesday night I checked in with Hannity on Fox News to chew over the latest developments on the Hillary front: "In 2008, the Democrats were told, 'Hillary is the heir presumptive. Let her get on with it and win the nomination.' And she loused it up. She defeated herself," Steyn said. "This time round, Joe Biden was told again, 'Hillary is the heir presumptive.' And she's loused it up again. And the fact is, neither he nor any other Democrat should just sit around just watching this slow motion train wreck." Aside from the new revelations about the server, and the remorseless move toward a full-blown criminal investigation, there remains the problem that Hillary is doing nothing to distract from the scandal: There is no campaign. So Sean and I discussed the bizarre announcement today that, following poll-testing, the candidate would be being more spontaneous and humorous in future. Breitbart News: Steyn said, "it's hilariously funny to have your campaign spokesman announce that you're planning to be more spontaneous. I mean, I gather that Hillary's director of spontaneity has announced that she's going to be spontaneous, this Thursday, 2:00 p.m., at Bud's Diner in Nashua, New Hampshire. So, if you're there...and you've undergone the background check, you'll get the chance to see Hillary being spontaneous, this Thursday." He added, "this is a postmodern campaign. The point about campaigning, in something like the New Hampshire primary, is that you encounter voters, and you persuade them to vote for you. They were a Bernie Sanders guy, but they go to a Hillary event and they're so stunned by her spontaneity, and her humor that they switch. With the Hillary campaign, you have to announce, before they'll let you into it, that you're pledging your lifelong allegiance to Hillary. So in other words the campaign has conceded that she is incapable of political persuasion." We also discussed another genius move by the campaign: Getting white liberal middle-class women at Clinton events to sing Negro spirituals with the word "Jesus" replaced by "Hillary". If this is to be a new campaign strategy, I suggested to Sean a couple of other hymns that might benefit from Hillarization: And she walks with me
And she talks with me
And she tells me poll-tested jokes... Why should Joe Biden let Mrs Clinton re-enact Hillary '08 even more ineptly? Notwithstanding their interchangeable hymnals, I hope Jesus' Second Coming goes better than Hillary's. Click below to watch: You can see the full interview here. ~As for that book of mine that Sean was kind enough to mention, that's my very latest - "A Disgrace to the Profession", the story of the 21st century's most famous graph and the damage it has done both to science and public policy. As we start our second week on sale, it's already in its fourth printing. But, if you no longer care for paper, it's also available in Kindle and Nook. We're still the Number One climatology bestseller, with our companion volume Climate Change: The Facts at Number Seven, and Michael E Mann's Dreary Predictions, down at Number 10. At Amazon Canada, we're in the Top 250, where Max Layton raves: "Mark Steyn has done an amazing amount of research, wittily presented as always. A must read!" At Amazon UK, Gerry Morrow calls it "An unputdownable put-down". ~On Wednesday I'll be starting the day with Dan & Amy at 560 WIND in Chicago, live at 8am Central. Later in the week I'll join Jim Lakely at Heartland, Ben Mathis at KickAss Politics, my old chums at Ricochet and, of course, Hugh Hewitt. © 2019 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc. All rights reserved.
No part of this website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied, modified or adapted, without the prior written consent of Mark Steyn Enterprises. If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club and you take issue with this article, then have at it in our comments section. receive the latest by email: subscribe to steynonline's free weekly mailing list enSCP-2711
Item #: SCP-2711
Object Class: Safe
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-2711 is stored in a waterproof compartment in Storage Unit-25, Site-148. Testing of SCP-2711 must be conducted on-site, away from any bodies of water. Related non-anomalous items are stored in Storage Unit-26.
Description: SCP-2711 is a large iron needle, 33 centimeters in length and 3 centimeters in diameter at its thickest. It does not show any signs of deterioration or rust.
SCP-2711's anomalous effect activates once it comes in contact with bodies of water of more than 20 liters in volume. SCP-2711 alters the affected body of water so that it takes on all of the physical properties of iron under the same temperature (except appearance) while retaining its chemical components. The affected water is hence referred to as SCP-2711-1.
The effect spreads at an initial speed of 20 liters per second and doubles every five minutes. The conversion process will stop once all of the water has been turned into SCP-2711-1. Water added at this point will not be affected. As long as there is more than 20 liters of SCP-2711-1 attached to SCP-2711, SCP-2711-1 will retain its current state. Otherwise, SCP-2711-1 will instantly turn back to normal water.
Two sets of inscriptions are found on SCP-2711:
The first set is confirmed to be in the same script used by SCP-2481-3, which is alleged to be the script used in Xia Dynasty. A deep strike crosses the text out.
伏羲之针，禹王复铸，定诸水、困凶兽、止洪灾。 The needle of Fuxi, reforged by King Yu to calm/still/solidify the waters, trap the fierce/ominous beasts and stop the floods.
The second set is confirmed to be in small seal script. Unlike the first set, the text is crudely engraved.
如意棒 Ruyi Bang/Stick that Adheres to One's Wishes
Addendum: SCP-2711 was found in the right paw of a non-anomalous rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta), embedded 2.3 meters below the surface of a lake on Mount Tongbai, Henan Province, China. The lake was converted into SCP-2711-1 at the time of discovery. The body of the rhesus macaque dates back to around 600 CE, but is well-preserved. The subject was found in an approximation of the Lotus Position. It wore the common attire of Buddhist monks of its time, but the clothing was heavily torn. Further examination reveals that the subject died of suffocation.
Upon the removal of SCP-2711, SCP-2711-1 turned back into lake water. The terrain quickly became unstable and the lake was destroyed by a mudslide. A damaged well was discovered under the lake during the subsequent clean-up. The well is made entirely of iron and is 66 meters deep. Broken chains and a lock composed of a beryllium-bronze alloy were discovered inside the well.If you watch Game of Thrones, or if you don't watch but do exist on the Internet, you probably have some sort of feelings about the Jon Snow–Daenerys Targaryen relationship. For the latter crowd, a quick catch-up: Kit Harington's Snow and Emilia Clarke's Targaryen had some major sexual tension all season, and just as they got together, viewers found out the two were aunt and nephew. Yep. Cue the most mixed emotions an incest plotline has ever created, and to top it off, we've now got an entire year to stew in it before the show returns next summer. That's the bad news. The good? The duo were cast to front Dolce & Gabbana's newest fragrance campaign back in March, and a slew of videos just landed to stir our thirst.
The design house has graced us with four promo videos for The One Eau de Parfum and The One for Men (both $67), both of which were shot in Italy. Clarke's video begins with her walking the streets of Naples. Someone gives her a bouquet of flowers, there's dancing, she eats a huge bowl of pasta. It feels a little bit like an idealized dream vacation. But, nope! Filmmaker Matteo Garrone shot the videos with city locals, so this is real-deal, genuine cultural warmth.
Beautiful, all very well and good, but with the memory of Jon Snow's butt still fresh, the Harington video is where it's at. Following the same concept, Harington walks through the city smiling more than he has ever and probably will ever on Game of Thrones. (No brooding here.) He waves at an incredibly lucky person. He double-kisses an older woman like he's known her for many years. He does that sexy dance-clapping thing; he is surrounded by a crowd of loving, happy-looking people, with pizza.
Sorry, but where was our invite to this pizza party in the streets of Italy? Where we can find out what Jon Snow smells like? Lost in the mail, we can only assume.
Dolce & Gabbana also released two behind-the-scenes videos from the making of the campaign. Major takeaways: The people of Naples are fantastic, and yeah, we're incredibly jealous.
These are both directors cuts, so in all likelihood, a campaign of Clarke and Harington together is probably on the way. (Otherwise, come on, missed opportunity of a lifetime.) The One for Men has been around since 2008, but Eau de Parfum is brand new, a combination of madonna lily, bergamot, and white peach that's rolling out in stores as we write.
Courtesy of brand
Courtesy of brand
The brand describes it as a "sensual scent," so fingers crossed we won't have to wait until 2019 to see sparks fly between Clarke and Harington. We'll take whatever we can get.
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-This 'Game of Thrones' Makeup Tutorial Parody Is the Most Extra in the Very Best WayImage caption The BBC drama based on Reginald Hill's novels began in 1996
The author of the Dalziel and Pascoe crime novels, Reginald Hill, has died at the age of 75.
His agent said Hill died peacefully at home in Cumbria on Thursday after a year long battle with cancer.
He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Pat, and two brothers, David and Desmond.
Ian Rankin, the author of the Rebus books, described Hill as a "fine writer and a great wit".
Hill was born in Hartlepool in 1936, where his father was playing professional football for the town's team, before moving to Cumbria with his family at the age of three.
He studied English at Oxford University and worked as a teacher but kept writing.
He eventually saw his first book, A Clubbable Woman, published in 1970.
'Great wit'
In 2010, the novel made the long list for the Lost Man Booker Prize which aimed to redress an anomaly which had meant books published in 1970 were not eligible.
The award was originally given for any book published in the previous year, but in 1971 it became an award for the best novel published that year.
In 1980 Hill gave up teaching to write full time.
The Dalziel and Pascoe crime novels found a wider audience when they were turned into a BBC television drama in 1996 featuring Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan.
The author of more than 40 books, Hill won the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger in 1995 for his lifetime contribution to crime writing.
Ian Rankin, the author of the Rebus books, paid tribute to him on Twitter.
He said Hill was: "A lovely man, fine writer, great wit. Great intelligence, humour and plotting; Falstaffian main character; literary sensibility - all found in Reginald Hill's Dalziel books."
Fellow crime writer Mark Billingham described him as "a wonderful writer and the loveliest of men. One of a kind."A canny Scots collector has amassed a hoard of more than 6000 empty beer tins.
Alex Drummond, 58, started collecting the used cans as a teenager and has gathered the vast collection over the course of 41 years.
The retired painter and decorator keeps the treasures in his spare room and attic, and has a number of special edition versions of well-known beers.
Mr Drummond, who lives in Kirkcaldy, Fife, said: “I started saving beer cans when I was about 17.
“I was having a drink with my dad one night and we put our empty cans on the mantle piece and it just grew from there, really.
“I’ve been acquiring cans for 41 years now and at last count I had well over 6,000.”
Mr Drummond has been offered more than £1,000 for a single can by a Swedish collector, but decided not to part with it.
He said: “The oldest that I have is a 1964 Tennants can. It even has a recipe on the back. They certainly don’t make them like that now.
“I would say that one is probably my favourite out of all my collection.
“I also have a limited edition Stella Artois can which was made to mark the solar eclipse a few year ago. It’s pure black and only 1,000 were produced at the time, so I’m lucky to have it.
“Collecting beer cans was hugely popular throughout the 1970s. In fact, it was the fastest growing collectible item of the decade.
“It’s really huge in America, they even have a convention similar to Comic Con.”
American Jeff Lebo claims to have the largest beer can collection in the world, with 83,000 stored in a custom-made house.
Mr Drummond’s may not yet have reached that scale, but it is still as much a way of life as a hobby.
“I am beginning to run out of space in my spare room,” he admitted.
“That’s why I’ve decided to put the majority of the cans in boxes and store them up in the attic but I could never throw them away.”We could have waited until it hit 1 million for the sake of the bigger headline, I suppose. But I wanted to say something: the success of zombie mod Day Z couldn’t have been predicted. It was a one off. A outlier. It’s one of those rare and beautiful times when a game design experiment explodes into a phenomenon. No one can plan for that to happen, not really. But I can predict one thing: the companies that do not support modding will never have a zombie mod sell hundreds of thousands of extra copies of their game.
I know that for companies trying to get a game out, it seldom seems worth putting out tools for people to mod. There’s the cost, for starters, and it’s not always even possible – especially if you are using certain kinds of middleware or something (and I know that from first-hand experience) – and then there’s the time it takes for people to get that toolset out there. Hell, it’s possible that the effort that goes in might never be appreciated. Might never get picked up and used by the players.
There’s a certain school of thought that looks at the lack of big total conversion mods, like there were in great waves after Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, and suggests that modding is “dead.” As usual with claims about the demise of a form, those claims start to look exaggerated when you look at what’s really going on. It’s something that we’re going to talk about in detail in the near future, but it’s arguable that mods are more interesting now than they have ever been. Just a quick glimpse at the Steam Workshop for Skyrim suggests that even though those grand overhauls are distant, the modding scene is far from idle.
For BIS, of course, the policy of supporting player-generated content and modification would have been a fundamental attraction even with Day Z. For that game the staples of other games – things like a single-player campaign – are almost incidental the toolset they provide. It’s something of a vindication that those tools have not only sold copies of the original game, years after release, but now look set to generate a new, standalone game.
Everyone else making games needs to look at that, and to consider that providing tools might be mean more than simply letting your community provide for itself, as Bethesda has done with The Elder Scrolls games, it might be the equivalent of buying a ticket in a very lucrative lottery. We might not get a new Counter-Strike every year, but that lottery is definitely still running.This is true art, friend. The amazing "brotato" (rhymes with potato, in a perfect world) has hacked together netbook components, an ancient keyboard and a 14.2-inch LCD into this classy case, dubbing the project "The Poor Man's Netbook." The box is running Windows XP, but he tested it out with Windows 7 and Mac OS X and it performed beautifully, except for the Bluetooth 2.1 module. The box is based on a Mini-ITX Intel D945GCLF2 Dual Core 1.6Ghz Atom motherboard, with 2GB of RAM, a 160GB HDD and 802.11n WiFi -- though you'll have to hunt down an outlet, there's no battery power here. The best news is that he's selling the whole conglomeration on eBay, perfect for completing that piece of horrible cyberpunk fiction you've been slaving over on your boringtop.[Thanks, Ryan]H. H. Asquith
Herbert Henry Asquith (generally known as H. H. Asquith), the second son of the two sons and three daughters of Joseph Dixon Asquith and his wife, Emily Willans Asquith, was born in Morley on 12th September 1852. His father was a wool merchant, supplying the local mills with top quality cloth from all over Europe. (1)
Asquith's biographer, Colin Matthew, has pointed out: "Two of his sisters died early, and his brother suffered a sports injury which stunted his growth; his father died when he was eight, from an intestine twisted while playing cricket. His mother was an invalid, with a heart condition and frequent bronchitis. The young Herbert Asquith soon of necessity developed the imperturbable, slightly withdrawn, self-sufficiency and good health which was his life's standby." (2)
The Asquith family were strong supporters of the Liberal Party. Asquith had a good relationship with both parents. He later described his mother as being a profoundly religious woman who was "a devoted and sagacious mother" who "made herself the companion and intimate friend of her children." (3)
After the death of his father in 1860, his grandfather, William Willans, took responsibility for the family, sending Asquith to Huddersfield College, and then in 1861 to the Fulneck Moravian School, near Leeds. He then went onto the City of London School. His mother moved to St Leonards, but Asquith remained in London and was "treated like an orphan" for the rest of his childhood. (4)
H. H. Asquith at University In November 1869, Asquith won a classical scholarship at Balliol College. While at Oxford University he came under the influence of Benjamin Jowett, his philosophy teacher. Asquith later commented to John Morley that Jowett's "talk is like one of those wines that have more bouquet than body." (5) Asquith was described as being someone with "effortless superiority" while others claimed it was a disguise for shyness: "I am hedged in and hampered in these ways by a kind of native reserve, of which I am not at all proud". To another of his friends he was "a man who had a plan of life well under control" with "a remarkable power of using every gift he possessed to full capacity." (6) Asquith was an outstanding student and eventually achieved a first-class honours degree. He also took an active role in politics and in 1874 he became president of the Oxford Union. While at university he made several important friends including Alfred Milner, Andrew C. Bradley, Thomas Herbert Warren, Charles Gore, William P. Ker, and William H. Mallock. (7)
Helen Asquith Asquith entered Lincoln's Inn to train as a barrister. He was called to the bar in June 1876. Asquith had fallen in love with Helen Melland when he had first met her at the age of fifteen in 1869. In September 1876, asked Dr. Frederick Melland for permission to marry his daughter. After a two month delay he replied: "I have the fullest conviction that your industry and ability will procure for you in due time that success in your profession which has attended you in your past career." (8) H. H. Asquith married Helen on 23rd August 1877. He later told a friend: "Her mind was clear and strong, but it was not cut in facets and did not flash lights, and no one would call her clever or intellectual. What gave her rare quality was her character, which everyone who knew her agrees was the most selfless and unworldly that they have ever encountered. She was warm, impulsive, naturally quick-tempered, and generous almost to a fault." (9) Over the next thirteen years Helen gave birth to five children: Raymond (1878), Herbert (1881), Arthur (1883), Violet (1887) and Cyril (1890). The couple were devoted to their children. Herbert Asquith pointed out that both his parents "allowed their children a full measure of liberty; they used the snaffle rather than the curb and their control was very elastic in nature." (10)
Asquith and the Liberal Party Asquith later wrote: "I was content with my early love, and never looked outside. So we settled down in a little suburban villa, and our children were born, and every day I went by train to the Temple, and sat and worked and dreamed in my chambers, and listened with feverish expectation for a knock on the door, hoping it might be a client with a brief. But years passed and he hardly ever came." (11) During this period wrote regular articles for The Spectator: "These articles... show his lifelong Liberalism early and clearly defined. They reflect a staunch radicalism tempered by realism (on condition that it worked from within the Liberal Party), a hostility to radical factionalists, and an admiration for party spirit." (12) Asquith warned about the dangers of the growth of socialism, something he described as "the English extreme left". (13) In 1885, Asquith's close friend, Richard Haldane, was elected as Liberal Party MP for East Lothian. He persuaded Asquith to apply for the vacant Liberal candidacy in the neighbouring consistency of East Fife. In 1886 William Gladstone proposed a Home Rule Bill that stated there should be a separate parliament for Ireland in Dublin and that there would be no Irish MPs in the House of Commons. The Irish Parliament would manage affairs inside Ireland, such as education, transport and agriculture. However, it would not be allowed to have a separate army or navy, nor would it be able to make separate treaties or trade agreements with foreign countries. (14) The Conservative Party opposed the measure. So did some members of the Liberal Party, led by Joseph Chamberlain, also disagreed with Gladstone's plan. Chamberlain main objection to Gladstone's Home Rule Bill was that as there would be no Irish MPs at Westminster, Britain and Ireland would drift apart. He added that this would be amounting to the start of the break-up of the British Empire. When a vote was taken, there were 313 MPs in favour, but 343 against. Of those voting against, 93 were Liberals. They became known as Liberal Unionists. (15) H. H. Asquith and Helen Asquith Gladstone responded to the vote by dissolving parliament rather than resign. During the 1886 General Election he had great difficultly leading a divided party. According to Colin Matthew: "So dedicated was Gladstone to the campaign that he agreed to break the habit of the previous forty years and cease his attempts to convert prostitutes, for fear, for the first time, of causing a scandal (Liberal agents had heard that the Unionists were monitoring Gladstone's nocturnal movements in London with a view to a press exposé)". (16) Asquith was a keen advocate of Home Rule and this was one of the reasons why he won his seat with a majority of only 376. In the election the number of Liberal MPs fell from 333 in 1885 to 196, though no party gained an overall majority. Gladstone resigned on 30th July. Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, once again became prime minister. Queen Victoria wrote him a letter where she said she always thought that his Irish policy was bound to fail and "that a period of silence from him on this issue would now be most welcome, as well as his clear patriotic duty." (17)
Member of Parliament Asquith's early years as an MP were marked by intense hard work as he tried to juggle his political commitments with the need to support his growing family from his earnings at the Bar. He did not make his maiden speech until 24th March 1887. Gladstone was impressed by his contribution and invited him to dinner. Gladstone told his friends that he considered Asquith to be a future leader of the Liberal Party. Although he spoke rarely in the House of Commons he developed a reputation for political oratory. (18) Asquith, as a good-looking and charming MP, was a much sought after dinner-party guest. Frances Horner commented: "We never thought any party complete without him." (19) In March, 1891, he found himself seated next to Margot Tennant, the vivacious twenty-seven-year-old youngest daughter of his fellow Liberal MP Sir Charles Tennant. Margot commented that she "was deeply impressed by his conversation and his clear Cromwellian face... he had a way of putting you not only at your ease but at your best when talking to him which is given to few men of note." (20) Asquith later commented that "Margot... took possession of me... The passion which comes, I suppose, to everyone once in life, visited and conquered me." (21) In the summer of 1891 the Asquiths had a holiday on the Isle of Arran. On 20th August, their son, Herbert Asquith, became feverish and Helen Asquith moved in to his room to nurse him. The following day Helen was taken ill. A doctor was called and he diagnosed typhoid and she died on 11th September. Herbert Henry Asquith wrote that night: "She died at nine this morning. So end twenty years of love and fourteen of unclouded union. I was not worthy of it, and God has taken her. Pray for me." (22) In the 1892 General Election held in July, Gladstone's Liberal Party won the most seats (272) but he did not have an overall majority and the opposition was divided into three groups: Conservatives (268), Irish Nationalists (85) and Liberal Unionists (77). Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, refused to resign on hearing the election results and waited to be defeated in a vote of no confidence on 11th August. Gladstone, now 84 years old, formed a minority government dependent on Irish Nationalist support. (23) Asquith was appointed as Gladstone's Home Secretary. On hearing the news he wrote to Margot Tennant. "Here I am, full from my earliest days of political ambition, still young, and just admitted to one of the best places in the Cabinet, and yet I undertake to say that there is hardly a man in London more profoundly depressed than I am today. You know why... What use to me... are honours, power, a career, if I am to be cut off from the hope and promise of all that is purest and highest in my life?" (24) The reason for this depression was that Margot had rejected his proposal of marriage. Asquith was twelve years older than Margot and she was in love with another man. However, she eventually changed her mind and they were married on 10th May 1894. Margot wrote in her diary five days after her marriage to Asquith: "I realized that in some ways with all his tact and delicacy, all his intellect and bigness, all his attributes, he had a common place side to him which nothing could alter... It is not in his nature to feel the subtlety of love making, the dazzle and fun of it, the tiny almost untouchable fellowship of it... He has passion, devotion, self-mastery, but not the nameless something that charms and compels and receives and combats a woman's most fastidious advances." (25) Margot later confessed that she had been wrong to doubt the wisdom of marrying Asquith: "I can truly say no words of mine today can at all, describe how differently things have turned out for me!!!! My in-loveness (for 9 years) with Peter Flower - my love for Evan Charteris, my hundred and one loves and friendships are like so much waste paper! My criticisms of Henry are pathetically stupid, narrow and crass. The fact is I was... a sort of drunkard of all social caresses up to the moment of marriage." (26) Over the next few years Margot had five children but only Elizabeth Asquith (1897–1945) and Anthony Asquith (1902–1968) survived as three of them died at birth. Margot had a reputation for speaking her mind and relations with her step-children were difficult. This was especially true of her dealings with Raymond Asquith, the eldest, and Violet Bonham Carter, the only daughter. William Gladstone and John Morley concentrated on Irish Home Rule, whereas Henry Asquith and his under-secretary, Herbert Gladstone, the prime minister's son, were put in charge of important aspects of the Liberals' programme of domestic reform. Asquith's position was difficult, for the Liberals in the Commons had only 272 MPs to the combined Unionist vote of 314, and thus relied on the Irish home-rulers for their majority. "It soon became clear that the Unionists intended to use their own majority in the Lords not merely to stop home rule but to spoil whatever items of the Liberals' legislative programme they disliked". (27) The Irish Home Rule Bill was introduced on 13th February 1893. William Gladstone personally took the bill through the "committee stage in a remarkable feat of physical and mental endurance". After eighty-two days of debate it was passed in the House of Commons on 1st September by 43 votes (347 to 304). Gladstone wrote in his diary, "This is a great step. Thanks be to God." (28) On 8th September, 1893, after four short days of debate, the House of Lords rejected the bill, by a vote of 419 to 41. "It was a division without precedent, both for the size of the majority and the strength of the vote. There were only 560 entitled to vote, and 82 per cent of them did did so, even though there was no incentive of uncertainty to bring remote peers to London." (29) Gladstone considered resigning and calling a new general election on the issue. However, he suspected that he could not mount a successful electoral indictment of the House of Lords on Irish Home Rule. He therefore pushed ahead with the Workmen's Compensation Act, a measure that was extremely unpopular with employers. Asquith was given responsibility for taking the bill through Parliament. The act dealt with the right of workers for compensation for personal injury. It replaced the Employer's Liability Act 1880, which required the injured worker the right to sue the employer and put the burden of proof on the employee. (30) In the autumn of 1893 Asquith prepared a Welsh Disestablishment and Disendowment Bill. In Parliament the measure was opposed by Conservative Party, who hated the slightest interference with the privileges of the established church. It was also attacked by the radical wing of the Liberal Party, who felt that the legislation did not go far enough. The leader of this group was David Lloyd George, who wanted the church stripped of the bulk of its wealth. Asquith complained to the Chief Whip, Tom Ellis, that he was far too lenient with Lloyd George's "underhand and disloyal" tactics. (31) In December 1893, Gladstone came into conflict with his own party over the issue of defence spending. The Conservative Party began arguing for an expansion of the Royal Navy. Gladstone made it clear that he was opposed to this policy. William Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was willing to increase naval expenditure by £3 million. John Poyntz Spencer, the First Lord of the Admiralty, agreed with Harcourt. Gladstone refused to budge on the issue and wrote that he would not "break to pieces the continuous action of my political life, nor trample on the tradition received from every colleague who has ever been my teacher" by supporting naval rearmament. (32) Conservatives continued to block the government's legislation. After accepting the Lords' amendments to the Local Government Bill "under protest" he decided to resign. In his last speech to the House of Commons on 1st March, 1894, he suggested that the time had come to change the rules of the British Parliament so that the House of Lords would no longer have the power to refuse to pass Bills which had been passed by the House of Commons. (33) Archibald Primrose, Lord Rosebery, became the new prime minister. His period in power was only short as the Liberal Party was defeated in the 1895 General Election. Rosebery resigned the leadership of the Liberal Party in October 1896. Asquith was seen by many as his natural successor but he rejected the offer as he did not have a private income and could not afford to give up his income from his work as a lawyer. (34) The job went instead to Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Asquith was convinced that he would eventually replace Campbell-Bannerman, as he was sixty-two years old and fifteen years his senior. He expected his financial situation to improve and in a couple of years time he would be ready to take over the leadership. As Margot Asquith pointed out: "Campbell-Bannerman is not young or very strong and is not likely to prove a formidable long-term rival." (35)
1902 Education Act On 24th March 1902, Arthur Balfour presented to the House of Commons an Education Bill that attempted to overturn the 1870 Education Act that had been brought in by William Gladstone. It had been popular with radicals as they were elected by ratepayers in each district. This enabled nonconformists and socialists to obtain control over local schools. The new legislation abolished all 2,568 school boards and handed over their duties to local borough or county councils. These new Local Education Authorities (LEAs) were given powers to establish new secondary and technical schools as well as developing the existing system of elementary schools. At the time more than half the elementary pupils in England and Wales. For the first time, as a result of this legislation, church schools were to receive public funds. (48) Nonconformists and supporters of the Liberal and Labour parties campaigned against the proposed act. David Lloyd George led the campaign in the House of Commons as he resented the idea that Nonconformists contributing to the upkeep of Anglican schools. It was also argued that school boards had introduced more progressive methods of education. "The school boards are to be destroyed because they stand for enlightenment and progress." (49) In July, 1902, a by-election at Leeds demonstrated what the education controversy was doing to party fortunes, when a Conservative Party majority of over 2,500 was turned into a Liberal majority of over 750. The following month a Baptist came near to capturing Sevenoaks from the Tories and in November, 1902, Orkney and Shetland fell to the Liberals. That month also saw a huge anti-Bill rally held in London, at Alexandra Palace. (50) Despite the opposition the |
fully portrays the evolution process and confuses many children who come to see it. An airplane flying with the banner "Thou Shalt Not Lie" was seen over the museum on its opening day. Conventional science says the universe is 14 billion years old and there are millions of years separating dinosaurs and humans in evolution history. People were lucky to find dinosaur fossils, let alone meet live dinosaurs even in the ancient times. Dinosaurs (Latin Dinosauria) these are extinct animals, consisting of multiple super orders of the reptilian class, lived on the planet during the period from 225 to 65 million years before (in Mesozoic era). The superorder of Dinosaurs is related to the subclass Archosauria and divided into the Saurischia and Ornithischia orders. Apparently, only the findings of the fossil remains of Dinosaurs served as a base for the creation of the Myth on dragons. The term "Dinosaur": The word "Dinosaur" is formed from two words: from the Greek deinos - terrible, almighty, and strange and saura "lizard". The term was coined in 1842 by an English biologist Richard Owen. Origin: The appearance of the first Dinosaurs Archosauria, in the course of nature, was commemorated by a massive (but not totally) extinction of the therapsid, superior forms of which are according to their organization very near to single pass mammals and to some assumptions they had mammary glands and fur. Behavior: Some of the dinosaurs acquired social behavior. At the present moment most of the earlier dinosaurs are Psittacosaurus, which lived 130 100 million years ago. The discoveries permitted to make a conclusion, that already for the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period a parental instinct existed. Extinction: According to one of the hypothesis, dinosaurs were extinct because of a global cataclysm, which possibly was presented itself as the falling of huge meteorites. The latest and more accurate discovery, however, denied the given hypothesis. According to the new statistics, this catastrophe took place after that, as the dinosaurs died, and their death was subjected to high the volcanic activity of the planets, as a result of which in those days there was a high content of arsenic in the air. Probably not any other living beings which lived on the Earth quickened the imagination more than dinosaurs. In the duration of around 150 million years they dominated on the land and were the biggest vertebrates in the ecological niche, developing in a wide range of forms, and inhabited in every continent. Possibly because of which they frequently had freakish forms possibly because of which they sometimes had grown to such huge sizes, and possibly because of which after long ruling the Earth they suddenly disappeared, apparently, with out traces, all these added to the attraction of scientists as well as to the public to the group of Dinosauria. Such as the wonderful dinosaurs, even the facts must be qualified. It's true that many of the dinosaurs actually had fairly strange forms, but were there among them at least some unidentified according to the exterior, of let us say, the giraffe or elephant? It's true that most of them really had grown to extremely sizes (and even enormous sizes), but there wasn't even one dinosaur, which could even compete with the size of a small baleen whale. Actually it would not be possible physiologically for an animal on land to be more than 100 tons (The legs would be so massive touching each other without leaving any space between them for the body!). Mostly dinosaurs were living beings of a medium size, equivalent to the size of a big mammal of the present days. Finally regarding the extinction with out traces, it is again a mistake. According to the believers and some paleontologists, some small insectivorous or carnivorous dinosaurs really survived the big Mesozoic extinction and still are with us today. They are called Birds. In some ecological niches dinosaurs did not invade. They never established in the lower terrestrial and subterranean vertebral niche, which was already engaged by mammals and lizards, but not (contrary to the popular theory) in the marine or aquatic habitat. They were not there in the air too; however, if birds are their descendents, then they acclimated to air and to such a success, that its descendents are still the most numerous and various out of all quadruped animals even for today.When we think about the future of the Scajaquada Expressway, there have been some people, like Matt Ricchiazzi, who have been outspoken in keeping all options on the table, including a parkway free of cars. Despite how ludicrous that idea sounds to some people, there are some cities out there that are actually considering this type of progressive move to a car-less culture. In fact, the German town of Hamburg has a 20-year plan to do just such a thing. There is a movement to reclaim lands that have been previously destroyed by road systems. You can read about this fascinating plan in Raw for Beauty. According to R4B, the move will create 17,000 acres of green space that will literally encompass 40% of the city.
Obviously the DOT/City is not going to consider anything of this nature for Buffalo, but this type of radical thinking does foreshadow ways that we can reclaim our city for the people, not for cars trying to get from one place to another in the quickest amount of time.
Somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten our priorities. We have been fed a lot of ‘Robert Mosian’ BS for decades. Now that we’re so used to how everything is operating, we’ve lost touch with what’s important in our urban environments. If you look at old photos of Buffalo, the way it was originally designed, with the beautiful Olmsted park system running through it, and around it, you will see what I mean. That was real progress… not the remnants we are left with today.
Cars are ‘where it’s at’ for now… but we must begin to put people first eventually.The Ghostbusters 2 Reference That Could Have Set Up The Perfect Sequel By Dirk Libbey Random Article Blend Ghostbusters 2 actually set up the perfect opportunity to make a third film in the franchise this year.
If you remember 1989’s World of the Psychic. In the "episode" we see in the film, he has two psychics on his show, each predicting a different date for the end of the world. One of the psychics believes the world will end on New Year’s Eve of the current year. It turns out this psychic prediction isn’t that far off as that is the date when the Ghostbusters end up doing battle with Viggo the Carpathian at the end of the movie. The world surely would have ended if not for the Ghostbusters. So if one psychic was so close, maybe the other one could be as well.
Her projected date for the end of the world? February 14, 2016. Valentine’s Day, bummer.
As a user on
End of the world related or not, we will be getting a new Ghostbusters movie this July with Paul Feig handling both the writing and directing duties. The new busting team consists of
Hopefully, the world won’t end next month so we’ll actually get to see the new Ghostbusters in action. Just to be safe though, maybe you should make your plans to see When we learned that the Ghostbusters franchise would be returning in the form of a reboot instead of a sequel, many fans were bummed. After years of teasing a third film in the franchise, with the original, much-loved characters, it now appears that will never happen. And now it looks like that may have been a shame asactually set up the perfect opportunity to make a third film in the franchise this year.If you remember 1989’s Ghostbusters 2 (and you’ll be forgiven if you’ve made a concerted effort to forget it), when we first meet Bill Murray’s character, Peter Venkman, he’s hosting a television show called. In the "episode" we see in the film, he has two psychics on his show, each predicting a different date for the end of the world. One of the psychics believes the world will end on New Year’s Eve of the current year. It turns out this psychic prediction isn’t that far off as that is the date when the Ghostbusters end up doing battle with Viggo the Carpathian at the end of the movie. The world surely would have ended if not for the Ghostbusters. So if one psychic was so close, maybe the other one could be as well.Her projected date for the end of the world? February 14, 2016. Valentine’s Day, bummer.As a user on Reddit points out, this could have made for a great premise for a third film starring the original cast. Nearly 30 years after the Ghostbusters successfully averted one world ending catastrophe they are called on to do it again. It would have made for a fantastic connection to the previous film. Of course, there are a number of reasons that a third film in the franchise could never happen. Bill Murray has made it perfectly clear that he had zero interest in reprising his role, plus with the death of Harold Ramis it just would have been near impossible to make a third movie great without one of the people who was integral to both the cast and the writing. Still, it’s a fun idea for a movie. Check out the full scene below.End of the world related or not, we will be getting a newmovie this July with Paul Feig handling both the writing and directing duties. The new busting team consists of Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon.Hopefully, the world won’t end next month so we’ll actually get to see the new Ghostbusters in action. Just to be safe though, maybe you should make your plans to see Deadpool early. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to top“If they have the staying power, they can camp there all winter,” Mr. Jenisch said. That attitude contrasts with that of the authorities in cities like New York, Oakland or Boston, where the police have evicted protesters from public space, and also with other financial centers in Europe.
In Zurich, for example, police cleared an encampment in November, arresting 31 people who resisted, according to Reuters. Earlier this month, police in London sent a letter to local businesses that appeared to link members of the Occupy movement with terrorist groups, according to the Guardian and other newspapers.
The Frankfurt encampment of about 50 tents is not exactly a picture of German order. The residents have trampled much of the small park to mud. Several sawed-off oil drums, apparently used for fires, lie about. Atop a knoll, someone has built a sculpture out of bent bicycle frames, toy dolls and empty beer bottles.
But there have been no arrests of Occupy Frankfurt activists, and residents of the camp described the local police more as allies than antagonists. A 42-year-old man who would give his name only as Jay, and said he was originally from North Carolina, described how the police had intervened when a group of rightist youths started shouting insults and trying to provoke a fight.
“The way I see it, they don’t bother, they protect,” Jay said, as rain began to drum on the plastic tarp covering the outdoor kitchen, where he was helping to serve a communal breakfast of donated bagels and peanut butter. “We have never had a problem with the police.”
Likewise, the Frankfurt police have never had a beef with the protesters, said Manfred Vonhausen, a police spokesman. “The people there have been totally calm,” he said.
The activists chose the site next to the E.C.B. to protest what they consider the bank’s aloofness from the democratic process and the austerity it is helping to impose on indebted countries like Greece. But the protesters do not seem to be very aware of the central bank’s policy actions, like its rate cut last week.
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Leftist movements have a long history in Europe, and the German police are used to dealing with neo-Nazis, extreme-left “Autonomen” and other groups with much more of a hang for violence than the Frankfurt campers, who do not even rate a permanent police presence.
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“The U.S.A. is not as used as the Europeans to dealing with these movements,” said a 50-year-old Occupy Frankfurt resident who would identify himself only as Uwe. He was managing an information stand fashioned from plastic tarps and wooden freight pallets, where passers-by could pick up leaflets and perhaps make a donation to help pay for portable toilets and other camp infrastructure. The protesters have been careful not to obstruct heavily traveled walkways that lead through the park from a nearby streetcar stop.
A few minutes later, Uwe, wearing a rumpled red overcoat, assumed the role of tour guide for a group of students in their last year of secondary school. He lit a hand-rolled cigarette as the students gathered around him in a semicircle, then described how the activists had rigged up a computer server in one of the tents.
“Very interesting,” said Nikolay Schiljahin, one of the students. A classmate, Sandro Kaufmann, said he agreed with protesters that “banks have too much power” but he was not quite ready to join the cause. “They need to form their arguments better,” Mr. Kaufmann said.
There was a list of demands on the Occupy Frankfurt Web site, www.occupyfrankfurt.de, but it was removed after some people complained it did not reflect the consensus of the group. Now the Web site says simply, “We are a community with many different ideas and goals, that nevertheless is in agreement that we want to set limits on the power of capitalism, money, banks, markets and governments.”
“The course of action looks different according to the individual member,” the Web site adds.
But the activists are resolute in their rejection of violence. This month, after a letter bomb was sent to Josef Ackermann, the chief executive of Deutsche Bank, Occupy Frankfurt issued a press release within hours condemning the attempted attack. Mr. Ackermann’s office is in a high-rise building a short walk from the Occupy Frankfurt site.
Though the headquarters of the European Central Bank looms over the site, the protesters have made no attempt to obstruct its business. When the bank’s governing council met in early December, a lone protester wearing a mask handed out leaflets near the bank entrance.
The camp generated a flurry of news coverage when it first appeared, but it has largely disappeared from the pages of German newspapers. Anti-capitalist movements are not really news in Germany, where the Left Party, with roots in the East German Communist regime, has seats in Parliament.
Residency in the park, part of the Taunus Anlage, a green ring that surrounds the central business district, also seems to have dwindled. Though there are about 50 tents, residents concede that some but not all are still occupied overnight. City officials counted only 20 people outdoors at the site one evening this week, but did not attempt to check how many more people might have been inside tents.
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Still, the movement seems to have more general appeal than the traditional protest groups. It has served as the focal point for weekend protest marches that have drawn thousands of people.
“Some of the Saturday demonstrations have been the biggest in Frankfurt for years,” said Harald Fiedler, chairman of the Frankfurt branch of the Confederation of German Trade Unions, which has donated a large tent to the protesters and provided other support. “They speak to a broader public.”
Mr. Fiedler predicted that the movement would gain new momentum when the weather turned warm again. At least some protesters are determined to tough it out until then. “It can get cold,” Jay conceded. “But you got to adapt.”Morgan Stanley said Thursday that it plans to deepen its presence in Baltimore, hiring 800 more people over the next four years and opening a second office in the heart of downtown.
The expansion, which would nearly double the firm's footprint in the city, comes with a $5 million package of state and city incentives. It's the third round of taxpayer-financed subsidies the New York-based financial services giant has received since it opened an office in Baltimore in 2003.
State and city leaders hailed the plans as a message from a major company that Baltimore is a good place to do business. They said the new white-collar jobs will build on economic momentum already underway, as companies including Comcast relocate or add jobs in the city.
Gov. Larry Hogan called the Morgan Stanley announcement "a tremendous win."
Employment in Maryland's financial activities sector peaked in 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Baltimore, the number of jobs in the field has fallen by nearly 50 percent since 2000.
Growth from a high-profile company like Morgan Stanley could catch the attention of similar businesses as well as support the ones that remain, said Karyl B. Leggio, a professor of finance at Loyola University Maryland's Sellinger School of Business.
"We are rebuilding our core as a financial services city, and that's good because that attracts other companies to think about Baltimore as well," she said.
The Morgan Stanley deal is one of several recent incentive packages from the state, some of which have been criticized as corporate welfare.
The administration announced last month a roughly $60 million mix of loans, grants and tax credits for Marriott International to retain its 3,500-person head count in Maryland and build a new headquarters. The administration also sought to extend a $20 million forgivable loan to Northrop Grumman, which is tied to the company's maintaining its 10,000-person workforce and investing $100 million, but that has been held up by General Assembly leaders.
CAPTION A Virginia seafood business owner has been sentenced to nearly four years in jail and a $15,000 fine for crab fraud. A Virginia seafood business owner has been sentenced to nearly four years in jail and a $15,000 fine for crab fraud. CAPTION Clyde Doughty Jr., Vice President, Athletics at Bowie State University, discusses the move by CIAA to Baltimore in 2021 with Bowie head basketball coaches Shadae Swan, left, and Darrell Brooks, right. (Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun video) Clyde Doughty Jr., Vice President, Athletics at Bowie State University, discusses the move by CIAA to Baltimore in 2021 with Bowie head basketball coaches Shadae Swan, left, and Darrell Brooks, right. (Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun video)
The latest Morgan Stanley incentive is smaller by comparison.
The company employs more than 55,000 people globally and about 1,000 people in Baltimore. Like other financial companies trying to rein in costs, it has worked to shift employees to less expensive locations, like Baltimore with its relatively low cost of living, a strategy leaders highlighted on a recent call with investors.
The expansion in Baltimore is tied to consolidation elsewhere at Morgan Stanley, said William H. Cole IV, head of the Baltimore Development Corp. He said it's one of the reasons Morgan Stanley chose to open a second office at the Bank of America building at 100 S. Charles Street.
In total, Morgan Stanley expects to occupy more than 250,000 square feet of office space in Baltimore.
In addition to its Harbor Point offices, the company is leasing about 69,000 square feet at 100 S. Charles Street — two floors — with the option to add more, said Abdi Mahamedi of New York-based Carlyle Development Group, which bought the property last year with plans for a major renovation that would orient the building to Pratt Street.
He said he expects Morgan Stanley to start moving in next fall.
"We believe in Baltimore's resurgence and renaissance," Mahamedi said. "We think it has a good future and this … will give this part of town a lot of credibility."
The expansion adds to hiring plans Morgan Stanley announced several years ago when it was in line to receive more than $6 million in state and city incentives linked to its new building in Harbor Point.
At the time, the company said it expected to employ 1,500 people in Baltimore by the end of 2018, but those goals were scaled back amid the slow recovery from the economic downturn. The incentive package also was reduced, said Karen Glenn Hood, a spokeswoman for the state Commerce Department.
Through a spokeswoman, Morgan Stanley officials declined to be interviewed.
Baltimore is the company's largest base in North America outside of New York, according to its website. Its Baltimore office handles operations, compliance and technology, and the expansion here could add divisions such as trade support.
"Morgan Stanley has established a strong footprint in Baltimore over the past decade, successfully expanding our local operations in partnership with the city," Sheila Welch, managing director, head of global workforce strategy at Morgan Stanley, said in a statement. "The firm is pleased to move forward with this new strategic initiative and continue growing our presence in the area."
Shannon Landwehr, president of the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore, helped establish Morgan Stanley's Baltimore office. She said the company, which went to the Economic Alliance for data when it started scouting for a location, likes the workers it has been able to recruit from local universities.
"Morgan Stanley is incredibly strategic about these decisions and certainly looked at all options," she said. "They see this as a place where they can do business, grow business. They like the workforce here, and they want to continue to be a part of this community."
The incentives for this expansion include a $4.5 million state grant, contingent on the company's investing $10 million, hiring at least 800 people by 2020 and keeping those employees for at least five years, Glenn Hood said. The city is also providing a $500,000 loan that can be forgiven if the company meets hiring targets by 2020.
"Economic development is a competitive process," Glenn Hood said.
Morgan Stanley, which reported about $5 billion in profit in the first nine months of the year, is also eligible for numerous tax credits, including for job creation and locating in an Enterprise Zone. The credits are likely to be worth at least $800,000, but a more precise estimate was not available.
Not including the tax credits, the company is in line to receive about $6,250 on a per-job basis.
Leggio said she expects the local economy to more than make up the taxpayer costs of the Morgan Stanley deal through the new jobs.
"The whole purpose of … incentives is to make us more competitive with other options that companies have, and a company like Morgan Stanley has virtually any city across the country to choose from," she said.The 2016 general election in Ireland was the first where legal gender quotas for candidate selection applied, with the election producing a 40 per cent increase in the number of female parliamentarians (TDs) elected. Fiona Buckley assesses how Ireland has implemented gender quotas and their impact on women’s candidacy and electoral success in the 2016 election.
In July 2012 the Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann, passed the Electoral (Amendment) (Political Funding) Act. The act includes a candidate selection provision which incentivises political parties to select at least 30 per cent female candidates and at least 30 per cent male candidates. If not, political parties surrender 50 per cent of the state funding they receive to run their operations. The threshold will increase to 40 per cent from 2023 onwards.
The act was adopted in response to Ireland’s poor record on women’s political representation. Up to and including the 2011 general election, the proportion of women in Dáil Éireann never exceeded 16 per cent. This was despite significant socio-cultural change over the past thirty years and the presence of a proportional electoral system, factors usually associated with facilitating women’s representation.
The introduction of gender quotas for the 2016 general election saw a significant improvement on the low levels of female candidacy associated with previous electoral contests. A total of 551 candidates contested the election – 388 men (70.4 per cent) and 163 women (29.6 per cent). This was the highest number and proportion of women to ever contest a general election in Ireland and represented a 90 per cent increase on the number of female candidates who contested the previous general election in 2011.
Despite reservations about where they would ‘find’ female candidates, a review of candidacy rates across the political parties show that all parties surpassed the 30 per cent threshold, as shown in the table below. Left-leaning parties were more likely to run higher proportions of female candidates than those on the centre right. The number and proportion of women standing as independent candidates also increased, suggesting that the discourse surrounding gender quotas and women in politics may have had a diffusion effect, encouraging women outside of party politics to put themselves forward as independents.
Table: Women’s candidacy in the 2011 and 2016 general elections
However, the implementation of gender quotas was not without controversy. Due to the decentralised nature of candidate selection in Ireland, tensions emerged between central party headquarters and the constituency level party over the implementation of gender directives. Tensions of this nature are not new in Irish elections. Party headquarters and constituency level parties are regularly at odds over informal candidate selection requirements such as the geographical spread of candidates and the number of candidates to be selected. But what the formal gender provision exposed is the masculinised nature of the concept of local party democracy.
As Elin Bjarnagard and Meryl Kenny have previously demonstrated, decentralised selection processes tend to favour well networked and resourced candidates, which are usually men. The application of gender quotas saw tensions emerge between the ‘favoured local son’ and the so-called ‘quota’ woman. In the Longford-Westmeath constituency, members of the Fianna Fáil party threatened to veto the selected female candidate. In Dublin Central, a male member of the Fianna Fáil party took a High Court constitutional challenge against gender quotas. The case was dismissed as it was deemed the plaintiff did not have locus standi but demonstrated the tensions that emerged as a result of the implementation of gender quotas.
A review of the candidate selection conventions across the four main political parties of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and Labour shows that out of a total of 155 selection conventions of which 54 were contested, just eleven gender directives were issued. In addition, 20 women were added-on by party headquarters (as were 14 men). Thus, the majority of female party candidates came through convention without the use of a gender directive. The main achievement of gender quotas was that it instilled a cultural change within political parties whereby political parties embraced gendered recruitment processes, encouraging and equipping women to put themselves forward for election.
Masculinised cultural legacies, both internal and external to political parties, resulted in claims that ‘unqualified’ and ‘unmeritorious’ women were being selected by political parties to fill the quota and avoid the financial consequences associated with non-compliance. However male meritocracy and experience were rarely questioned.
What exactly ‘meritocracy’ means in terms of the selection of Dáil candidates is yet to be answered, and may mean something different to party members, party leaders and voters. If merit is measured solely by electoral experience, then research that I have conducted on female candidates with Claire McGing dispels the myth that quotas resulted in the selection of ‘unqualified’ women. The vast majority of female candidates, like their male counterparts, served extensive political apprenticeships.
In total, 88, or 54 per cent, of women candidates held seats at national and/or local level at some point in their careers, and 84 (52 per cent) of the candidates were current office-holders at the time of the election: 25 were TDs, ten were senators and 49 were councillors. Looking at the larger parties, 85 per cent of Fine Gael’s female candidates were electorally-experienced, 82 per cent in Fianna Fáil, 78 per cent in Sinn Féin and 100 per cent in Labour.
All bar one of the women selected through a gender directive was a current office-holder. The woman who was not was a former councillor and Dáil and European candidate. Of the 20 women added to the ticket by party headquarters, 14 (70 per cent) had prior electoral experience: 11 current councillors, two former councillors and another who narrowly missed out on a seat in the 2014 local elections.
The results of the election show that a total of 35 women were elected, 16 incumbents and 19 new female TDs. This represents a 40 per cent increase on the number of women TDs elected in 2011, and 22 per cent of Dáil Éireann now consists of women, the highest proportion of women deputies in the history of the state. Women make up 13.6 per cent of Fianna Fáil TDs, 21.7 per cent of independent TDs, 22 per cent of Fine Gael TDs, 26.1 per cent of Sinn Féin TDs, 28.6 per cent of Labour party TDs, 33.3 per cent of AAA-PBP TDs, 50 per cent of Green party TDs and 66.6 per cent of Social Democrats TDs. Overall, women candidates won almost 25 per cent of the first preference votes in the election, compared with 16 per cent in 2011.
However, some female candidates reported that where they ran on a dual ticket with a male party colleague, the local party organisation largely concentrated its resources and efforts around the male candidate. These reports suggest that informal masculinised legacies within political parties remain, posing a challenge to the effectiveness of gender quotas. This is indicative of continuing resistance to affirmative action. It is likely to take a few electoral cycles before the gender quota is fully imbedded into the political system and this resistance is diluted.
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Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
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About the author
Fiona Buckley – University College Cork
Fiona Buckley is a Lecturer in the Department of Government in University College Cork. She is on Twitter @fionamaybuckleyAccess to the Beta will be closing on November 22nd.
After November 22nd the opportunity to join the Beta will no longer be available for new players, but the Beta backers can continue to test (and play!) the game until the release of the game and beyond. All Beta backers will continue getting builds to test and play up until the final release.
Today we want to announce one of those benefits.
In Elite: Dangerous there will be areas of the game that will not be immediately accessible. Players may have to build a reputation with the governing faction in order to be given a permit to visit an area under their jurisdiction.
The Solar system, which is the star system of the birth of humanity, is restricted in this way. In the year 3300 humanity's homeworld has become a rich playground for the successful, the wealthy, and the powerful and famous. And of course, as a Beta backer, you belong in that set. All visiting commanders will need a permit, granted by The Federation in order to visit Sol or anywhere in the Solar system. However, all Alpha and Beta backers will be given an automatic permit, without having to first earn a reputation with The Federation. (For those of you whose allegiances lie elsewhere this could be a very useful benefit indeed!). Being a Beta backer extends far beyond getting early access to the game. All Beta (and Alpha) backers have access to the beta forums and we will continue to support Alpha and Beta backers with additional benefits and special offers in the future as a thank you for the early support you have given us.Today we want to announce one of those benefits.In Elite: Dangerous there will be areas of the game that will not be immediately accessible. Players may have to build a reputation with the governing faction in order to be given a permit to visit an area under their jurisdiction.The Solar system, which is the star system of the birth of humanity, is restricted in this way. In the year 3300 humanity's homeworld has become a rich playground for the successful, the wealthy, and the powerful and famous. And of course, as a Beta backer, you belong in that set. All visiting commanders will need a permit, granted by The Federation in order to visit Sol or anywhere in the Solar system. However, all Alpha and Beta backers will be given an automatic permit, without having to first earn a reputation with The Federation. (For those of you whose allegiances lie elsewhere this could be a very useful benefit indeed!).Bell’s Oberon is already available in 16oz cans, and now 12oz cans as well. Just in time for the first wave of oppressive heat are 12 packs of the popular summer wheat ale.
“Cans can go more places than glass and it’s a much more convenient packaging option – we believe our fans will really enjoy this new option,” said Laura Bell, Bell’s Vice President.
Bell’s Oberon is already available in bottles (6 packs, 12 packs), mini-kegs, and 16oz can 4-packs. 12oz cans are now available in 12 packs. Additionally, the brewery recently launched Bell’s new Spigelau glass, designed for wheat beers.
Style: American Wheat Ale
Release: June 2015
Distribution: All Bell’s Distribution states.
Oberon is available year round in Florida, Arizona, southern California, southern Alabama and Puerto Rico. Image via Bell’s Brewery.On paper, the 2016 incoming football recruits should be one of the strongest groups in years. New facilities, a program starting to turn the corner, and limited spots should all add up to a high caliber Buff commit. But that only works if you have a commit. As of right now, the Colorado Buffaloes are sitting on a goose egg, with zero incoming high school seniors pledging themselves to the program. Jaime Uyeyama wrote a concerning article for SBNation's very own Pacific Takes, though I will stay away from doom and gloom. As Uyeyama's title says, CU is not alone on Zero Commit Island. Iowa State also does not have a pledge for the class of 2016, and although it's not great company to be in (I'm sure they would say the same), it's nice to know that the Buffs are not alone in their struggle.
There are a few explanations for why there have been no commits thus far, but none of them really explain the whole issue. One of the more popular reasons being thrown around is the limited number of scholarships. the Buffs are scheduled to have 10 open spots for this upcoming class, with 9 scholarship seniors and Markeis Reed leaving the program. That number may continue to creep up as a few other players leave their spot on the team open, but as of right now, only 10 positions are available. This has a few effects. First, the amount of kids that the assistant coaches can offer goes down tremendously. With only 10 spots, all of the coaches are going to hold on to their first option for as long as possible, as the margin for error is so much smaller in this class. One bad egg can spoil the proverbial carton much easier in a small class. This is evidenced by the offers right now. By and large, only slam dunk recruits have been offered by the coaches, and they are not moving past those offers as fast as we have seen them previously. Recently, we have seen them take more chances, with Brian Lindgren offering Sam Noyer as a QB prospect (no other P5 offers) and the junior college players they have offered don't necessarily have star-studded offer lists. The other effect the limited scholarships have is the quality of players being offered shoots up. Coaches are able to market an offer as an exclusive invitation in such a small class, and obviously with such exclusivity, the average projected quality of recruit goes way up. This should be great for CU, right? Higher rated offers equals higher rated commits. Well, as you can see, there are no commits, and the Buffs can get outgunned by the more storied and successful programs.
Another possible explanation for the lack of commitments so far is how much Coach MacIntyre and company rely on satellite camps, which have recently come under fire. Last year, almost all of the recruiting class attended these camps (usually before committing), and the assistant coaches have gone on record numerous times about how much they value watching the prospect in person. During the spring evaluation period, the coaches generally visit the players and tour the country, extending offers and looking for more talent. Now that the summer period is about to start, satellite camps start to pop up, and expect more offers and (God-willing) commitments during that time period.
Finally, the University of Colorado is trying to break in two new assistant coaches, and they are also using those coaches to try to regain some footing into recruiting hotbeds. As my title (guys, it's a reference) suggests, all the new attention being paid to Texas and Florida means that the focus has shifted from California, relatively speaking. Don't get me wrong, the Golden State will always be a huge source of players for the Buffs, and it will continue to be so. However, it would be criminal to waste Jim Leavitt's connections down in Florida, and to a lesser extent Joe Tumpkin's connections in Texas and Florida. This leaves Klayton Adams (splitting time between Northern Cali and Hawaii), Troy Walters (pretty much everywhere), Brian Lindgren (QB's), and Charles Clark (Florida and Cali) recruiting California. Outside of those coaches, Gary Bernardi focuses on Arizona and travels around the mountain region, with Toby Neinas focusing on the home state of Colorado and Jim Jeffcoat using his near legend status in Texas. All of this adds up to CU Football casting a wider net to find its catches, as evidenced by the weekly maps the official football account posts on Twitter.
Enough of my mumblings, it's time to look at some candidates for Colorado Football's first 2016 commitment.
Best Case Scenario: Carlo Kemp, OLB, Followed Quickly By QB
Extremely unlikely and getting more unlikely by the day, Carlo Kemp's commitment has been chased by the Buffs for a long time. Hailing from Fairview High School (a short drive away from Folsom Field), Kemp is exactly what CU needs in more than one way. It is no secret that the Buffs are thin at linebacker, and it's no secret that they have had |
request. She gave him the information she had, then tried to convince John to let Oliver in on the secret, but John refused and left.[16]
Sometime later, Oliver and Felicity heard a report about a Vertigo-related hostage-taking incident in Starling City Aquarium. As Oliver mixed the herbs he had to use on the addict, Felicity wondered why he wasn't going to kill the man instead. Oliver explained to her that his sister was once in a similar place and didn’t deserve to be killed for taking Vertigo, so neither did this man. When Oliver lamented that he should've killed Cecil Adams the first time around, Felicity tried to talk him out of it, only for him to point out that his choice had been wrong since the city was once again in danger due to Vertigo, and that he would kill Cecil Adams once and for all when he got the chance. Oliver left after instructing Felicity to call Diggle for backup. Later, Felicity walked into the Arrowcave to find that Oliver's things had been replaced with the club's inventory and furniture, which Oliver claimed was a long story. Directed to look at the autopsy reports of the Vertigo victims, Felicity discovered that one of the users had died due to his allergy to chlorpromazine. Oliver promptly left Felicity in the Arrowcave to recheck the psychiatric hospital, realizing that the amount of anti-psychotic drugs needed to manufacture the new Vertigo could only be found in a mental institution.[16]
While Oliver and Diggle were working out and talking about Floyd Lawton, Felicity refuted Oliver's claim that Lawton was on another continent, explaining that she'd decrypted A.R.G.U.S.'s communication logs and ended up admitting that she dyed her hair blonde, much to Oliver's amusement and John's impatience. Felicity told them that Lawton had returned to Starling City thanks to a sting setup by John's friend, A.R.G.U.S. agent Lyla Michaels. Felicity pulled the details of the sting for John and Oliver to study and create a counter-plan for, and later monitored the movements of Edward Rasmus, who hired an assassin to kill Laurel Lance's clients, orphaning a young boy who was also targeted for having seen the assassin's face. Just before the time for A.R.G.U.S.'s sting, Felicity got a notification that Rasmus was on a flight manifest heading out of Starling City, forcing Oliver to choose whether to support John or help Laurel's case. He chose Laurel, and when he returned, Felicity was tending to John's head wound. Upset that Oliver chose Laurel yet again, John told him that his absence caused the deaths of four A.R.G.U.S. agents, and though Felicity didn‘t say anything on the subject, it was clear that she agreed with John.[34]
Oliver brought Felicity a laptop belonging to Harold Backman, who laundered money for the white-collar criminals of Starling City, and asked her to return money to their rightful owners before they turned the laptop over to the IRS. Felicity tried to convince Oliver to apologize to Diggle for breaking his promise to him, but Oliver stubbornly refused. After a while, Felicity walked into the club to find Oliver conversing with Laurel Lance, whom she now met for the first time. Excusing herself as someone who is fixing Verdant's internet router, Felicity urged Oliver to come with her so she could show him what she'd found, explaining that she hacked Cayman Fidelity and compiled a list of deposits made in the last year and had discovered a payment made on the same day of Walter Steele's disappearance. She managed to track it to Dominic Alonzo, who ran the biggest underground casino in the city. With Oliver hesitating to both storm Alonzo's place due to the unknown amount of security guarding the place and contact John for help, Felicity convinced him to let her get caught counting cards in order to place a bug on Alonzo's computer. Despite his reservations, Oliver bent to Felicity's tenacity, but insisted that he plan the mission, which Felicity agreed to.[12]
Before she went, Felicity paid a visit to John to try and convince him to help them save Walter, but to no avail. Sometime later, she and Oliver arrived outside Alonzo's casino, where Oliver gave her another chance to back out. When Felicity refused to do so, he assured her that he'd be right outside, and they separated. With Oliver scouting ahead and providing her the password (snapdragon), Felicity headed in, detailing how many of Alonzo's employees were in sight and also accidentally rambling at him, much to her chagrin. Her plan to get caught counting cards went off without a hitch, and she was brought into Alonzo's office. Introducing herself as Megan (her middle name), she planted the bug and agreed to never count cards in Alonzo's casino again, only for them to find the earwig that connected her to Oliver. Having lost contact with her, Oliver stormed the casino and, after getting Felicity out of Alonzo's clutches, reverted to his old method of intimidating his target into confessing the information he wanted. Alonzo told them that he'd heard the gunshot that killed Walter, devastating her and Oliver.[12]
Felicity returned to the Arrowcave later that night to find Oliver sitting in the dark. Admitting that she'd been doing the same thing, she tried to extend her condolences to Oliver and his family, only for Oliver to tell her that Walter was still alive. He explains that his mother had known who had Walter all along, and he'd followed her straight to Malcolm Merlyn after giving them the news that Walter was found dead. He asked her to pull up Malcolm's phone records to trace the call he made to where Walter was being held, which Felicity discovered was in Blüdhaven. Seeing that the least amount of security is on the roof, Oliver chartered a jump plane to parachute down, and when he recovered Walter, Felicity immediately proceeded to the hospital to see him.[12]
Felicity, Oliver and Diggle were trying to figure out what The Undertaking was and how Moira Queen was involved in it. Oliver decided that it was time he spoke to his mother about it, and when Felicity expressed concern due to what happened the last time he tried that, he told her that he'd be doing it without the hood. When Oliver returned, Felicity was shocked to see the mess his face had become, scolding John and reminding him that he was supposed to pull his punches, indicating that John had told her about the plan Oliver had concocted to make his mother talk. Oliver asked her to research Unidac Industries, to which Felicity reminded him that Queen Consolidated acquired Unidac Industries at the same time they'd met. Discovering that Unidac Industries specialized in seismic infringement, Oliver theorized that Malcolm planned to level the Glades using a device that triggers a man-made earthquake. Upon finding a news article suggesting that the copycat archer was involved, they realized that the Dark Archer was working for Malcolm Merlyn, and that they were tying up loose ends.[35]
When Felicity decided to hack into Merlyn Global Group to find information about Malcolm's plan, but was stonewalled by the company's firewalls, she expressed that they would have to waltz in to gain access to the company mainframe. Oliver decided to do just that, and Felicity ended up posing as a delivery girl for Big Belly Burger and snuck to the twenty-fourth floor with Oliver. While hacking in, Felicity encountered a guard patrolling the floor earlier than scheduled, and since Oliver was detained by Malcolm himself, John was forced to head up to rescue her, forcing her to pretend to be a Tommy Merlyn groupie. Later, she told them that she left a Trojan in the mainframe, thinking it would come in handy in the future. The Trojan later alerted them when Malcolm logged onto his computer, prompting Oliver to face him as a distraction while John went to retrieve the earthquake device. However, Felicity's Trojan backfired on her, as Malcolm moved the devices when he discovered the virus.[35]
Detective Quentin Lance took Felicity into custody for questioning after police technicians found a computer trail linked with the vigilante's activities that traced back to her computer at Queen Consolidated. Felicity was later released when Oliver, as the vigilante, contacted Lance to warn him of the impending attack on the Glades. Before leaving, and without blowing her cover, Felicity explained that she had thought the vigilante was a bad person too, until she realized how much he'd sacrificed for Starling City. She pointed out that it made him more of a hero than Lance gave him credit for. Before Oliver left to confront Merlyn, he told Felicity that he wanted her out of the Glades because of the chance that the Markov Device would go off. She refused, telling him that if he wasn’t leaving, she wasn’t leaving. After stealing data from Merlyn Global, Felicity worked with Lance to disarm the earthquake device threatening the Glades, blowing her cover with Lance and confirming that she was definitely in league with the vigilante, in order to prevent the Undertaking. Though successful in disarming the device, Felicity was stuck in Verdant as the back-up Markov Device was activated and proceeded to destroy the East sector of the Glades.[36]
Working with the Arrow
Five months later, Felicity and Diggle traveled to Lian Yu in order to find Oliver. In the process, she chartered a rickety airplane that she inevitably jumped out of and eventually stepped on a land mine, which Oliver saved her from by swinging from a tree using a rope arrow. In a bid to cajole him into returning to Starling City, she revealed that his mother's trial was coming up and Queen Consolidated was undergoing a hostile takeover, which meant that she would lose her job if it succeeded, and that his family would lose the source of their income. She and John convinced Oliver to come back, under the condition that he did it as Oliver Queen, and not as The Hood. Later, she, Oliver, and Diggle finally met Isabel Rochev at QC in regards to the company buyout. The meeting was interrupted by The Hoods, who declared that Oliver has failed the city. As Oliver rushed Isabel out, one of The Hoods members pointed a gun at him and Felicity hit him with a statue. Oliver and Felicity escaped through a window, swinging once again via a chain out the window and into another two floors below, escaping The Hoods. After the attack, Felicity confronted Oliver for not even trying to stop the Hoods, and he responded by citing the bodycount he typically left behind. After Oliver found out that the Hoods kidnapped Thea, she, Oliver, and John went to the upgraded lair. She helped him find out information about the Hoods, why they formed, and their location. She then gave Oliver his new bow. Back at the hideout, after Oliver defeated the Hoods, they talked about a new way and a new name for the Hood, naming himself the Arrow.[37]
When Oliver promoted Felicity to his executive assistant, she vehemently protested her new position, to which Oliver explained that he needed to keep her close to him due to "how [they] spend [their] nights". Felicity inevitably stayed on as his assistant, but made it clear she disliked her new job and wouldn't resort to typical secretarial duties such as fetching coffee. To stop the Chinese Triad from stealing medicine being delivered to Glades Memorial Hospital, Felicity found out where they would strike next, only for the Arrow to be ambushed and incapacitated by Bronze Tiger. Back at the Arrowcave when Oliver and Diggle had an argument about Laurel, Felicity called Oliver out on his attitude, admonishing him for being so involved with his own troubles that he didn't realize that Diggle and Carly had broken up, partially because of him. After missing a crucial fundraiser due to stopping the Triad, Oliver was vilified by Sebastian Blood. In an effort to cheer him up, Felicity gave Oliver a cup of coffee, though just this once.[38]
Felicity and Diggle were waiting in the Arrowcave when Oliver arrived, having been nearly caught by the SCPD due to Laurel setting a trap for him. Oliver asked Felicity to keep an eye out on a new vigilante, a blonde woman who seemed like a highly skilled fighter, but they soon re-prioritized to help Officer Quentin Lance with The Dollmaker case. Because of all the times she hacked the SCPD, they'd outsourced their evidence to a facility that she couldn't hack into from the outside. Oliver and Lance broke into the facility and gave Felicity the connection she needed to retrieve and disseminate the information there, leading to a break in the case. It turned out that all the women used a special type of skin cream called Mermaiden, and her skills left Lance mystified at the thought that she can discover all of that with what little information she'd been given in less than a minute, prompting Oliver to smile under the cover of his hood. She then volunteered to be bait for the Dollmaker, going to each boutique and buying Mermaiden. Quentin pointed out that Felicity must trust The Arrow a lot to be bait for a serial killer. Creeped out, and scared, she vowed to never be bait again, right before she was attacked by the Dollmaker. The Arrow and Quentin scared him off, but not before Felicity was injured. When she'd recovered, she reported the kidnapping of Quentin and Laurel to Oliver, and managed to provide him with their location.[39]
When Oliver's was late to a Queen Consolidated’s investment party, Felicity was forced to make excuses to Isabel. When asked where he was, Felicity opened her communications link to him, only to be startled at the sound of gunfire. Oliver finally arrived, having some blood on his face that Isabel noticed and that Felicity tried to excuse away. While watching Oliver and Laurel speak during the party, Felicity realized that Laurel had also been in the same two places where the masked blonde vigilante had helped Oliver out, leading her to theorize that it was Laurel, not Oliver, whom the woman was following. This revelation allowed Oliver to track the woman and learn her real identity: Sara Lance. Back at the Arrowcave, Oliver told Felicity and Diggle that Sara hadn't died on the island, prompting Felicity to question why he hadn't told the Lances about her survival. An upset Oliver explained to her that because nothing good happened on the island, they were better off not knowing. Later, they set aside the Sara issue to locate the Mayor's hideout to take back stolen weapons crates of military-grade armament. Felicity later "borrowed" the FBI’s facial recognition software to identify the Mayor's real identity, Xavier Reed, and figured out that not only was Reed's foster brother serving in the army, he was also about to hand over assault rifles and grenade launchers to Reed, prompting Oliver to head out and successfully stop it from happening.[40]
Felicity finally met the elusive Sara and expressed her happiness regarding Sara's survival despite not having known her before the shipwreck. This amused Sara, who called Felicity "cute". Oliver told them that he and Sara were attacked inside the Queen Mansion by a man dressed like the Dark Archer, then asked Felicity to analyze a bag of dirt the man had tracked in. Hearing their lack of knowledge on the matter, Sara revealed that the man was named Al-Owal, a member of the League of Assassins sent to bring her back with him, as she too was a member. She admitted to murdering a man who was later found by his young children and used it as an example as to why she kept her survival a secret from her family. Later, when Sara apologized to Felicity for upsetting her with her confession, Felicity compared Sara's regret for joining the League of Assassins to her regret of joining a gym membership. Sara thanked Felicity for not making her feel like "what she was" and expressed how lucky Oliver was for having both her and John as friends. When Oliver arrived, Felicity reported that she'd found pesticide on the dirt he gave her, giving them Al-Owal's possible hideout. After Sara and Oliver failed to deter him, Felicity volunteered to warn Officer Lance about the possible threat on his life. She confronted Lance at his apartment after his shift, and Lance was seemingly disgruntled by not only her request but her vague explanation. Lance refused to listen to her, believing that he wasn't in any real danger. Felicity returned to the Arrowcave, announcing her failure, forcing Sara to reveal herself to her father.[41]
Felicity arrived when Isabel was reprimanding Oliver for his lack of interest in the company. Felicity apologized for interrupting, reminding Oliver about his "evening plans". She told him that "Mr. Harper" had information for him while a disbelieving and irritated Isabel listened. Oliver then told Felicity that she needed to work on her excuses. She later went with Oliver, Diggle, and unexpectedly Isabel to Moscow to rescue Lyla from prison. Unbeknownst to her, Isabel believed she's sleeping with Oliver because of her abrupt job change and asks Oliver multiple times about it. While in the hotel, Felicity helped orchestrate Diggle's capture and coordinated the rendezvous point for his escape. Later that night, Felicity went to fetch Oliver from his hotel room, only to find Isabel exiting his room. As Isabel left, she looked back over her shoulder and said to Oliver "I think she can take the night off". Felicity, hurt by what Isabel implied, was visibly shocked by what happened. While she, Oliver, and Anatoly Knyazev stake out the gulag, Felicity shut down the prison's phones, helping Diggle and Lyla break out. After the mission succeeded, Diggle, Lyla, Felicity, Oliver, and Isabel returned to Starling City in Oliver's private jet. Despite saying "what happens in Russia stays in Russia" while in Moscow, she confronted Oliver about Isabel at Queen Consolidated, suggesting that she had feelings for him. Oliver gently explained that due to his vigilantism, he believed "it's better to not... be with someone that [he] could really care about", implying that he might have romantic feelings Felicity her as well, but wouldn't act on them. Felicity voiced her belief that he deserved better and walked off in tears.[42]
Felicity took Diggle to the Arrowcave when he passed out in the office and immediately called Oliver. Calling in a favor from a chemist at Queen Consolidated, Felicity had a sample of Diggle's blood analyzed and learned it contained traces of Vertigo. When Oliver arrived, Felicity explained that Diggle had somehow been injected with the drug and his condition was the effects of severe withdrawal. Cecil Adams, who had broken out of prison, took credit for the outbreak of Vertigo withdrawal among regular people. As Oliver was occupied with his mother's on-going trial, Felicity worked with an ill Diggle to try to figure out why a random mix of people were infected. After plotting out the employment of each infected person, she found a path and linked that path to the free flu shots that were given around the city. Since Diggle was out of commission and Oliver was at the trial, Felicity decided to check out the immunization truck on her own, and was subsequently abducted by Count Vertigo. When the Count found her Queen Consolidated ID badge in her coat, he managed to figure out the Arrow's true identity and called Oliver using her phone, using Felicity as bait to lure Oliver to his office. Despite Felicity urging him not to kill the Count because of her, Oliver shot him in the chest three times, killing him when he moved to inject her with a high concentration of Vertigo. Later, Felicity thanked Oliver for saving her life, then apologized for being the reason he had to choose to kill someone again. Oliver assured her that "there was no choice to make" because she was about to be hurt.[43]
Felicity welcomed Moira Queen back when she paid a visit to the office, laughing at the joke Moira made, but then awkwardly mentioning Moira's stint in prison, making Moira leave the room immediately. Minutes later, she and John fetched Oliver to tell him about a break-in at one of QC's Applied Sciences facilities, where a centrifuge had been stolen. They proceeded to the site, meeting Lance, Kelton the Crime Scene Unit technician, and Barry Allen, who introduced himself as a C.S.I. from the Central City Police Department. After Barry extrapolated a logical, but unbelievable explanation about the thief being super-powered by merely looking at the crime scene, Felicity realized that he knew more about the case than they did and enlisted his help, telling Barry that Oliver wanted to keep the investigation in-house. During the course of their time together, Felicity exhibited signs of being attracted to Barry, though she was clearly uncomfortable when he mentioned his admiration of the Arrow and his theory that the vigilante had partners, particularly one versed in computer science. Barry seemed to reciprocate her affections, and though he was briefly surprised to learn that Felicity spent her nights with Oliver, he was reassured when she denied liking Oliver romantically and then asks him to accompany her to the party Oliver was throwing to celebrate his mother's acquittal. She became angry at Oliver when he revealed that Barry had been misleading them, only for Barry to admit that he was investigating their case due to its possible relation to the events that led to his mother's death and the wrongful incarceration of his father. Oliver made it up to her by re-inviting Barry to the party, where they share a dance. Later, after Barry received a phone call from his boss demanding he return to Central City at once, Felicity was visibly disappointed that they had to say goodbye. She proceeded to the Arrowcave to direct Oliver to the thief's next target, only for the thief to overpower Oliver and knock him into a pile of unknown drugs. Felicity and John came to Oliver's rescue, and when she was unable to discover what Oliver was poisoned with, John decided to call 911, despite Oliver being in full vigilante garb. Felicity stopped him from making the call, instead asking John to abduct Barry at the train station to ask for his help in saving Oliver.[44]
Felicity, John, and Barry worked together to save Oliver, with Barry using a small dose of rat poison to thin Oliver's coagulating blood. When Oliver woke up, he was upset to discover that Felicity had exposed his secret to an outsider without his consent, leading to their first fight which ended only when Barry pointed out that Oliver was being a jerk to her. While Oliver was away, Felicity ran a print that Barry lifted from Oliver's neck through the computer and finds a match, identifying Oliver's physically-enhanced attacker as Cyrus Gold. As she ran Gold's picture through facial recognition software, targeting traffic cameras to track Gold's location, Barry smugly reminded her about his theory of the vigilante working with partners, and then surprises them by mentioning that he'd kept count of the high-profile cases they'd been involved with. Oliver soon arrived to question Barry about the side-effects of the rat poison, which included hallucinations and excessive sweating. Felicity correctly realized that Oliver had been hallucinating and asked what he was seeing, only to be visibly jealous when he mentions Shado, another girl he met on the island. Minutes later, Felicity announced that she had found Gold's location and directed John and Oliver to a motel Gold might be staying in. When Gold managed to hurt John, with him and Oliver narrowly escaping, Oliver told Felicity to call for backup, and she reached out to Officer Lance.[45]
Later that day, Barry implied that despite her denying it, he understood why Felicity would like Oliver. Their conversation eventually turned to their holiday plans—with Barry asking her what she was doing for Christmas and she replying “lighting my menorah”, though it was interrupted when Oliver arrived and asked for some privacy, prompting her and Barry to retreat to Big Belly Burger to get some takeout. They returned with John to find the Arrowcave in disarray, though Oliver denied that they'd had a break-in and didn't explain what happened. After Barry told Oliver that his hallucinations weren't being caused by any drugs in his system, Felicity found a police report detailing Quentin's injuries and the death of several officers, including Quentin's former partner and friend, Lucas Hilton. Oliver left to speak with Quentin and returned with a key that Felicity tracked back to a place in the Glades. When Oliver prepared to face Gold once more, Felicity tried to stop him and failed, so she asked him to promise that he'd come back, but he didn't. To John and Felicity's relief, Oliver returned mostly intact, and she rushed to hug him while he assured them that he'd stopped hallucinating, though he also warned them that they had to keep an eye on Roy Harper, who'd been injected with the same serum that gave Gold his enhanced abilities. When he asked after Barry, Felicity told him that Barry had returned to Central City, just as Barry gives her a call. He told her that he arrived too late to attend the activation of the S.T.A.R. Labs particle accelerator, but that if she ever decided to go on a date with someone who wasn't Oliver Queen (marking the first time her romantic feelings for Oliver are blatantly mentioned), then that someone wouldn't be late for their date. Barry mentioned that he'd left a present for Oliver: a mask. Felicity helped Oliver put it on, becoming the first person to see him as the Arrow. When asked how he looked, Felicity told him that he looked like a hero.[45]
Felicity had gone to Central City to stay with Barry, who was in a coma after being struck by lightning. After she returned, Officer Lance asked the Arrow if his "blonde friend" could hack the cell phone records of his fellow policemen to see which one tipped off Cyrus Gold. It was later implied but not directly stated by Officer Lance that Felicity did, indeed, trace the cell phone records of the policemen at the precinct and relayed them to Lance. As Oliver replied, another bomb went off. He instantly contacted Felicity and she tried to help him find the bomber, Shrapnel. Felicity tracked him while Oliver followed in a high-speed chase. She lost Shrapnel's signal and he ended up escaping. Oliver blamed her, claiming she was distracted by Barry. When she angrily left, Diggle told Oliver "I think you didn't have a problem with Felicity's performance until she met Barry Allen". Their argument was still unresolved, a very concerned Felicity helped Oliver escape one of Shrapnel's booby traps by identifying the trap's power source. Afterwards, Oliver apologized to Felicity, admitting he relied on her more than he thought he did, and acknowledged her as his partner.[46]
Felicity conducted a polygraph test for the Arrow via Bluetooth, determining that the man Oliver was interrogating knew nothing about Brother Blood. At Queen Consolidated, Felicity, Diggle, and Oliver discussed Laurel's claim that Sebastian Blood was not who he said he was. While Diggle was skeptical of Laurel's theory and blamed it on paranoia, Felicity seemed to think that it was credible and decided to look into it. Felicity researched Blood's past, but was unable to find any electronically-stored information, all of it being held in a file at the City Archives. She assisted the Arrow in the Archives, maneuvering him through the building and helping him and Laurel avoid the police when they eventually came.[47]
Felicity discovered that Ben Turner had escaped from Iron Heights Prison. She explained that since the earthquake, more prisoners had escaped and the prison officials had been working overtime to conceal any breakouts, saying "Iron Heights was better at keeping secrets then they were at keeping prisoners". Felicity later interrupted one of Roy Harper's training sessions, informing the Arrow that Turner had just suspiciously stolen blueprints to Malcolm Merlyn's house. When Oliver returned from the mansion, she fingerprinted a watch that he had taken from one of the mercenaries. After scanning several databases, she discovered that the thief in question worked for Milo Armitage, and was ultimately able to track him down based on a shipment that was based at the Starling City docks. When she left the Arrowcave and went upstairs to Verdant to deliver this news to Oliver, Felicity was drunkenly harassed at the bar of the club by a highly intoxicated Laurel Lance. After Oliver's identity was revealed to Roy, Oliver brought him to the Arrowcave. Felicity met Roy for presumably the first time, and when he asked if their group has a name, she called them "Team Arrow".[48]
Felicity questioned Walter about a wire transfer Moira made from a flagged account on Tempest. Walter assured her he would talk to Moira about it, but Felicity knew he was lying. She traced the wire payment to Dr. Gill, the obstetrician who delivered Thea. Remembering Moira's testimony about her affair with Malcolm, Felicity connected the dots and realized Thea was Malcolm's daughter. Afterwards, she stopped by the Queen Mansion and informed Moira of her discovery, urging the matriarch to tell Oliver and Thea herself. Taking advantage of Felicity's feelings for Oliver, Moira manipulated her into keeping the secret, claiming that while Oliver would be angry at his mother for lying to him, he would also blame Felicity for telling him. This ordeal lead her to become distracted and withdrawn, which began to concern Oliver. Felicity helped Sara by finding out that the Tibetan Pit Viper venom used to poison Laurel was acquired from the local zoo. She tracked down a license plate that may be connected to Nyssa al Ghul, the daughter of Ra's al Ghul. At Moira's campaign event, Oliver asked what had been bothering her. Unable to keep this secret from him any longer, Felicity revealed to Oliver that she doesn't talk a lot about her family because her father abandoned her and her mother, which deeply hurt her. She explained to Oliver her fear of losing him. Oliver assured her he wouldn't, which lead Felicity to tell him the truth about Thea's parentage.[8]
After Sara joined the team, Felicity began to feel left out as Sara, Oliver, and Diggle traded stories of their battle scars. She took her frustration out on a training dummy, only for Sara to give her some pointers on self-defense. When William Tockman, AKA the Clock King, stole the Skeleton Key, a device that could access any computer system, Felicity tried to stop him, but he managed to divert their attention to stopping a near-collision with a bus and a train. Felicity soon felt insecure and left out again when Sara revealed her aptitude for chemistry, genetics, and computers to study Tockman's blood. Together, Felicity and Sara were able to determine that Tockman had MacGregor's Syndrome and identify him. Felicity discovered that Tockman's sister, Beverly Tockman, was suffering from Cystic Fibrosis and all the money he stole was to pay for her lung transplant. Based on his sister's address, the Arrow and the Canary tracked Tockman down. However, this proved to be a trap, as Tockman waited for Felicity to hack the device he had planted and was able to backtrack and trace the computer system to the Arrowcave. Using the Skeleton Key, Tockman destroyed the Arrowcave's computer systems.
As an upset Felicity assessed the damage, Oliver told her to call Walter and liquidate 800,000 shares of Queen Consolidated as bait for Tockman. After Oliver and Sara left, Diggle tried to get Felicity to open up about her thoughts regarding Oliver's relationship with Sara, implying that she insecure because of whatever feelings she had for Oliver. Felicity denied it and explained to Diggle of her uncertainty of herself within the team due to Sara's abilities, feeling extra pressure to take Tockman down. After she placed the liquidated shares into Oliver's account at Starling National Bank, Tockman quickly took their bait, and Felicity tried to stop him alone. Oliver, Sara and Diggle managed to find her before Tockman did, but while Oliver dealt with Tockman's men and Diggle stopped a gas main from exploding, Felicity and Sara found Tockman. Felicity took a bullet for Sara and was shot in the shoulder. Using the same virus that fried her systems, Felicity used Tockman's phone to knock him out.
Back at the Arrowcave, Sara patched her up, thanking Felicity for saving her. Felicity, high on Oxycodone (which she believed to be aspirin) was pleased that she finally had a scar of her own. Oliver asked if she had really been feeling left out and Felicity admitted that she had gotten used being Oliver's "girl-girl". Oliver reassured her that she would always be his girl.[13]
When Slade Wilson was in the Queen Mansion on an art tour, Oliver quietly called Felicity. Bringing back Big Belly Burger for the rest of Team Arrow in the Arrowcave, she answered the call. After there was no response, she believed Oliver butt-dialed her and put the call on speakerphone. Sara heard Slade's voice and realized that Oliver and his family were in immanent danger. When the rest of the team left, Felicity used thermal imaging software to track movement Thea, Moira, and Slade were on their tour of the house, therefore directing Diggle, Sara, and Roy on their mission throughout the Queen Mansion.[49]
Diggle began staking out Felicity's apartment in case Slade decided to attack her. She came to his car early in the morning and him a mug of hot chocolate. Felicity convinced Diggle to go home, pointing out that Diggle wouldn't be able to take on Slade if he decided to come after her. Later in the Arrowcave, Felicity began tracking any type of automotive movement in Starling City based on car titles and rental agreements, looking for anything under the name of Slade Wilson. She then alerted Oliver to a robbery at 5th and Giffen. Felicity was also able to locate Slade Wilson's headquarters using information supplied to Oliver by the Bratva (Alexi Leonov). When Oliver planned on meeting Slade at his headquarters, Felicity futilely tried to discourage him, emphasizing that Oliver was no match for Slade and that he'd be killed if he went.[15]
Felicity stated that she had been "keeping tabs" on Helena Bertinelli's global activity for the last year. She traced a stolen car to Michael Staton, Helena’s late fiancé, hacking the GPS and discovering that she was headed for Starling City. After the Arrow, the Canary, and Roy were unsuccessful in finding Helena, Felicity found out that a "frat boy" gave her a ride into town and attempts to track Helena down. Throughout the event, both Felicity and Diggle were very verbally expressive of their feelings for Helena, constantly referring to her as "Oliver's psycho ex-girlfriend".[50]
Felicity gave Oliver a month's worth of phone messages and reminded him about Queen Consolidated's annual board meeting, warning him that there was no way the CEO could avoid attending it. After Thea Queen's abduction, Felicity was adamant on tracking her down. She compiled a list of Verdant's customers from the previous night based on receipts, traced the credit card numbers and connected it to their cell phones, and pinged them, looking at all of their photos. When Diggle commented on how much work that was, Felicity simply said, "It's Thea". She found a partial picture of a car that was registered to Slade Wilson, and hacked into its GPS. Later in the night, when Slade was released from police custody, Felicity lead the rest of Team Arrow over the comms, tracking the car Slade had entered. He somehow multiplied the signal into other identical vehicles, getting away in the process. Felicity attempted to calm Roy down when he got angry at Oliver and blamed him for Thea's kidnapping. She also encouraged Oliver when everyone else thought that it was futile, telling him "Go get Thea. Stop Slade. End this once and for all." Felicity and Diggle consoled Oliver afterwards, emphasizing to him that he was not alone when it comes to defeating Slade.[51]
Felicity masterminded a break-in plan at Queen Consolidated's Applied Sciences division. Using the Skeleton Key, Oliver, Felicity, Diggle, and Sara infiltrated and planted explosives around the building in order to prevent Slade's further use of its technology. When Slade surprised the team in the foundry, Felicity was not hurt or even attacked, but later discovered that he stole the Skeleton Key from them. When Slade broke into S.T.A.R. Labs, Diggle and Felicity investigated to find out what Slade attempted to steal from them. They ran into Cisco Ramon and Caitlin Snow, and Felicity stated that she met them before in Central City and asked about Barry's condition. When they refused to tell her what had been stolen, Felicity hacked Harrison Wells' personal files to find out. She prided herself on doing so, saying "he's the director of S.T.A.R. Labs, which basically makes me unstoppable." Felicity also kept an eye out on the city's power grid, waiting for the moment Slade activated the bio-transfuser. When Oliver arranged a meeting with Thea, Felicity called him and interrupted, informing him that the transfuser just went online. She tracked the location but told him to wait to stop Slade, thinking Oliver's conversation with Thea was more important. Later, when Oliver revealed that there was a cure for the Mirakuru, Felicity went to S.T.A.R. Labs to have an antidote created.[52]
Felicity continued investigating Isabel Rochev's death and told Diggle that S.T.A.R. Labs were still working on the mirakuru cure. Roy destroyed her computers after he woke up and left before he could do any more damage. Felicity called Oliver and Sara (at the same time) with the news that Roy escaped. She helped them track him while on his rampage. She also assisted Oliver with his hurt knee and helped him inject an entire bottle of Lidocaine into his knee. Throughout the crisis, contrasting with Sara's darker perspective, Felicity emphasized that Roy could still be saved.[53]
Felicity attended Moira's funeral with Diggle. There, the pair ran into the newly resurrected Isabel Rochev, who both startled and threatened them. Felicity wondered where Oliver was and why he did not attend his own mother's funeral, and began looking for him through every means possible. She wondered if Oliver was dead, but learned that he was not when she and Diggle visited Amanda |
.91 set earlier this month. The Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC) also fell sharply, trading 8.9 percent lower.
BTC China said in a tweet Thursday that it will close down its operations by Sept. 30 as Chinese authorities crack down on cryptocurrencies.
China is tightening its grip on the burgeoning currency. On Sept. 4, Chinese media outlet Caixin reported that regulators banned companies from raising money through initial coin offerings (ICOs), referring to them as an unauthorized fundraising tool that may involve financial scams.
Since then, bitcoin has lost more than 20 percent of its value.
Bitcoin since Sept. 4Organisers have unveiled their mascots – creatures supposedly fashioned from droplets of steel used to build the stadium
In the end they were neither animal, vegetable nor mineral. Nor, as some cynics had predicted, did they resemble white elephants.
Instead, Wenlock and Mandeville, the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic mascots, elicited mostly baffled reactions as to just what they were at their unveiling today.
With a metallic finish, a single large eye made out of a camera lens, a London taxi light on their heads and the Olympic rings represented as friendship bracelets on their wrists, they resemble characters dreamed up for a Pixar animation.
But London 2012 organisers, for whom the launch of the mascots marks the start of a crucial period in which the games will become public property, pointed to the delighted reaction of a hall full of primary school children at today's launch as evidence that they would connect with their target audience.
"They remind you of aliens, which is really weird and cool," said 10-year-old Ali. "It reminds you of the Olympics, which is worldwide so it's something you'll want to remember forever," added 11-year-old Zanyab as they cavorted with life-size mascots for the cameras.
The pair are based on a short story by children's author Michael Morpurgo that tells how they were fashioned from droplets of the steel used to build the Olympic stadium. They will be crucial in raising funds and spreading messages about the games.
Wenlock, named after the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock that helped inspire Pierre de Coubertin to launch the modern Olympics, and Mandeville, inspired by the Buckinghamshire town of Stoke Mandeville, where the Paralympics were founded, will become very familiar in the next two years. The chairman of the London organising committee of the Olympic games (Locog), Lord Coe, said the mascots were aimed squarely at children and designed with the digital age in mind. He said they had the most positive reaction in workshops to road test them.
Among the designs rejected at the start of an open pitch process were anthropomorphic pigeons, an animated tea pot and a Big Ben with arms and legs.
Children will be encouraged to interact with the characters, inviting them via Facebook, Twitter and the web to visit their school and, said Coe, inspiring them to take up different sports.
"The story itself is very rooted in the nations and regions. Young people will be able to decide where they go, what sports they pick up. There is a real interactivity there, it is a language and a flexibility that is driven by young people," he said.
The pair were introduced in an animated film that followed their story from the Bolton steelworks where the frame of the Olympic stadium was made. They will become a range of up to 30 cuddly toys, including versions based on celebrities and sports stars, as well as adorning badges, T-shirts, mugs and more.
Organisers hope Wenlock and Mandeville will rank alongside the more fondly remembered mascots, such as Waldi the dachshund from the 1972 Munich games and Misha the bear from the 1980 Moscow Olympics – rather than the much maligned Izzy of Atlanta 1996. "The games have got a few stupendous assets – the mascot, tickets, the volunteers, the torch relay – and you have got to really use those to bring home your key messages," said Locog's chief executive, Paul Deighton.
"If you link them together you begin to have a really powerful story that people will respond to."
The unveiling of the bold London Olympics logo in 2007 was controversial, with many criticising its graffiti-like design. Organisers, who hired Wolff Olins at a cost of £400,000 to design it, stood firm, arguing that it was supremely adaptable and perfect for the digital age. But they were forced to withdraw a launch film after it emerged that it had the potential to trigger epileptic seizures.
The mascots, conceived by London design agency Iris and costing, said Deighton, just "a few thousand pounds", are an important staging post from a financial and marketing point of view. They will pour up to £15m into the coffers of the organising committee via dozens of licensing deals, part of an overall licensing target of £70m to £80m towards Locog's £2bn privately raised budget.
In 1984, the Los Angeles games ushered in the money-spinning Olympic era. The event was the first to use its Disney-designed mascot to raise funds, since when they have become a cash cow for organisers.
But the story behind the mascots is also designed to help make the Olympics relevant to the whole nation. That will be crucial if organisers are to maintain support for a project that is also costing the public £9.3bn, particularly as cuts in public services begin to bite.
After a spell of behind-the-scenes work devoted to raising £700m in sponsorship revenues, Locog is entering a more public phase when everything it does, from the unveiling of the mascot to its ticket pricing policy, will come under scrutiny.NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Close to half of U.S. girls ages 13 and 17 have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV), but there is still a way to go to improve those numbers, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
There are more than 100 strains of HPV, some of which cause genital and anal warts. In most people, the virus is sexually transmitted but the immune system clears the infection fairly rapidly. However, persistent infection with certain HPV strains can eventually lead to cancer.
Persistent HPV infection is the primary cause of cervical cancer. For that reason, the CDC and other groups recommend that all girls ages 11 and 12 receive the HPV vaccine, and that teenagers and young women up to age 26 get “catch-up” vaccination.
But not all girls are getting the vaccine. The CDC estimates that in 2010, 48 percent of girls ages 13 to 17 had gotten at least one dose of the HPV vaccine, which is given in three doses over six months.
That’s higher than in the two years before, but still too low, the agency says.
In the new study, reported in the journal Pediatrics, CDC researchers looked at the factors that seemed to influence whether girls got the vaccine or not.
They found that getting a doctor’s recommendation for vaccination made the biggest difference.
Among more than 18,000 U.S. girls ages 13 to 17, those whose parents had a doctor’s recommendation were 2.6 times more likely than their peers to have gotten at least one HPV dose.
The findings are based on responses to a 2008-2009 CDC survey of parents of more than 18,228 teenage girls. Overall, 37 percent of the girls had gotten at least one HPV dose in 2008, while 44 percent had in 2009.
The 2010 figure of 48 percent was slightly higher but not by much. “We’re concerned about that,” said Dr. Christina Dorell of the CDC, who led the current study.
Based on these findings, she told Reuters Health, doctors and other health providers play a big role in HPV vaccination decisions.
“Of the girls who started vaccination, most had a provider recommendation,” Dorell said. “We want providers to make the recommendation, and make it a strong one.”
But in this study, only 53 percent of parents said their doctor had recommended that their daughter get the HPV vaccine.
It’s not clear why many providers would not promote the vaccine. But Dorell said one potential reason could be cost: the vaccine is expensive and some doctors may not want to stock it.
There are two vaccines that can prevent infection with certain cancer-related strains of HPV: Merck’s Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix, both of which cost about $400 for three doses.
The study also found some other factors linked to a girl’s likelihood of getting the HPV vaccine, including a lack of health insurance. That’s despite the fact that uninsured girls are eligible for the federal Vaccines For Children program, which provides free vaccines for families who cannot afford them.
In many of those cases, parents might not be aware that they are eligible for the program. Dorell said that raising awareness among uninsured families — through local health-department campaigns, for instance — might help boost HPV vaccination rates.
Another issue is the fact that while about half of teenage girls have started the HPV vaccine series, many may not finish it. In 2008 and 2009, Dorell’s team found, only 53 percent of girls who had started the series received all three shots.
Again, it’s not clear why that is, according to Dorell. In some cases, doctors may not make it clear that three doses are needed, she noted. In others, families may just not return for the follow-up visits.
“Parents should be aware that (HPV vaccination) is a measure to protect their daughter from cervical cancer in the future,” Dorell said.
She added that the vaccine has a “strong safety record.” The most common side effects, according to the CDC, are pain at the injection site, fever, dizziness and nausea.
As of this past June, about 35 million doses of Gardasil had been dispensed in the U.S., and about 18,700 “adverse events” — which may or may not be caused by the vaccine — had been reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
Of those, 92 percent were considered mild — meaning they were not life threatening and caused no persistent damage. The rest were serious, and included blood clots and 56 deaths.
However, there were no patterns to suggest that the vaccine itself was responsible for those serious medical problems or deaths, the CDC says.
Cervical cancer, the disease HPV vaccination is designed to prevent, is diagnosed in more than 12,000 U.S. women each year. Most of those cases are linked to HPV infection.
SOURCE: bit.ly/nyPKgY Pediatrics, online October 17, 2011.
$INS01; Line LNY Insave:- TI line name (Map report)Transparency Watch Releases Searchable Database Of 27,000 US Intelligence Workers
from the publicly-posted-information,-searchable-by-the-public dept
Intelligence gathering on intelligence gatherers. Watching the watchers. Whatever you want to call it, Transparency Toolkit is doing it. It has gathered 27,000 publicly-posted resumes from members of the "intelligence community" and turned them into a searchable database.
The database -- ICWatch -- was put together using software specifically constructed by Transparency Watch (and posted at Github). Not only can the database be searched through TW's front end, but the data is also available in raw form for data-mining purposes.
Some may find this searchable database to be a form of doxxing, but TW says that isn't the intent. Instead, it's meant to give the public additional insight into the inner workings of the intelligence community, as well as allowing researchers and journalists to sniff out information on still-unrevealed surveillance programs.
"These resumes include many details about the names and functions of secret surveillance programs, including previously unknown secret codewords," Transparency Toolkit said.
"We are releasing these resumes in searchable form with the hopes that people can use them to better understand mass surveillance programs and research trends in the intelligence community."
The data was collected from LinkedIn public profiles using search terms like known codewords, intelligence agencies and departments, intelligence contractors, and industry terms, the group said.
Cultweave, UIS, Nucleon, CREST, Pinwale, Anchory, Association, Dishfire, SharkFinn, GistQueue, GoldPoint, Mainway
Snort, TRAFFICTHIEF, PINWALE, BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, BLARNEY, BULLRUN, CARNIVORE
What Transparency Watch has done is simplified a taskcould have performed prior to the compilation of the ICWatch database. In fact, nearly two years ago, the ACLU's Chris Soghoian pointed out that public LinkedIn profiles were coughing up classified program names posted by intelligence community members in their listed skills and work history.This is all Transparency Watch has done -- only in aggregate and accessible to those without a LinkedIn account.What Soghoian noted back in 2013 remains true. Searches for known NSA programs frequently bring up other program names, all posted publicly by employees and contractors with an apparent disregard for the agency's "everything is a secret" policies.A search for "PINWALE" brings up a profile listing the following:And another listing these terms You can also find out who's involved in Predator drone flights. Or who's participated in the NSA's Tailored Access Operations Some may argue that this algorithmic collection of resumes and LinkedIn profiles may be dragging some people under the "intelligence community" umbrella that shouldn't really be there. That's likely true, but this is one of those inescapable outcomes of dragnet operations. They may also argue that turning over this information to the public may cause some of those listed to be subjected to harassment or put them in danger. Also, this may unfortunately be true as well.But there's a simple solution, albeit one that can't be applied retroactively.As the government so frequently points out to us, publicly-posted information carries no expectation of privacy. The same goes for government employees and government contractors in sensitive positions who choose to disclose information about their skills and employment publicly. If any danger to these people exists, it hasexisted. ICWatch may make the job simpler, but it's done nothing any person can't do on their own, using simple search tools.
Filed Under: code names, database, intelligence, intelligence community, resumes
Companies: linkedin, transparency watchAltcoins The Seven Sins of the DAO
A new revelation about the DAO has come in from the publication Hacking, Distributed written by researchers and cryptographers Dino Mark, Vlad Zamfir, and Emin Gün Sirer. The three have written a 13-page paper describing potential attacks to the DAO ecosystem called “A Call for a Temporary Moratorium on The DAO.” So far the DAO has raised 12.07 million Ether equivalent to $132.32 million USD at the time of writing. The DAO pre-sale is officially closed. The project has so far been the largest crowdfund to date and holds roughly 14% of the Ether in existence. The researchers from Hacking, Distributed encourage the community to temporarily prohibit activity of the DAO until the updates can be made.
Also read: Ether to Blame for Bitcoin’s Decline?
Many Eyes Are Watching The DAO. Can It Succeed With These Transgressions?
The paper describes seven identified attacks on the DAO that can cause “honest investors” quite a bit of troublesome times and could “hijack” investments. The report states, “these concerns motivate a moratorium on funding proposals to prevent losses due to poor mechanism design.” Researchers give a background explanation of the DAO and how voting processes work within the Ethereum decentralized autonomous organization. Following this, the team then goes into the seven attacks that would make the DAO fail to operate the way it supposed to. This is the very basics of each attack as the whole paper can be read here. Hacking, Distributed latest revelation explains:
“We now describe why the current implementation of The DAO fails to uphold this principle.”
‘The Affirmative Bias, and the Disincentive to Vote No’
Currently, the DAO has a strong bias to vote “Yes” the researchers detail and votes of “No“ would be suppressed quite often. Those who vote “No” would have a hard time voting this way because they would need prior information that would yield negative criteria about funding a certain project.
‘The Stalking Attack’
Splitting from the DAO to redeem Ether due to its inherent nature of using sub-contacts to perform this action can cause stalkers. Users who want to exit become the sole investor and curator and then executes the contract to retrieve the funds. Because the action of the split is public knowledge via the blockchain, a “stalker” can pursue the splitter effectively blocking the withdrawal of funds.
‘The Ambush Attack’
In the Ambush attack, a large investor uses the “Yes” bias to their advantage. The user adds a large quantity of “Yes” votes to a proposal last minute to a project that fits their needs. Attacks done in this fashion would be extremely difficult to detect says the paper and “they leave little to no time for The DAO token holders to withdraw their funds.” The researchers detail one particular “whale’ who purchased 7.7% of the DAO, and this vector could easily be manipulated by that person.
‘The Token-Value Attack’
This attack is a traditional maneuver in cryptocurrency markets where large investors use bearish shorts with their holdings to cause the tokens market value to drop significantly. Large investors can cause a panic in the market by colluding with others to sell off in bulk and then scooping up the lowered priced tokens when it reaches a bottom. This rinse and repeat maneuver can enable an individual or group the ability to significantly obtain large quantities of voting power. The paper says it gets even worse as this attack can be melded together with the stalker attack as well. Hacking, Distributed paper states:
“Worse, since the existence of the stalker attack is now well-known, the attacker need not attack any real entity, but can instead create fictitious entities who post stories of being stalked in order to sow panic among The DAO investors.”
‘The extraBalance Attack’
Another maneuver where an attacker creates “scares” in the market causing shareholders to split from the DAO so the token value increases. Because the book value increases users cannot recover any extraBalance and as more users split, the unrecovered extraBalance is added to the total, and continually bolsters the value. This attack can also be coupled with the stalking attack.
‘The Split Majority Takeover Attack’
The DAO white paper explains how a typical “majority takeover” can be deterred by the introduction of curators. Yet the researchers explain it is not entirely clear how the curators can detect this action if it was made up of “a cartel of multiple entities, proposes not just a single proposal for 100% of the funds, but multiple different proposals.” In fact, the paper says this attack may be “indistinguishable” from investments that seem appealing to the majority.
‘The Concurrent Tie-Down Attack’
The paper describes how simultaneous proposals can cause undesirables within the nature of the DAO system. By blocking voters from splitting or transferring until the end of the voting period causes “trapped voter” shares in the DAO. He/She or a group can easily have an effect on the funds of trapped voters.
“This provides an attack amplification vector, where an attacker collects votes on a proposal with a long voting period, in effect trapping the voters’ shares in The DAO. She can then issue an attacking proposal with a much shorter voting period.”
‘Independence Assumption’
The DAO makes the critical assumption that proposals are independent and not meant to be tethered together. However, the authors of the Moratorium report say it’s quite possible for many things to be mutual and collaborative by design. The paper states, “the nature of voting on proposals in The DAO provide no way for investors to express complex, dependent preferences.” This may cause different kinds of voting behaviors within the participants of the proposals but may not necessarily be an attack.
The paper reports there are potential fixes, but it should be dealt with immediately by the curators. The authors say these potential problems could lead to significant losses in investments, and the moratorium should be prioritized right away. Hacking, Distributed researchers state, “a moratorium would give The DAO time to make critical security upgrades. We encourage the community to adopt a moratorium until The DAO can be updated.”
A Security Gaurd for the DAO?
On May 27th the Slock.it team released a PDF called the “Slock.it UG Proposal #1, DAO Security” revealing the developers believe it is necessary to hire a human to protect the DAO from attack vectors. Developers say the DAO community has shown they would rather see a community-based security working group as opposed to one that is on call. The proposal calls for the “deployment of a single, full-time expert at the helm of this cell.” The cost of this person for year-round security is 8,000 ETH, with payment disbursals on a monthly basis and the transactions will work through an Ethereum smart contract. The code for the contract is already available for public view via Github. The proposal explains the full-time security guard’s duties stating:
“This person will act as first point of contact for security disclosures: Having an official first point of contact for the channeling of security concerns will help maintain a calm, level headed way of addressing such matters, while ensuring a swift, professional reaction. He will continuously monitor, preempt and avert any potential attack vectors The DAO may face, including social, technical and economic attacks. He will also help the community with analyzing major Proposals for attacks. This will include highlighting 51% attacks, mismatched bytecode, and social engineering/collusion attacks.”
All of this news has been seen as negative news concerning the DAO, and the community has been up in arms. People are not so sure about a human watchdog when the entire project is based on code. However, the recent PDF is just a proposal and may not come to fruition. Trading begins today on many exchanges and this will add another element to the whole picture and many will watch the market take over from here. Ethereum itself has taken a significant dive in value as the token value has price dipped to $11 USD per Ether which in turn has brought the DAO crowdfund appraisal down as well. Despite all the human opinions, the future will now decide the DAOs fate and you can guarantee the whole world will be watching.
What do you think about Hacking, Distributed’s analysis? What do you think about the full-time security guard proposal? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Pixabay, and The DAO HubLast night the House of Representatives voted to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress, on the grounds that she had asserted her Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer their questions, thereby depriving them of the opportunity for what they hoped would be some spectacular grandstanding. You might think that a group of people with such reverence for the Constitution wouldn’t get so angry when certain portions of it, like the Fifth Amendment, become inconvenient to their political ends. But this contempt vote was like the end of a toddler’s tantrum, the final hoarse scream before the child collapses in an exhausted heap on the floor.
You may be wondering: what ever happened to that IRS scandal, anyway? It went the way of pretty much every Obama administration “scandal,” which is that it turned out to be not nearly as scandalous as Republicans had hoped.
In fact, a clear pattern has emerged on how these scandals have unfolded, one that might be helpful to keep in mind as we start paying attention to Benghazi again. Here’s a handy guide:
Stage 1: Worse than Watergate! Whenever a controversy emerges, Republicans immediately jump to the conclusion that they’ve struck political gold. At last, the true depths of the Obama administration’s treachery will be revealed! However much is known at first and whatever the allegations are, Republicans can be relied upon to say it was worse than Watergate, partly because they seem to have forgotten what Watergate was actually about, but mostly because it’s Barack Obama we’re talking about here.
“This makes Watergate look like child’s play,” said Michele Bachmann about Solyndra. “We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate,” said Peggy Noonan about the IRS (so that means that it wasn’t worse than Watergate, but it was worse than Iran-Contra). And everyone agrees that Benghazi is worse than Watergate. “I have made a study of different cover-ups – the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and Iran-Contra,” said noted scholar Sen. James Inhofe. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I think this is probably the greatest cover-up, in my memory anyway.” Benghazi would drive Barack Obama from office, said Mike Huckabee: “I remind you — as bad as Watergate was, because it broke the trust between the president and the people, no one died. This is more serious because four Americans did in fact die.” Rep. Steve King put it in perspective: “If you link Watergate and Iran-Contra together and multiply it times maybe 10 or so, you’re going to get in the zone where Benghazi is.”
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Stage 2: The facts show something problematic, but not Watergate-level scandal. This is where things get complicated. Every controversy is unique, but the pattern has been that the actual facts do reveal something problematic, but not the criminal malfeasance Republicans were hoping for.
For instance: The IRS scandal was about ill-trained workers ham-handedly trying to apply vague laws they didn’t really understand, not a conspiracy directed from the White House to swing an election by holding up the applications of a bunch of Tea Party groups to get special tax status as social welfare charities. Benghazi was a chaotic mess, and different decisions could have been made leading up to it, but nobody in the White House or the State Department cruelly decided to let American personnel die. Solyndra was one of many companies the government supported in its green tech efforts, and they went bankrupt when the price of silicon for solar panels plummeted and their technology was no longer cost-effective, but there was no nefarious conspiracy.
Every case has lessons that can be learned, but none of them gave Republicans what they were really after: the scandal that would destroy Barack Obama’s presidency.
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Stage 3: The (not so) dramatic hearings. Republicans decide to go ahead with hearings anyway, in most cases overseen by the spectacularly incompetent Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee. The hearings reveal no new information, though they do provide an opportunity for Republican members to pretend to be outraged, and for ranking minority member Elijah Cummings to argue bitterly with Issa. In some cases, like Benghazi, this results in a downgrading of the central allegation, from the charge that people high up in the administration were directly responsible for four deaths, to the current charge, that people high up in the administration spun the events after the fact in an attempt to make the administration look good, which is 1) absolutely true, and 2) not a crime.
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Stage 4: The rage at the media for not paying enough attention. A core feature of Republican rhetoric on all these controversies is the complaint that the mainstream media are ignoring the story, and only Fox News is brave enough to bring the truth to the American people. But in fact, in every case, the media did pay attention for a time. Most all of these controversies got blanket coverage for a while. But that coverage inevitably petered out when Republicans were unable to substantiate their most dramatic claims.
You may not need much in the way of facts to get the scandal train moving — breathless allegations and high dudgeon are usually enough — but unless some real misdeeds are revealed, the train will slow to a stop. Republicans’ real problem isn’t that the media didn’t pay attention to the scandals, it’s that there just hasn’t been much there, leaving the media with little choice but to move on.
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Stage 5: The last gasp. That’s what the contempt vote against Lerner is, and in some ways, that’s what the select committee on Benghazi is, although that will be an extended last gasp. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that the select committee is going to uncover nothing meaningful that we don’t already know. Why? First, because there have already been lots of hearings and testimony and investigations and documents turned over, and no malfeasance has been revealed. Second, because I doubt these clowns would be capable of finding anything even if there was anything to find. It’s all about theater.
Indeed, GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy, the head of the new select committee on Benghazi, accidentally admitted as much, as Dana Milbank points out:
Asked by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about the possibility that his panel’s work would continue into the 2016 election campaign, Gowdy replied that “if an administration is slow-walking document production, I can’t end a trial simply because the defense won’t cooperate.” A trial? And the Obama administration is the defense? So much for that “serious investigation” House Speaker John Boehner promised; his new chairman intends to play prosecutor, proving the administration’s guilt to the jury — in this case, the public.
Once the committee convenes, the media will be all over it for the first couple of days. And after it becomes apparent that no blockbuster revelations and no scandalous misbehavior being uncovered, they’ll drift away. And then Republicans will start complaining again that the media are conspiring with the administration in the cover-up.The common denominator among the NFL's elite is the presence of a franchise quarterback under center. Teams with blue-chip signal-callers routinely find themselves in the Super Bowl hunt, while those without established QBs struggle to win consistently in an ultra-competitive league. Thus, executives search high and low for quarterbacks with the tools to transform a franchise into a winner.
Brooks: Draft grades Bucky Brooks performs a division-by-division assessment of the draft, highlighting notable picks and handing out grades.
performs a division-by-division assessment of the draft, highlighting notable picks and handing out grades. READ
In the 2011 NFL Draft, several teams expended early selections on quarterback prospects hoping to land an upper-echelon playmaker with the goods to lead a postseason run. The Carolina Panthers (Cam Newton), Cincinnati Bengals (Andy Dalton) and San Francisco 49ers (Colin Kaepernick) all remain pretty satisfied with their returns, having all participated in last season's playoffs. While the jury is still out on the Tennessee Titans' pick (Jake Locker), the Jacksonville Jaguars (Blaine Gabbert) and Minnesota Vikings (Christian Ponder) simply failed to get it right on draft night.
In 2012, the Indianapolis Colts (Andrew Luck), Washington Redskins (Robert Griffin III) and Seattle Seahawks (Russell Wilson) found their franchise quarterbacks on draft weekend -- something that also might be true for the Miami Dolphins (Ryan Tannehill) and Philadelphia Eagles (Nick Foles). But the Cleveland Browns struck out, despite investing a first-round pick in a mature signal-caller (Brandon Weeden).
With the Jaguars, Vikings and Browns all readdressing the quarterback position in Round 1 of the 2014 draft, I thought I would take a closer look at each situation. Here are my thoughts:
Jacksonville Jaguars
What was the book on Blaine Gabbert heading into the 2011 draft? Gabbert ranked as the top quarterback in the 2011 class on several boards across the league. Teams were intrigued with his prototypical physical dimensions, arm talent and athleticism. In 26 starts for the Missouri Tigers, Gabbert completed more than 61 percent of his passes for 6,779 yards, posting a 40:18 touchdown-to-interception ratio. Although Gabbert's numbers paled in comparison to Chase Daniel's production guiding the same offense, Gabbert's raw tools convinced many that he could develop into an impact player in the pros.
Scouts did worry about Gabbert's pocket poise and deep-ball accuracy. He seemingly wilted under heavy pressure at Mizzou, exhibiting a lack of composure and courage when the pocket broke down. He routinely flinched with defenders in close proximity -- a tell-tale sign of a quarterback looking at the rush instead of focusing on his progressions down the field. Gabbert also struggled with his accuracy on throws beyond 15 yards; he couldn't consistently place the ball in the strike zone on deep in- or out-breaking routes. Thus, Gabbert compiled numbers by terrorizing opponents with a host of quick-rhythm throws (bubble screens, stick routes and quick outs).
Where did it go wrong in Jacksonville? Truthfully, Gabbert was destined to fail with the Jaguars. He didn't have a stellar supporting cast around him and he was thrown to the wolves before he was ready to play as a pro. Also, the 2011 NFL lockout prevented Gabbert from getting a jump-start on his career with offseason workouts and minicamps. He didn't have a solid grasp of the offense -- or the speed and pace of the NFL game -- prior to taking over as the Jaguars' starter in Week 3 of his rookie season. Lastly, the Jaguars didn't do Gabbert any favors by having three different offensive coordinators in his three seasons with the team. Sure, NFL quarterbacks are expected to be adaptable, but it's hard for any signal-caller to adjust to constant change in the play-calling department, particularly when it's a young QB still getting a feel for the pro game.
Now, I'm not trying to absolve Gabbert for his role in the Jaguars' underachievement over the last few years, but it's important to note that the team didn't put him in the best situation to succeed. In March, Jacksonville traded him to San Francisco for a sixth-round pick.
Why will it be different for Blake Bortles? In their second year with the franchise, general manager Dave Caldwell and head coach Gus Bradley are making a concerted effort to not repeat the mistakes of the prior regime. First and foremost, the Jaguars appear to have a plan in place to slowly bring along Bortles until he is ready to take over as the starter. The team re-signed Chad Henne to a two-year deal in March, providing a solid placeholder. Although Henne obviously will do his best to retain the starting position, I'm sure he has been encouraged to share his knowledge with the youngster in the meeting room. The seventh-year veteran should be a valuable mentor to Bortles while he adapts to the NFL.
Whenever Bortles is ready to take the reins, he will be surrounded by a number of enticing weapons acquired by the Jags this offseason. In free agency, Jacksonville scooped up promising RB Toby Gerhart. And in the draft, after selecting Bortles in Round 1, Jacksonville quickly grabbed a pair of intriguing pass catchers (Marqise Lee and Allen Robinson) in the second round. On Day 3 of the draft, the Jags added running back Storm Johnson, Bortles' backfield mate at Central Florida. Thus, Bortles won't feel the pressure of having to carry the entire offense on his back because he is supported by capable playmakers.
Bortles showed glimpses of being a big-time quarterback during his time at UCF, but he must continue to work on his judgment under duress, while developing a better feel for making full-field reads. At the end of the day, though, he has all of the physical tools and intangibles coaches look for in a franchise quarterback.
Cleveland Browns
Battista: The fall and rise of Johnny Judy Battista provides a behind-the-scenes look at Johnny Manziel's draft-day wait... and eventual selection.
provides a behind-the-scenes look at Johnny Manziel's draft-day wait... and eventual selection. READ
What was the book on Brandon Weeden heading into the 2012 draft? Weeden was a late riser on draft boards around the league. After spending five years as a minor league baseball player, Weeden joined the Oklahoma State football program and eventually finished his collegiate career with back-to-back 4,000-yard seasons. The 6-foot-4, 221-pounder displayed the arm strength and passing prowess to make all of the requisite throws at the NFL level. Although he occasionally misfired on a tight-window throw, Weeden's superior arm talent was expected to allow him to eventually succeed in a traditional dropback system.
In terms of flaws in Weeden's game coming out of Oklahoma State, scouts pointed out his questionable judgment, football IQ and athleticism. He was a sitting duck in the pocket against exotic-blitz pressures, which led to hurried throws into tight coverage. Additionally, he didn't show great football awareness when he repeatedly fired the ball into traffic due to misreads. Consequently, scouts thought it would take some time for Weeden to develop into a solid starter as a pro. Former Baltimore Ravens head coach (and current NFL Media colleague) Brian Billick once told me that it takes about 18 games to determine if a quarterback can play in the NFL.
Where did it go wrong in Cleveland? The idea of adding Weeden to the Browns' roster seemed sensible at the time. Cleveland needed a quarterback with arm talent, as Colt McCoy just couldn't make precise throws in inclement weather. Now, Weeden was certainly an upgrade in raw talent, but he was miscast in Pat Shurmur's version of the West Coast offense, which featured a number of quick-rhythm throws from under center. Weeden never appeared comfortable directing the Browns' attack during his rookie campaign; many of his miscues were the result of being placed in a system that didn't accentuate his strengths.
When Rob Chudzinski replaced Shurmur as head coach last year, there was plenty of optimism that Weeden would get back on track in a vertical offense that suited his talents as a strong-armed thrower. However, he didn't fully grasp the complexities of offensive coordinator Norv Turner's system, resulting in a number of turnovers and miscues.
Brandt: Instant-impact rookies Forget about depth-building developmental prospects -- Gil Brandt lists six rising rookies poised to turn heads with their play now. READ
Forget about depth-building developmental prospects --lists six rising rookies poised to turn heads with their play
Why will it be different for Johnny Manziel? Johnny Football will succeed in Cleveland because he is a better player than his predecessor -- and the new Browns regime will look to maximize his talent. In Kyle Shanahan, Manziel has the right offensive coordinator to help him play to his strengths as an improvisational playmaker. While most point to Shanahan's success with RGIII in Washington, I believe it's his work with Matt Schaub in Houston that ultimately will help him craft an offense that best suits Manziel's game. With the Texans, Shanahan helped concoct an offense that befuddled opposing defensive coordinators with its movement-based concepts. Shanahan routinely incorporated a stretch/bootleg combination, complementing the scheme with a handful of exotic play-action passes featuring clever vertical patterns. All of this spawned uncertainty among defenders, creating numerous big-play opportunities. Shanahan mixed in some of those concepts during his time in Washington, helping Griffin average a ridiculous 8 |
back ISIS and recovering key cities, towns and territory. The US-Turkish agreement, therefore, risks undermining this key relationship and ceding ground to ISIS.
Furthermore, there is a high risk that the alliance with Turkey will drag the US away from its narrow focus of degrading ISIS and towards regime change. Although this might be seen as a desirable outcome, the ISIS-free safe zones will provide bases for not only the largely ineffective Western-friendly FSA, but also extremist groups Nusra Front and Arar al-Sham, which share affiliations with Al-Qaeda. Neither they nor Turkey want to see the PKK gain advantage in Syria or further embolden efforts to establish and maintain Rojava, the three Kurdish self-declared autonomous cantons. As a result, they are unlikely to be reliable partners. It is not inconceivable that they could provide false intelligence, leading the coalition to strike against the PKK and its affiliates rather than ISIS.
It is difficult to envision the few hundred fighters trained by the coalition’s ‘train and equip’ programme managing to persuade extremist groups to turn their attention away from the Assad regime and towards ISIS; it is much more likely to be the other way around. As such, the safe zones are much more likely to serve as bases from which Syrian opposition groups will launch operations against the regime, enjoying the protection of air cover, rather than fight ISIS.
At face value, the prospect of establishing safe zones in Syria appears to be a positive development. However, in their current form, they are unlikely to serve as safe havens for Syrian refugees or areas for the Syrian opposition to practice governance. They are much more likely to serve as bases from which groups that vehemently oppose the West can perpetuate their war against the Assad regime. At the same time, the US has ceded valuable political ground to Turkey, which will use these zones to establish hegemony over Syria’s Kurds, rather than to fight ISIS.
To comment on this article, please contact Chatham House FeedbackM.Zuiko Digital ED 40-150mm f/2.8 PRO Lens is rated 4.8 out of 5 by 86.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Joseph from Outstanding portrait/tele zoom 10 yr ago I bought a 70-200/2.8L IS and I loved it and used the hell out of it; a month ago I bought one of these. There really is no comparison. This lens is cheaper and meanwhile better in every regard. I'm sure the 70-200/2.8L IS II is a vastly sharper lens than the original, but it costs almost twice as much. And the build quality of this lens is terrific, Leica-like. If you don't need every last bit of full frame DoF and/or resolution, and you don't want 3x the weight, I'd go with M43 and the Olympus pro line. It's a 21st century way to do better with < 10 lbs what used to take 20 lbs. As much as I love(d) working with FF, I'm happy to scale down now.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Dean from Absolutely spectacular lens! I've shot with the Nikon 200-400 VRII, the new 80-400, and the 300 2.8 VRII (on D4 and D800e bodies) and, as good as those lenses are, this Olympus can hold its own! And, hold is the operative word here. Light, extremely fast focusing, and wonderful contrast. Did I mention sharp? You could cut youself on the images they are so sharp. Haven't tried it on my OMD E-M10, but on the E-M1, all is good! If the promised 300mm 4.0 is this good, there will be a mass exodus from Canon and Nikon users. There is absolutely no excuse any longer to carry 50 lbs. and $ worth of gear when you can use a pro MFT body (E-M1 or GH4) with these incredible lenses that weigh and cost 1/3 less than Nikon/Canon gear.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Fotobug823 from Great lens I bought this lens to use with the MC-14 teleconverter. I am using it for bird photography. I have the M.Zuiko ED 300 F/4.0 PRO lens also, but I have some trouble using it handheld since it is much heavier. I am only 5/4 tall and a senior female, so I like this lens combination. I use the Me-Foto tripod which is very light, but sturdy with this camera combination. I have enjoyed using it. Because of the image stabilizer in the camera, I can use it handheld when I try to capture a bird in flight. Well worth the money. I am looking forward to taking it out on more outings.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Terry from Excellent Lens This lens fits my needs well. I shoot with 2 kits: a full frame Nikon D610 and a micro-four-thirds Olympus OM-D E-M5. There are many situations where my Nikon with a 70-200mm f/2.8 is my go-to kit, but there's a price to pay in weight and size. I've found a lot of situations where I really want a small kit. For that, my Olympus with this 40-150mm f/2.8 works extremely well. This lens compares very well in sharpness and light transmission, and for what it does, it is surprisingly light and small. If you're thinking about getting this lens, I would highly recommend it.
Rated 3 out of 5 by Mike from Not as sharp as reviewed by others I bought this for my GH4 based on reviews. The lens had a nice feel to it and seemed solid. When I attached it to the camera I noticed immediately that it did not seat solidly. It had noticeable play (slippage). My 12-40mm Zuiko lens fits nicely on the camera with only a touch of play. So, I had to decide if I could live with it. Well, after taking some photos, especially long focal length it was clear this lens will not work for me. It's soft at the end of the lens. I wanted to take some nice landscapes of the mountains around me and I just could not get a sharp focus on infinity. Maybe it was a faulty lens, not sure. But, I have returned it.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Richard L. from Premium Lens High Quality Construction High quality construction complements Olympus Micro Four Thirds OMD E-M1 camera. Even though this is a heavy lens compared to other less expensive micro four third lenses it is comparable to more expensive full frame camera lenses and its weight is countered by the included mount. I especially like the internal zoom and sliding storage lens hood. I'm impatiently waiting for additional Olympus PRO series micro four thirds lenses. I've been using Olympus OM cameras for over thirty years and highly recommend them for anyone looking for a smaller lighter format digital camera.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Kotheimer from New To 4/3, And I'm Impressed! I was so disappointed with the poorly constructed and soft-focused 4.5-5.6 40-150mm Zuiko that I actually was beginning to question Olympus lenses. No worries, however, as this glass is FIVE STARS! Pro quality construction and tack sharp. See below for images. Yes, It is large and heavy for a 4/3 lens, but compared to a Canon full frame, it is still quite small. This lens takes advantage of the new firmware on the EM-1. Focus stacking. YAY!Suggesting that abortion be “safe, legal, and rare,” and crowing that “no one likes abortion,” accomplishes nothing for women's rights. Rather than trying to cozy up to the forced-birth camp, women who value their freedom should be proud to say that they like abortion, the one final, definitive instrument that secures our bodily autonomy.
I love abortion. I don’t accept it. I don’t view it as a necessary evil. I embrace it. I donate to abortion funds. I write about how important it is to make sure that every woman has access to safe, legal abortion services. I have bumper stickers and buttons and t-shirts proclaiming my support for reproductive freedom. I love abortion.
And I bristle every time a fellow activist uses a trendy catch-phrase or rallying cry meant to placate pro-lifers. The first of these, “Make abortion safe, legal, and rare!” has been used for decades as a call for abortion rights.
Safe and legal are concepts I fully support, but rare is something I cannot abide. I understand the theoretical mindset: it is better for a woman to prevent an unwanted pregnancy than to bear the physical and financial burden of an abortion. While my own abortion involved very little pain and a minimal financial expense, one which my ex-boyfriend was willing to share with me, even I can admit that using condoms or the pill is preferable to eight weeks of nausea and weight gain. Contraception is a valuable tool.
However, there is no need to suggest that abortion be rare. To say so implies a value judgement, promoting the idea that abortion is somehow distasteful or immoral and should be avoided. Even with affordable, accessible birth control, there will be user errors, condoms that break, moments of spontaneity. The best contraceptive access in the world won’t change the fact that we are merely human and imperfect in our routines. The best access in the world also won’t change the fact that some women are raped, while others find that even wanted pregnancies sometimes need to be terminated for the woman’s well-being or to avoid birthing a child with painful or unmanageable disabilities. Women who find themselves facing any of these situations shouldn’t feel guilty for failing to keep the numbers low.
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It stands to reason that if we ensure contraception is both readily available and easily affordable for sexually active women of all ages, the need for abortion may decrease as a result. That would be a laudable accomplishment and an indication of social progress for an America otherwise plagued by anti-feminist, religious conservatism known for shaming women’s sexuality.
Nevertheless, even in the face of such (hypothetical) strides, we must remember that extenuating circumstances like health, contraceptive failure, and rape mean that abortion will always be a normal, necessary, and reasonable choice for many women. As such, we must avoid stigmatizing it in any way. No woman benefits from even the vaguest insinuation that abortion is an immoral or objectionable option. That’s the weak argument made by misogynistic, forced-birth advocates, and it has no place in a dialogue about reproductive freedom. Terminating a pregnancy is not an unethical act, yet suggesting that abortion should be rare implies that there is something undesirable about having one.
Similarly, I’ve heard reproductive rights activists claim that “no one likes abortion,” in an attempt to find common ground with anti-choicers. While it may be true that no one likes the physical act of having an abortion (any more than she may like her yearly mammogram, life-saving chemotherapy, or temporarily uncomfortable dental surgery), a great many women like abortion itself. They like knowing that an unwanted pregnancy does not have to yield an unwanted child. They like knowing that their mental and physical health take precedence over an embryo. They like knowing that they own their bodies. Many medical procedures are physically unpleasant, but that doesn’t lessen how grateful we are to have them available when we need them.
Suggesting that abortion be “safe, legal, and rare,” and crowing that “no one likes abortion,” accomplishes nothing for women’s rights. Pandering to the anti-choice movement by implying that we all find termination distasteful only fuels the fire against it. What good is common ground if it must be achieved at the expense of women who have had or will have abortions? Those women need advocates like us more than we need support from anti-abortionists. Rather than trying to cozy up to the forced-birth camp, women who value their freedom should be proud to say that they like abortion. In fact, they should venerate it whole-heartedly. Abortion is our last refuge, the one final, definitive instrument that secures our bodily autonomy. What’s not to love?It was a great 5 days in Mission Viejo for the 2013 United States Masters Swimming summer nationals. A boat load of records were broken, friendships reignited and a frenzy of fun in the sun. It truly was emblematic of the good in our sport. Here’s a behind the scenes video from SwimSwam contributor Mike Lewis of Ola Vista Photography who chronicled the event for USMS and Swimmer Magazine:
There’s so much that can be said about this year’s USMS summer nationals but it’s hard to put into words the inspiration, fun and truly admirable accomplishments in the water – there were times posted by 30, 40 and 50 somethings that would stand up in a USA swimming senior meet. There were people competing for the first time ever. There were stories of survival and recovery brought about through swimming.
Check out USMS daily recaps from the meet to continue to relive the fun.
USMS is a national membership-operated nonprofit organization that provides membership benefits to nearly 60,000 Masters swimmers across the country. These benefits include insurance, SWIMMER magazine, sanctioned events, and many others. USMS and its 52 Local Masters Swimming Committees (LMSCs) provide direct support to more than 1,500 smaller clubs and workout groups. Structure and organization of USMS programs vary and are driven by factors such as pool availability, instructor or coach availability, community support, and finances. The majority of locations offering USMS programs have coaches on deck. Coaches write workouts and provide feedback and instruction. (source: usms.org)A teenage girl, traveling with her mother and younger brother, died Wednesday in the north Indian state of Punjab after being thrown off a moving bus for resisting molestation, local media reports said. Three men, including two bus staff, have been arrested in the case.
The incident took place in Moga district, nearly 90 miles from the capital Chandigarh. The girl and her mother reportedly protested against the harassment by a group of men in the bus, and also complained to the driver who allegedly did not respond.
Police reportedly said that they have seized the bus.
The girl's mother, who was unconscious for several hours at a local hospital after suffering injuries during the incident, said on Thursday, "They kept abusing us. No one helped. They first pushed my daughter off the bus, then me." According to reports, the bus assistant molested the 38-year-old woman.
The bus had few passengers when the incident took place, local news network NDTV reported.
The latest case has again raised concerns over women's safety in India.
"This is a very painful incident. As per the information received, the bus (involved in the incident) belonged to some company of Punjab Government chief's family member. In such a situation, I don't think the state government will be able to provide any help to the sufferers," Mayawati, an Indian politician, reportedly said. "I would like the higher authorities to take charge of the case and punish the guilty. The mother and daughter were initially molested and were thrown out of the bus on protesting."
The incident follows the December 2012 gang rape where a student was brutally assaulted on a bus in India's capital New Delhi, after which she succumbed to her injuries. The case had led to huge public outcry and prompted the government to announce several steps to ensure safety of women on public transport.Zig Programming Language Blurs the Line Between Compile-Time and Run-Time
2017 January 30
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Zig places importance on the concept of whether an expression is known at compile-time. There are a few different places this concept is used, and these building blocks are used to keep the language small, readable, and powerful.
Introducing the Compile-Time Concept
Compile-Time Parameters
Compile-time parameters is how Zig implements generics. It is compile-time duck typing and it works mostly the same way that C++ template parameters work. Example:
fn max(comptime T: type, a: T, b: T) -> T { if (a > b) a else b } fn gimmeTheBiggerFloat(a: f32, b: f32) -> f32 { max(f32, a, b) } fn gimmeTheBiggerInteger(a: u64, b: u64) -> u64 { max(u64, a, b) }
In Zig, types are first-class citizens. They can be assigned to variables, passed as parameters to functions, and returned from functions. However, they can only be used in expressions which are known at compile-time, which is why the parameter T in the above snippet must be marked with comptime.
A comptime parameter means that:
At the callsite, the value must be known at compile-time, or it is a compile error.
In the function definition, the value is known at compile-time.
For example, if we were to introduce another function to the above snippet:
fn max(comptime T: type, a: T, b: T) -> T { if (a > b) a else b } fn letsTryToPassARuntimeType(condition: bool) { const result = max( if (condition) f32 else u64, 1234, 5678); }
Then we get this result from the compiler:
./test.zig:6:9: error: unable to evaluate constant expression if (condition) f32 else u64, ^
This is an error because the programmer attempted to pass a value only known at run-time to a function which expects a value known at compile-time.
Another way to get an error is if we pass a type that violates the type checker when the function is analyzed. This is what it means to have compile-time duck typing.
For example:
fn max(comptime T: type, a: T, b: T) -> T { if (a > b) a else b } fn letsTryToCompareBools(a: bool, b: bool) -> bool { max(bool, a, b) }
The code produces this error message:
./test.zig:2:11: error: operator not allowed for type 'bool' if (a > b) a else b ^./test.zig:5:8: note: called from here max(bool, a, b) ^
On the flip side, inside the function definition with the comptime parameter, the value is known at compile-time. This means that we actually could make this work for the bool type if we wanted to:
fn max(comptime T: type, a: T, b: T) -> T { if (T == bool) { return a or b; } else if (a > b) { return a; } else { return b; } } fn letsTryToCompareBools(a: bool, b: bool) -> bool { max(bool, a, b) }
This works because Zig implicitly inlines if expressions when the condition is known at compile-time, and the compiler guarantees that it will skip analysis of the branch not taken.
This means that the actual function generated for max in this situation looks like this:
fn max(a: bool, b: bool) -> bool { return a or b; }
All the code that dealt with compile-time known values is eliminated and we are left with only the necessary run-time code to accomplish the task.
This works the same way for switch expressions - they are implicitly inlined when the target expression is compile-time known.
Compile-Time Variables
In Zig, the programmer can label variables as comptime. This guarantees to the compiler that every load and store of the variable is performed at compile-time. Any violation of this results in a compile error.
This combined with the fact that we can inline loops allows us to write a function which is partially evaluated at compile-time and partially at run-time.
For example:
const CmdFn = struct { name: []const u8, func: fn(i32) -> i32, }; const cmd_fns = []CmdFn{ CmdFn {.name = "one",.func = one}, CmdFn {.name = "two",.func = two}, CmdFn {.name = "three",.func = three}, }; fn one(value: i32) -> i32 { value + 1 } fn two(value: i32) -> i32 { value + 2 } fn three(value: i32) -> i32 { value + 3 } fn performFn(comptime prefix_char: u8, start_value: i32) -> i32 { var result: i32 = start_value; comptime var i = 0; inline while (i < cmd_fns.len) : (i += 1) { if (cmd_fns[i].name[0] == prefix_char) { result = cmd_fns[i].func(result); } } return result; } fn testPerformFn() { @setFnTest(this); assert(performFn('t', 1) == 6); assert(performFn('o', 0) == 1); assert(performFn('w', 99) == 99); } fn assert(ok: bool) { if (!ok) unreachable; }
This example is a bit contrived, because the compile-time evaluation component is unnecessary; this code would work fine if it was all done at run-time. But it does end up generating different code. In this example, the function performFn is generated three different times, for the different values of prefix_char provided:
// From the line: // assert(performFn('t', 1) == 6); fn performFn(start_value: i32) -> i32 { var result: i32 = start_value; result = two(result); result = three(result); return result; } // From the line: // assert(performFn('o', 0) == 1); fn performFn(start_value: i32) -> i32 { var result: i32 = start_value; result = one(result); return result; } // From the line: // assert(performFn('w', 99) == 99); fn performFn(start_value: i32) -> i32 { var result: i32 = start_value; return result; }
Note that this happens even in a debug build; in a release build these generated functions still pass through rigorous LLVM optimizations. The important thing to note, however, is not that this is a way to write more optimized code, but that it is a way to make sure that what should happen at compile-time, does happen at compile-time. This catches more errors and as demonstrated later in this article, allows expressiveness that in other languages requires using macros, generated code, or a preprocessor to accomplish.
Compile-Time Expressions
In Zig, it matters whether a given expression is known at compile-time or run-time. A programmer can use a comptime expression to guarantee that the expression will be evaluated at compile-time. If this cannot be accomplished, the compiler will emit an error. For example:
extern fn exit() -> unreachable; fn foo() { comptime { exit(); } }
./test.zig:5:9: error: unable to evaluate constant expression exit(); ^
It doesn't make sense that a program could call exit() (or any other external function) at compile-time, so this is a compile error. However, a comptime expression does much more than sometimes cause a compile error.
Within a comptime expression:
All variables are comptime variables.
variables. All if, while, for, switch, and goto expressions are evaluated at compile-time, or emit a compile error if this is not possible.
,,,, and expressions are evaluated at compile-time, or emit a compile error if this is not possible. All function calls cause the compiler to interpret the function at compile-time, emitting a compile error if the function tries to do something that has global run-time side effects.
This means that a programmer can create a function which is called both at compile-time and run-time, with no modification to the function required.
Let's look at an example:
fn fibonacci(index: u32) -> u32 { if (index < 2) return index; return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); } fn testFibonacci() { @setFnTest(this); // test fibonacci at run-time assert(fibonacci(7) == 13); // test fibonacci at compile-time comptime { assert(fibonacci(7) == 13); } } fn assert(ok: bool) { if (!ok) unreachable; }
$ zig test test.zig Test 1/1 testFibonacci...OK
Imagine if we had forgotten the base case of the recursive function and tried to run the tests:
fn fibonacci(index: u32) -> u32 { //if (index < 2) return index; return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); } fn testFibonacci() { @setFnTest(this); comptime { assert(fibonacci(7) == 13); } } fn assert(ok: bool) { if (!ok) unreachable; }
$ zig test test.zig./test.zig:3:28: error: operation caused overflow return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:14:25: note: called from here assert(fibonacci(7) == 13); ^
The compiler produces an error which is a stack trace from trying to evaluate the function at compile-time.
Luckily, we used an unsigned integer, and so when we tried to subtract 1 from 0, it triggered undefined behavior, which is always a compile error if the compiler knows it happened. But what would have happened if we used a signed integer?
fn fibonacci(index: i32) -> i32 { //if (index < 2) return index; return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); } fn testFibonacci() { @setFnTest(this); comptime { assert(fibonacci(7) == 13); } } fn assert(ok: bool) { if (!ok) unreachable; }
./test.zig:3:21: error: evaluation exceeded 1000 backwards branches return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^./test.zig:3:21: note: called from here return fibonacci(index - 1) + fibonacci(index - 2); ^
The compiler noticed that evaluating this function at compile-time took a long time, and thus emitted a compile error and gave up. If the programmer wants to increase the budget for compile-time computation, they can use a built-in function called @setEvalBranchQuota to change the default number 1000 to something else.
What if we fix the base case, but put the wrong value in the assert line?
comptime { assert(fibonacci(7) == 99999); }
./test.zig:15:14: error: unable to evaluate constant expression if (!ok) unreachable; ^./test.zig:10:15: note: called from here assert(fibonacci(7) == 99999); ^
What happened is Zig started interpreting the assert function with the parameter ok set to false. When the interpreter hit unreachable it emitted a compile error, because reaching unreachable code is undefined behavior, and undefined behavior causes a compile error if it is detected at compile-time.
In the global scope (outside of any function), all expressions are implicitly comptime expressions. This means that we can use functions to initialize complex static data. For example:
const first_25_primes = firstNPrimes(25); const sum_of_first_25_primes = sum(first_25_primes); fn firstNPrimes(comptime n: usize) -> [n]i32 { var prime_list: [n]i32 = undefined; var next_index: usize = 0; var test_number: i32 = 2; while (next_index < prime_list.len) : (test_number += 1) { var test_prime_index: usize = 0; var is_prime = true; while (test_prime_index < next_index) : (test_prime_index += 1) { if (test_number % prime_list[test_prime_index] == 0) { is_prime = false; break; } } if (is_prime) { prime_list[next_index] = test_number; next_index += 1; } } return prime_list; } fn sum(numbers: []i32) -> i32 { var result: i32 = 0; for (numbers) |x| { result += x; } return result; }
When we compile this program, Zig generates the constants with the answer pre-computed. Here are the lines from the generated LLVM IR:
@0 = internal unnamed_addr constant [25 x i32] [i32 2, i32 3, i32 5, i32 7, i32 11, i32 13, i32 17, i32 19, i32 23, i32 29, i32 31, i32 37, i32 41, i32 43, i32 47, i32 53, i32 59, i32 61, i32 67, i32 71, i32 73, i32 79, i32 83, i32 89, i32 97] @1 = internal unnamed_addr constant i32 1060
Note that we did not have to do anything special with the syntax of these functions. For example, we could call the sum function as is with a slice of numbers whose length and values were only known at run-time.
Generic Data Structures
Zig uses these capabilities to implement generic data structures without introducing any special-case syntax. If you followed along so far, you may already know how to create a generic data structure.
Here is an example of a generic List data structure, that we will instantiate with the type i32. Whereas in C++ or Rust we would refer to the instantiated type as List<i32>, in Zig we refer to the type as List(i32).
fn List(comptime T: type) -> type { struct { items: []T, len: usize, } }
That's it. It's a function that returns an anonymous struct. For the purposes of error messages and debugging, Zig infers the name "List(i32)" from the function name and parameters invoked when creating the anonymous struct.
To keep the language small and uniform, all aggregate types in Zig are anonymous. To give a type a name, we assign it to a constant:
const Node = struct { next: &Node, name: []u8, };
This works because all top level declarations are order-independent, and as long as there isn't an actual infinite regression, values can refer to themselves, directly or indirectly. In this case, Node refers to itself as a pointer, which is not actually an infinite regression, so it works fine.
Case Study: printf in C, Rust, and Zig
Putting all of this together, let's compare how printf works in C, Rust, and Zig.
Here's how printf work in C:
#include <stdio.h> static const int a_number = 1234; static const char * a_string = "foobar"; int main(int argc, char **argv) { fprintf(stderr, "here is a string: '%s' here is a number: %d
", a_string, a_number); return 0; }
here is a string: 'foobar' here is a number: 1234
What happens here is the printf implementation iterates over the format string at run-time, and when it encounters a format specifier such as %d it looks at the next argument which is passed in an architecture-specific way, interprets the argument as a type depending on the format specifier, and attempts to print it. If the types are incorrect or not enough arguments are passed, undefined behavior occurs - it may crash, print garbage data, or access invalid memory.
Luckily, the compiler defines an attribute that you can use like this:
__attribute__ ((format (printf, x, y)));
Where x and y are the 1-based indexes of the argument parameters that correspond to the format string and the first var args parameter, respectively.
This attribute adds type checking to the function it decorates, to prevent the above problems, and the printf function from stdio.h has this attribute on it, so these problems are solved.
But what if you want to invent your own format string syntax and have the compiler check it for you?
You can't.
That's how it works in C. It is hard-coded into the compiler. If you wanted to write your own format string printing code and have it checked by the compiler, you would have to use the preprocessor or metaprogramming - generate C code as output from some other code.
Zig is a programming language which is intended to replace C. We can do better than this.
Here's the equivalent program in Zig:
const io = @import("std").io; const a_number: i32 = 1234; const a_string = "foobar"; pub fn main(args: [][]u8) -> %void { %%io.stderr.printf("here is a string: '{}' here is a number: {}
", a_string, a_number); }
here is a string: 'foobar' here is a number: 1234
Let's crack open the implementation of this and see how it works:
/// Calls print and then flushes the buffer. pub fn printf(self: &OutStream, comptime format: []const u8, args:...) -> %void { const State = enum { Start, OpenBrace, CloseBrace, }; comptime var start_index: usize = 0; comptime var state = State.Start; comptime var next_arg: usize = 0; inline for (format) |c, i| { switch (state) { State.Start => switch (c) { '{' => { if (start_index < i) %return self.write(format[start_index...i]); state = State.OpenBrace; }, '}' => { if (start_index < i) %return self.write(format[start_index...i]); state = State.CloseBrace; }, else => {}, }, State.OpenBrace => switch (c) { '{' => { state = State.Start; start_index = i; }, '}' => { %return self.printValue(args[next_arg]); next_arg += 1; state = State.Start; start_index = i + 1; }, else => @compileError("Unknown format character: " ++ c), }, State.CloseBrace => switch (c) { '}' => { state = State.Start; start_index = i; }, else => @compileError("Single '}' encountered in format string"), }, } } comptime { if (args.len!= next_arg) { @compileError("Unused arguments"); } if (state!= State.Start) { @compileError("Incomplete format string: " ++ format); } } if (start_index < format.len) { %return self.write(format[start_index...format.len]); } %return self.flush(); }
This is a proof of concept implementation; it will gain more formatting capabilities before Zig reaches its first release.
Note that this is not hard-coded into the Zig compiler; this userland code in the standard library.
When this function is analyzed from our example code above, Zig partially evaluates the function and emits a function that actually looks like this:
pub fn printf(self: &OutStream, arg0: i32, arg1: []const u8) -> %void { %return self.write("here is a string: '"); %return self.printValue(arg0); %return self.write("' here is a number: "); %return self.printValue(arg1); %return self.write("
"); %return self.flush(); }
printValue is a function that takes a parameter of any type, and does different things depending on the type:
pub fn printValue(self: &OutStream, value: var) -> %void { const T = @typeOf(value); if (@isInteger(T)) { return self.printInt(T, value); } else if (@isFloat(T)) { return self.printFloat(T, value); } else if (@canImplicitCast([]const u8, value)) { const casted_value = ([]const u8)(value); return self.write(casted_value); } else { @compileError("Unable to print type '" ++ @typeName(T) ++ "'"); } }
And now, what happens if we give too many arguments to printf |
. One pillar of his family economics is the assumption that the fewer kids you have, the better they’ll be. Becker matter-of-factly speaks of the “quality/quantity trade-off.” A central lesson of behavioral genetics, as we’ve seen, is that the trade-off is often illusory. Parents who believe otherwise base their family plans on misinformation. Is this merely one admittedly large oversight on Becker’s part, or has the ability of enlightened self-interest to explain the family been oversold?
That lunch with Becker was an intellectual highlight of my life. A draft of Donohue and Levitt’s “ more abortion, less crime ” paper was circulating. As soon as Becker heard the main idea, his economic genius started running around like a jackrabbit. My recollection is that he was skeptical, because he expected abortion to change the timing of births rather than their total number. Whatever Becker said, though, just being in his presence was awesome. Death sucks, and it’s got to stopLGBulleTIn #68 - The week in LGBTI news
October 21-27, 2016
Friday, October 21
Australia: Adelaide unveils Rainbow Walk in the city centre to celebrate the LGBTI community
A pathway in rainbow colours has been unveiled in Adelaide’s Central Business District to celebrate the local LGBTI community. Aimed at representing a “permanent symbol to celebrate diversity within our community,” the art installation includes a timeline to highlight significant South Australian milestones, people and events in the state’s history.
"We have a very proud story to tell here in South Australia," former Adelaide City Councillor Robert Simms told 891 ABC Adelaide. "(This walk is) a reminder of how far we've come on the journey for law reform for LGBTI Australians, but […] we've still got work to do."
“The walk recognises and appreciates those who paved the way for us here today," Feast Festival patron Margie Fischer said. “(This) is a road we can walk together to support diversity and acceptance."
~~~
Friday, October 21
Nigeria: Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act has “far-reaching and severe impact,” report shows
Nigeria: Harsh Lawâs Severe Impact on LGBT Community https://t.co/kpqzNOkyjf — Human Rights Watch (@hrw) October 20, 2016
The law has been used by some police officers and members of the public in Nigeria to legitimize multiple human rights violations perpetrated against LGBT people, according to Human Rights Watch.
While no evidence was found that anyone has been prosecuted under the Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, an 81-page report documents how its impact has been “far-reaching and severe.” Since the law has been approved, an increase in violations against LGBT people has been documented, including widespread extortion, mob violence, arbitrary arrest, torture in detention, and physical and sexual violence.
“LGBT people in Nigeria are not advocating for same-sex marriage," said Wendy Isaack, LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, "but they want the violence to stop and, for human rights defenders and organizations that provide services to LGBT people, to be able to operate without fear. Nigeria should respond to the African Commission’s recommendation to review the law.”
~~~
Friday, October 21
Singapore: new rules restrict funding opportunities for public events, including those in support of rainbow communities
Foreign entities will need a permit before they can fund or support events held at Singapore's Speakers’ Corner in Hong Lim Park, the Ministry of Home Affairs announced. "The Government's position has always been that foreign entities should not interfere in our domestic issues, especially those of a political or controversial nature," the ministry said.
Even if no particular event was mentioned in the announcement, Channel News Asia pointed out how new regulations came after the ministry said in June that it would take steps to clarify that foreign entities should not fund or support events held at Speakers’ Corner, including the annual Pink Dot event in support of rainbow communities.
"We respect and understand the Ministry of Home Affairs’ position," a statement by PinkDot reads. "However, we are disappointed by the latest clarifications from the ministry. Pink Dot has always been a local movement dedicated to bringing LGBT Singaporeans closer to their friends and families and closer to Singapore society as a whole – a universal aspiration that we do not consider to be controversial or political."
~~~
Saturday, October 22
Cyprus: ILGA-Europe annual conference closes in Nicosia
Our conference host Miguel Vale De Almeida presents reflections from #IENicosia2016 1st day #intersectionality #power to the #people A post shared by ILGA-Europe (@ilgaeurope) on Oct 20, 2016 at 11:48pm PDT
Over 400 human rights defenders came together to take part in the ILGA-Europe annual conference. In this 2016, a year that marks the 20th anniversary of the European region of ILGA, the conference was held in a country that has recently made important steps towards a better recognition of the fundamental rights of LGBTI people: in the past two years, Cyprus saw its first Pride march, the criminalization of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric and the adoption and enactment of the Civil Union Law.
The conference was held under the theme Power To The People, with a strong focus on diversity and intersectionality, and perspective spaces for participants to come together and discuss shared issues. It was a time of debates, of celebrations for the many victories achieved, but also a moment to look at the current political and social backdrop facing the continent.
Marginalised groups are "being used as a threat to society, tapping into the insecurity that people feel," ILGA-Europe co-chair Joyce Hamilton told Associated Press. Key to maintaining the momentum after important victories have happened, she claimed, would be for movements to join forces and defend human rights for all.
During the conference, A. Chaber, Brian Sheehan, Costa Gavrielides, Joyce Hamilton and Olena Shevchenko were elected to the ILGA-Europe board, while Martin Iversen Christensen and Anastasia Danilova were confirmed as European representatives on the ILGA World Board.
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Saturday, October 22
United States: lawsuit filed against Utah State Board of Education over anti-LGBT laws
Federal lawsuit challenging #Utah laws that ban positive speech about #LGBT people in Utah public school — NCLRð³ï¸âð (@NCLRights) October 22, 2016
Advocacy groups have filed a federal lawsuit challenging state laws that ban positive speech about lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people in Utah public schools curricula, classroom discussions, and student clubs.
The lawsuit is the first of its kind at the national level to challenge such laws, which – according to reports - currently also exist in South Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
The lawsuit, according to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, alleges that “the laws violate the U.S. Constitution and federal education law by discriminating against LGBT people and restricting the First Amendment rights of students and teachers.”
These laws “single out 'homosexuality' and LGBT persons for negative treatment, improperly restrict student and teacher speech,” the complaint reads, “and create a culture of silence and non-acceptance (…), all of which puts LGBT students at heightened risk of isolation, harassment, and long-term negative impacts on their health and well-being while serving no legitimate state interest.”
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Monday, October 24
El Salvador: government signs cooperation agreement to advance LGBTI entrepreneurship
The Government of El Salvador signed a cooperation agreement to provide support for 15 companies led by members of the LGBTI community and “provide new development opportunities for this population.”
With this agreement, the first-of-a-kind in the country, the Secretaria de Inclusión Social commits to “provide support and technical assistance” to these companies, hoping to include more of them in the project in the near future.
According to Mónica Linares, director of the Asociación Solidaria para Impulsar el Desarrollo Humano (ASPIDH), this agreement is set to “help members of the LGBTI community be more included in the work environment.”
Read more on El Mundo
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Wednesday, October 26
United Nations and international human rights experts call for end to human rights violations against intersex children and adults
Speaking ahead of Intersex Awareness Day, a group of United Nations and international human rights experts has called for an urgent end to human rights violations against intersex children and adults.
“While awareness of the existence and rights of intersex people is slowly growing thanks to the work of intersex human rights defenders,” a statement reads, “only a handful of countries have taken concrete measures to uphold their rights and protect them from abuses.”
Human rights experts have urged Governments to prohibit harmful medical practices on intersex children, to "uphold the autonomy of intersex adults and children," and to grant them "access to support as well as to medical services that respond to their specific health needs and that are based on non-discrimination, informed consent and respect for their fundamental rights."
In the run up to Intersex Awareness Day, the United Nations also launched a new video and online platform "to encourage greater understanding of intersex issues, provide a platform for intersex people to tell their stories, and press for action to end the abuse and stigma that shadow many intersex people from early childhood on."
Is that all? More LGBTI news bites
Dozens of actions have taken place all around the world on the occasion of the International Day of Action for Trans Depathologization.
Men convicted of same-sex sexual activity on the basis of outdated laws will receive a full pardon, the Scottish government has announced.
The British overseas territory of Gibraltar has legalised marriage equality, as the Civil Marriage Amendment Bill 2016 was passed in parliament unanimously.
According to reports, legislators in Taiwan announced they will propose an amendment to the Civil Code that would introduce marriage equality, and give couples adoption rights.
According to reports, police in Bangladesh have arrested a person over the murder of activists Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy, who were hacked to death in April 2016.
Civil society organisations are calling on police to investigate over the murder of Jhosaira Rufo Monserrat (Eva), a trans woman and a sex worker who was shot to death in the Dominican Republic.
For the third consecutive year, but this time together with Argentina, Uruguay ranks on top of the Social Inclusion Index published by Americas Quarterly when it comes to LGBT-friendliness in the American continent.
According to reports, a government spokesperson in Malawi has claimed that a U. S. pastor known for hate speech against the LGBTI community is not welcome in the country.
A bill aimed at protecting people against hate crimes including on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status was presented in South Africa.
In New Zealand, a new report recommended national sporting bodies adopt a policy of zero tolerance for homophobia and other discriminatory behaviour.
A conference aimed at bringing together people of Christian faith, pastors, leaders and youth workers who are a part of - or work with - the LGBTI community was held in New Zealand.
In the United States, a rule barring contractors working with USAID from discriminating against people on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity when providing services has come into force.
A report issued by Department of Health's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in the United States showed that lesbian, gay and bisexual adults are more likely than their straight counterparts to abuse substances and experience mental health issues.
As the ILGA World Conference approaches (it’s a month until the event begins!), our weekly dispatch of LGBTI news from around the world takes a break: the LGBulleTIn will be back on December 9!
Is there any other LGBTI-related news
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Drop us a line on Facebook or tweet @ilgaworld!Overview (5)
Mini Bio (1)
Fred Phelps was born on November 13, 1929 in Meridian, Mississippi, USA as Frederick Waldron Phelps. He is known for his work on Fred: The Movie (2000), The Most Hated Family in America (2007) and Judgment Day. He was married to Margie Phelps. He died on March 19, 2014 in Topeka, Kansas, USA.
Spouse (1)
Trade Mark (2)
Always wears a bullet proof vest, windbreaker, white rubber gloves, and a cowboy hat
Southern accent
Trivia (14)
Has thirteen children, fifty-two grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Except for four of his children (Dorothea, Kathy, Mark, and Nate), all of them are members of the Westboro Baptist Church, which is based in Topeka, Kansas.
Despite being awarded a special honor by the NAACP for his practice of civil rights cases in the 1970s and 80s, he has been recorded by news crews and private citizens on numerous occasions screaming racial expletives at crowds of blacks and civilians. Members of the NAACP have stated in recent years that Phelps would not have been given the award had they known that he was using the civil rights cases as a front for extortion crimes.
Permanently disbarred from practicing law in 1987 for slander, libel, extortion, and harassment. The motion for Phelps' disbarment was signed by every federal judge in the state of Kansas. Phelps accepted disbarment on the grounds that none of his children, six of whom were also listed in the motion, would face the same fate; three of them (including Fred Jr. and Margie Phelps-Roper) were suspended for libel, slander, and harassment.
In 1968, weighing nearly 300lbs, he was rushed to the hospital after overdosing on a cocktail of barbiturates, amphetamines, and alcohol. He remained in a coma for nearly a week; upon release from the hospital he placed himself on a stringent liquid diet and dropped to 135lbs in less than three months.
In 1994, a woman attempted to murder him by running him over in her car after he allegedly shouted sexual obscenities at her during a picket. Phelps declined to press charges when the Topeka district attorney informed him that doing so would be essentially admitting that he was guilty of inciting violence, and he himself would be arrested and tried.
Accepted to West Point at the age of sixteen. He dropped out before attending any classes.
Featured in the June 11, 1951 issue of TIME magazine for his efforts to make kissing in public a criminal felony in Pasadena, California. His crusade came to an end after he was arrested for assaulting a police officer who informed him that he did not have permission to picket at John Muir University.
Part of a failed mission to convert Mormons in Vernal, Utah, with fellow students from Bob Jones University in 1947. After delivering a sermon condeming the Mormon religion, the mission leader was asked a theological question he did not know the answer to; Phelps responded by attacking the man who'd asked the question, resulting in a near riot.
Attended Bob Jones university for two years (1946-1948) before dropping out. He cited racial issues as the reason for his departure; in 1994 Rev. Former college employees told the Topeka Capital Journal that Phelps left after being given an ultimatum that he either seek psychiatric counselling or be expelled.
John F. Kennedy, Jr., ranked him #5 on his list of "The Most Interesting People in Politics" in George Magazine.
Fred Phelps is a registered Democrat in Kansas, and has even ran for the Democratic primary for governor three times (1990, 1994, and 1998).
After spending decades as one of the most prominent hate figures in the United States, he is believed to have undergone a complete reversal of his homophobic beliefs shortly before his death. According to Phelps' grandson and former church member Zach Phelps-Roper, Phelps was voted out of the church after undergoing a "change of heart" regarding his religious beliefs. Zach reported that Phelps had spoken in support of the members of Equality House across the road from the church, which was regarded as "rank blasphemy" by the church, and told Them that They were ''good people''.
Was banned from entering the United Kingdom along with his daughter Shirley.
Personal Quotes (31)
The Lord is punishing this evil nation for abandoning all moral imperatives that are worth a dime.
Thank God for the tsunami, and thank God that two thousand dead Swedes are fertilizing the ground over there [in Asia]. How many of these two thousand, do you suppose, were fags and dykes? This is how the Lord deals with His enemies. And the Lord has got some enemies. And Sweden heads the list. You filthy Swedes. You filthy Swedes!
Thank God for 9/11. Thank God that, five years ago, the wrath of God was poured out upon this evil nation. America, land of the sodomite damned. We thank thee, Lord God Almighty, for answering the prayers of those that are under the altar.
This evil nation has smeared fag feces blended with dyke-- fag semen and dyke feces on the Bible!
President Bush and thousands of others, politicians and preachers, are making speeches and lying in [sic] their teeth, all agreeing that they can't explain such tragedies, but they're just certain a loving God had nothing to do with the massacre. They say, evil did it, like Star Wars, some evil force.
Don't you stupid Aussies get it? Australia is doomed! Nothing, and nobody, can help you. You have sinned willfully after you have received knowledge of the truth.
Thank God for the violent shooter, one of your soldier heroes in Tucson. God appointed the Afghanistan veteran to avenge himself on this evil nation. However many are dead, Westboro Baptist Church will picket their funerals. We will remind the living that you can still repent and obey. This is ultimatum time with God. Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Luke 13:3. This nation unleashed criminal violent veterans on Westboro Baptist Church for telling you to obey God. We told you at your soldiers' funerals that they are dying for your sins. You hate those words and you will not stop sinning. So you sent violent veterans, so-called patriot guard riders, to attack and try to silence Westboro Baptist Church. Then you sent violent crippled veteran Ryan Newell with 90 rounds of ammunition, planning to shoot five Westboro Baptist Church members while picketing. God restrained the hand of them all, then he turned the violent veteran on you. 22-year-old Jared Loughner opened fire outside a Tucson, Arizona grocery store, shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Federal Judge John M. Roll, and sixteen others. At least six are dead and counting. Congress passed three laws against Westboro Baptist Church. Congresswoman Giffords, an avid supporter of sin and baby-killing, was shot for that mischief. A federal judge in Baltimore, part of the massive military community in Maryland and in the District of Columbia, put Westboro Baptist Church on trial for faithful words from God. Federal Judge Roll paid for those sins with his life. Today, mouthy witch Sarah Palin had Representative Giffords in her crosshairs on her website. She quick took it down, however, because she is a cowardly brute like the rest of you. The crosshairs to worry about are God's and he's put you in his and your destruction is upon you. You should have obeyed. This nation of violent murderers is in full rebellion against God. God avenged himself on you today by a marvelous work in Tucson. He sits in the heavens and laughs at you in your affliction. Westboro Baptist Church prays for more shooters, more violent veterans, and more dead. Praise God for his righteous judgments in this Earth. Amen.
This evil man has proclaimed June as the month to be proud of abominable sins against God!... God then affixed the death penalty for doing what the LGBT fags do, fornicating day and night, and what Obama gratuitously said we must be proud of!
God hates fags! God hates America! Thank God for dead soldiers! You're going to hell!
Canada is a filthy country run by fags, which has Draconian laws making it a crime to preach the Gospel there. All of these cowardly kissy-poo preachers who telecast their milquetoast sermons into Canada have to edit out every single word critical of fags -- snip, snip, snip -- or the fag officials of Canada will arrest and criminally prosecute the Canadian affiliates, and shut down their stations! There's no freedom of speech in Canada. There's no freedom of religion in Canada. It is against the law to read the Bible in Canada.
We told you, right after it happened five years ago, that the deadly events of 9/11 were direct outpourings of divine retribution, the immediate visitation of God's wrath and vengeance and punishment for America's horrendous sodomite sins, that worse and more of it was on the way. We further told you that any politician, any political official, any preacher telling you differently as to the cause and interpretation of 9/11 is a dastardly lying false prophet, cowardly and mean, and headed for hell. And taking you with him! God is no longer with America, but is now America's enemy. God himself is now America's terrorist.
This jackass of a president ought to proclaim pride month for decency, abstinence and chastity, not for the most abominable sins known to mankind - in the estimation of God Almighty, that is. Obama will bring down the curses of God upon the whole creation. Remember, you ignorant Americans, you Obama-worshippers around the world, we warned you. He raises a false argument ordering that nobody discriminate against fags. Listen up, you Bible-ignorant moron! It is neither wrongful nor sinful to discriminate against sin!
God is punishing America for the way they have persecuted us at Westboro Baptist Church, and worse and more of [the Virginia Tech massacre] is coming and this evil sodomite nation is doomed.
For ten long weary years prior to 9/11, WBC warned you daily on the mean streets of this nation that your sodomite sins will be avenged by an angry God except you repent. You persecuted us for our trouble, thereby aggravating your great transgression. On 9/11/01, God Almighty dealt backsliding America a staggering blow.
Mr. Rogers gave aid and comfort to homosexuals. He was a man who preached tolerance of all sorts of people in ways that directly contradicted the Bible. His syrupy teachings led millions astray. He was a wuss and he was an enabler of wusses.
The president whose moral values would permit him to kill his unborn grandchildren if his daughters get pregnant by mistake, that same president has now issued a formal proclamation glorifying sodomite sin!
The Lord sent a world-class whopper of a massacre to Virginia Tech, killing thirty-three, drawing headlines like 'Shocked!', 'Horrified!', 'The worst massacre in US history!'. Well, we wish you were thirty-three thousand killed, but we are thankful to our Father for thirty-three.
Bill O'Reilly is a demon-possessed messenger of Satan. O'Reilly regularly slanders Westboro Baptist Church on his program, and he only has guests who join him in slandering Westboro Baptist Church, and refuses to allow Westboro Baptist Church to respond! Thus, Bill O'Reilly is a blaspheming hell-bound hypocrite claiming to be fair and balanced and running a no-spin zone. Hah! O'Reilly is of his father the Devil.
Our church has had a lot of bad dealings with those demon-possessed Canadians! A big Canadian flag flies at our church upside-down, the international symbol of distress. We fly it day and night, to educate and warn people about the fagi-nazi regime just to the north of us. Canadians are afraid of their tyrannical fag-run government. You can determine for yourself about Canada, and keep as far away from them as you can.
I tell you, my friends, it's a sin to pray for the USA. And nobody that's intelligent, and that fears God, will fly the American flag any way but upside-down, the international signal of distress... It's too late to pray for the USA.
Same-sex marriage, by any name, civil union or otherwise, is the ultimate smashed-mouth in-your-face insult to God Almighty, and you think He's going to let England and America and the rest of this evil world get by with it? God Almighty has not joined fags in holy wedlock. God no longer keeps America safe. America is doomed. We're getting the pants beat off of us, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. God is now America's terrorist, that's who Bush is fighting, that's the terrorist that he best be afraid of. You tweaked His nose, you jackass, you tweaked His nose! God put it in your wicked heart to start that war. That's the message we've got at the funerals of these dead soldiers. God duped you into starting a war, so He could punish you. And any preacher preaching it any other way is a lying hell-bound false prophet. So almost eighteen months now and the siege has got people eating their babies, and their small children, and each other! You're going to eat your babies! God Himself duped Bush into a no-win war, and He did that by the technique of putting a lying spirit in the mouth of all his trusted advisers, to punish America.
On Tuesday, May 14, the old fat false prophet Jerry Falwell died and entered hell. As the old preacher used to put it, he split hell wide open... Hell from beneath was moved to meet Falwell at his coming, rousing the dead, even those that used to be bigshots on Earth now in hell greeting him with such words as these: 'Why, hello, Reverend Fraudwell, you old money-grubbing pervert!'... As a young preacher in Springfield, Missouri, Falwell was a true Calvinistic Baptist preacher who believed and preached the truth. But he saw early on that his lust for power and lucre could never be satisfied if he was faithful to the word of God. And so the old fool like the false prophet Balaam sold his soul for a mess of free will-ism, God loves everybody-ism, Arminianism, lies - sold his soul for lies.
Stiff-necked America, in flagrant rebellion against God, is indulging a caterwauling orgy of sinful maudlin cinementality on the 5th anniversary of God's 9/11 vengeance upon this evil nation for its sodomite sins!
[Concerning the September 11 attacks] God hates America, and those calamities last Tuesday are none other than the wrath of God, smiting fag America... That wasn't any accident. That wasn't any coincidence. There's only America to blame for those tragedies.
It is the obligation of Westboro Baptist Church to put the cup of God's fury to America's lips, and cause America to drink it. And you will drink it!
[Concerning the September 11 attacks] God hates America, and God demonstrated that hatred to some modest degree only last Tuesday -- sent in those bombers, those hellacious 767 Boeing bombers, and it was a glorious sight. What you need to do is see in those flames -- those sickening, twisting, burning, life-destroying flames, brightly shining from every television set around the world! You need to see in those flames a little preview of the flames of Hell that are going to soon engulf you, my friend. Burn your soul forever!
[Concerning the September 11 attacks] How many do you suppose of those hundred and thirty soldiers died in the Pentagon last Tuesday were fags and dykes? And how many do you suppose were working in that massively composed building structure called those two World Trade Center buildings, Twin Towers? There were five thousand or ten thousand killed and, counting all those passengers in those airplanes, it's very likely that every last single one of them was a fag or dyke or a fag enabler, and that the minute he died, he split hell wide open, and the way to analyze the situation is that the Lord God Almighty, pursuant to His threatenings and warnings, killed him, looked him in the face, laughed and mocked at each one of them as He cast each one of them into Hell!
We warned that WBC has had lots of experience with Ireland's militant sodomite citizenry, steeped for many decades in ignorant, blind idolatrous Catholicism, belching out their vile fagspeak, slander and blasphemy against God and His word.
You are a Bible pervert, Bush! And I knew it, the minute you hired that fag Scott Evertz to run your White House and told Rumsfeld to hire that fag [Stephen] Herbits, Steven Herbits, to screen all the applicants for employment to the Pentagon.
God hates Australia, land of the sodomite damned! The fag-infested land of Australia is burning. The fire of God's wrath is sending hundreds of those filthy Australian beasts straight to hell! We at Westboro Baptist Church are rejoicing, and we are praying that the dear Lord would burn many more Australians alive!
Bush said, in a big memorial service the other day, we've come to mourn and grieve and try to make some kind of sense out of this senseless tragedy that makes no sense. Well, wrong, President Bush. It makes perfect sense, to those who believe the Bible. [The victims of the massacre] died for America's sins and persecuting Westboro Baptist Church.Frequently asked questions
Kickstarter: How do I get access to the beta?
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What is War for the Overworld?
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Press Inquiry?
I have a question that isn’t answered here… help!
Q: Kickstarter: How do I get access to the beta?
A: Head on over to this page for some wonderful step-by-step instructions.
Q: Kickstarter: When do I get my physical rewards?
A: The physical rewards will be manufactured and dispatched after release of the final game. Keep an eye on the Kickstarter updates for more information!
Q: Kickstarter: I need to change my shipping address!
A: We’ll be handling shipping address changes when we’re closer to dispatching the physical rewards.
Q: What is War for the Overworld?
A: War for the Overworld is a brand new Dungeon Management Game (equal parts God Game & RTS) from Subterranean Games. Within WFTO you take on the role of an Underlord who has the power to dig your own dungeons and fill them with rooms, devious minions and defenses, as the goodly heroes attempt to infiltrate your dungeon in a vain attempt at glory or riches your army will dispose of them, though you could always help by casting vicious spells and rituals… before beginning an assault on their own lands.
Q: When will the game be released?
A: The full game will be released in April 2nd 2015, however the Bedrock Beta is available now on Steam Early Access!
Q: Where can I keep up with development?
A: The best place is our forums, website and newsletter (coming soon), but you can also follow/subscribe/etc our Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Twitch profiles, or join the official WFTO Subreddit.
Q: What is the Bedrock Beta?
A: The Bedrock Beta is the foundation of War for the Overworld that will be regularly updated with assets, bug fixes, and features. Our goal with making the game available so early is to allow us to gather valuable feedback and criticism whilst allowing you to enjoy the opportunity to watch the game grow as we progress from beta to the finished product.
Q: I have a bug to report! Where should I go?
A: Head on over to our Bug Reports forum. Thanks for the help!
Q: Where should I post feedback or suggestions?
A: Feedback should be posted in our forum, suggestions should be posted in our Suggestions forum.
Q: How often will the Bedrock Beta be updated?
A: In preperation for our release in February we will be slowing our release schedule to focus all efforts on development. We expect to release one more patch this year and a couple more early next year, for more information please read WFTO Wednesday #94.
Q: Is the Bedrock Beta only available on Steam? What if I don’t want to use Steam?
A: The Bedrock Beta is only available through Steam as it provides a significantly better environment for testing than any other distribution platform. If you purchase the game through our website (using the Humble Store widgets), a DRM-Free download of the game will be available to you at release. Please note that the DRM-Free version will not support any Steamworks-powered features and may have limited multiplayer functionality.
Q: What platforms can I play WFTO on?
A: WFTO is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Q: I missed out on Kickstarter and would like to get my hands on one of those awesome Kickstarter reward tiers, is that possible?
A: Unfortunately not, however we may make certain things available in the future. Any Kickstarter-exclusive items will only ever be available under special circumstances (contests, charity, etc).
Q: What are these Humble Store widgets?
A: The Humble Store is a checkout system created by the wonderful folks behind the Humble Bundles. You can find out more information on the PC Gaming Wiki.
Q: What’s the difference between purchasing on your website and purchasing on Steam?
A: Purchasing WFTO on our website through the Humble Store widgets will provide you with a Steam Key and a DRM-Free download of the game on release, we also get a larger percentage of the revenue which lets us keep the lights on. The Humble Store widgets also allow you to provide an additional tip if you wish! Please note that the DRM-Free version will not support any Steamworks-powered features and may have limited multiplayer functionality.
Q: What do I get in the Underlord Edition of the game?
A: The Underlord Edition includes the exclusive Sovereign Dungeon Theme, a soundtrack download, and a copy of The Dungeoneer’s Guide to the Underworld, a digital companion book for all your Dungeon-Building needs. Please note that these rewards will not be available until the release of the game. Every Kickstarter backer who pledged above £15 will automatically get the Underlord Edition extras.
Q: Is there a physical box copy of the game available?
A: Yes! We have partnered with Sold Out Sales & Marketing to produce and distribute a physical version of the Underlord Edition. Please see our announcement and the Boxed Copy FAQ for more details.
Q: Is it possible to upgrade from the standard edition to the Underlord Edition?
A: Not currently, but we will make this option available soon.
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A: Not at the moment. We may make a demo available or have a free weekend on Steam closer to release.
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A: Yes, we plan to release patches and content updates for the foreseeable future. Please read this thread for more information on our plans for post-release support.
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A: We aren’t yet ready to announce our plans for modding support. Please keep an eye on the updates.
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A: Yes! Multiplayer will be added to the beta in the coming months.
Q: Press Inquiry?
A: Please see our Press page.
Q: I have a question that isn’t answered here… help!
A: We love feedback as much as we love answering questions, the best (and fastest) way to get a response is to post a thread on our forums. Alternatively, you can send a message to our Facebook or Twitter pages, or email us here. If you are a Kickstarter backer, you can message us through our Kickstarter page.(Wikimedia Commons)
SÃO PAULO - O ministro do STF (Supremo Tribunal Federal) Teori Zavascki, relator da Operação Lava Jato, avisou aos seus colegas na noite da terça-feira (24) que autorizaria a prisão do senador Delcídio do Amaral (PT-MS). Segundo informa a colunista Monica Bergamo, da Folha, ele tentava obter apoio antecipado para medida considerada excepcional e extrema.
Alguns ministros como Celso de Mello, Gilmar Mendes, Dias Toffoli e Cármen Lúcia resistiram à medida, mas os fatos apresentados eram tão "chocantes", nas palavras de um dos magistrados, que todos concordaram que a prisão era inevitável.
Vale ressaltar que o Teori Zavascki já dizia que "o pior ainda está por ser revelado" e continua adotando o mesmo tom grave em relação à Operação Lava Jato.
Os avisos alarmistas incluem a delação premiada do ex-diretor internacional da Petrobras, Nestor Cerveró, que Zavascki homologou há alguns dias. O ministro define o ex-diretor da Petrobras como um homem que "sabe muito" e é um dos poucos no país que têm pleno conhecimento do conteúdo, aparentemente explosivo, informa a colunista.
É hora ou não é de comprar ações da Petrobras? Veja essa análise especial antes de decidir:
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25. Michigan OK, it’s just a block “M.” But the color combination of maize and blue that makes Michigan’s football uniforms the best in the land also makes the |
workers is so discredited that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are opposed. (cool revolution/ Flickr)
This article was first posted at The Globalist.
During the 1993 U.S. congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, a Democratic Congressman with a solid pro-labor voting record asked me why I thought NAFTA would be bad for working people.
After I had given my answer, he responded: “Well, you may be right about the economics.” “But we have a 2000-mile border with Mexico. The President told me we need NAFTA to make it secure.”
Who can argue against national security?
NAFTA was the economic model for the ever more corporatist trade deals that followed, including the currently proposed 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The arguments for NAFTA also set the pattern for the debates over those deals. Whenever the economic case crumbles, “national security” becomes the fallback rationale.
After a quarter century of off-shored jobs and depressed wages in the wake of corporate-driven trade de-regulation, the claim that the Trans-Pacific Partnership will make life better for American workers is so discredited that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are opposed.
Obama, the Republican
But the Republican leadership and Barack Obama still want it, and they will try to get Congressional approval in the post-election “lame duck” session before the new president takes office.
True to form, their sales pitch has shifted from the claim that the TPP will make Americans prosperous to the claim that it will make America safer.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter says “passing TPP is as important to me as another aircraft carrier.” Likewise, eight former Defense secretaries assure Congressional leaders that approving the TPP will “contribute to a safer world for us, our children and our grandchildren.”
Obama’s former chief economist Alan Krueger now tells us that “trade agreements are primarily about foreign relations.”
Plunging Mexico into turmoil
Unfortunately, the foreign policy case for these neoliberal trade deals has fared no better than the economic policy case.
The national security argument for NAFTA was that:
it would reduce illegal immigration and
it would transform Mexico into a prosperous, First World democracy under the rule of law.
But within a few years, the economic dislocation triggered by NAFTA led to millions of jobless Mexicans heading north across the border.
In response, the U.S. government has built 670 miles of hi-tech fence—with another 700 miles planned. It has also deployed almost 20,000 guards to patrol it with dogs, guns and drones. In effect, we are already well on our way to building Donald Trump’s wall.
Far from making Mexico more stable, NAFTA helped plunge the country into lawlessness and social turmoil. The huge increase in trade overwhelmed U.S. Customs, making it easier to ship marijuana and cocaine into our eager market.
Drug cartels fought over the profits, spreading criminal violence throughout the country. The State Department now warns Americans against traveling to Mexican border states where “U.S. citizens have been the victims of violent crimes, such as homicide, kidnapping, carjacking and robbery by organized criminal groups.” Quite a way in which trade aggressively makes us more secure!
The China problem
Six years after signing NAFTA, Bill Clinton, pushed by corporate lobbyists, agreed to the Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) deal with mainland China. It that allowed U.S. investors to produce goods for the U.S. market made by exploited Chinese workers.
PNTR, Clinton told us, was a clever geopolitical strategy to “pull China in the right direction” i.e., toward greater democracy and into the role of America’s junior partner in Asia.
After sixteen years, Americans are now told that China moved in the “wrong” direction. Internally, it remains a harsh authoritarian state.
Externally, flush with dollars from its massive trade surpluses with the United States, China has expanded its armed forces and employed its economic power. It is busily prying U.S. out of its hegemonic position in South East Asia.
In response, the United States is building up its network of military bases and supplying more weapons and training to China’s neighbors—all of which are, ironically following, what the U.S. has labeled as, China’s “wrong” model of authoritarian capitalism.
Today, U.S. and Chinese war planes and ships are buzzing each other in the South China Sea over territorial disputes that have nothing to do with the security of the people of the United States.
Short of war, the U.S. can no more stop China from dominating the South China Sea than China can stop the U.S. from dominating the Caribbean. China’s trade with its neighbors already dwarfs their trade with us. The gap, and China's influence, will inevitably grow.
Preserving credibility?
If anything, the looming TPP deal will make it worse. By weakening the standards for “local content,” it will increase the proportion of TPP countries’ exports to the U.S. that are made in China.
Moreover, despite their current national security rhetoric, the TPP negotiators actually dropped the provisions in previous trade deals that allowed the U.S. government to stop foreign acquisitions of U.S. firms if deemed a threat to national defense.
As the arguments in favor of TPP dissolve one by one, its promoters’ last-ditch claim is that we need it to preserve credibility—otherwise known as “saving face.” Failure to approve the deal, says the President, “would call into question America’s leadership in this vital region.”
Really? Certainly, the leaders of the other nations involved understood that Congressional approval was not a sure thing. They will be disappointed, of course, and any U.S. diplomat who assured them that it was a slam-dunk will be embarrassed. So what?
The TPP would not be the first agreement negotiated by the U.S. administration that Congress has turned down. The Law of the Sea, for example, was negotiated in 1982 and we still have not ratified it.
United States will remain a major player
Just ask yourself, has the U.S. Navy lost credibility as a result? Do other nations not ship their goods to us? Do we still not assume the role of guarantor of freedom of the seas?
As for credibility, the United States suffered a humiliating military defeat in Vietnam, and we are still by far the most respected military force in the region.
The U.S. will remain a major player in the Asia whether or not the TPP is approved. And our Asian “partners” are not likely to stop using us as a piece in their political chess games with China because they can’t get to sell us even more underwear and electronic gadgetry than they do now.
Like the other trade deals since NAFTA, the TPP is a device for multinational corporations to drive down the wages of American workers. No one should be fooled by the effort to paste over that ugly economic reality with a happy-face sticker labeled “national security.”Excavations at one of Britain’s most majestic castles help tell the story of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom
By ERIC A. POWELL
July/August 2016
On the windswept northeastern coast of England, Bamburgh Castle rises high above a massive outcrop of black dolerite. Its brooding sandstone fortifications command sweeping views of the surrounding county of Northumberland, which was once the heart of the medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Visit the castle today, and what you see is an ornate Norman fortress that was extensively rebuilt by its owners in the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, though traces of medieval masonry are still visible in many of the buildings. But view the site through the eyes of archaeologist Graeme Young, and a different vision of the castle emerges. On his morning tea break, Young takes a few moments from supervising his crew to explain that he has spent 20 years excavating inside and around Bamburgh in an effort to understand the site’s 2,000-year history. Beneath the stately grounds of the modern castle, he and his team have unearthed the remains of a royal citadel from the early medieval period, when Northumbria’s Anglo-Saxon kings made this nearly impregnable volcanic plateau their seat of power. In the popular imagination, this era is the violent and barbaric Dark Ages, but Young suggests that discoveries here paint a more nuanced picture. “We’ve long known Bamburgh was an important site during the Anglo-Saxon period,” he says, “but we’ve discovered it was much more cosmopolitan that we imagined.” Sitting in a small office tucked into the wall of Bamburgh’s west courtyard, Young tells the unlikely story of archaeology in the castle. It begins in the 1960s, when famously eccentric archaeologist Brian Hope-Taylor started to excavate inside the castle walls. He had previously dug at a nearby early royal Anglo-Saxon settlement called Yeavering that he believed was a co-capital with Bamburgh of the kingdom of Bernicia, which predated Northumbria. “He was one of the first archaeologists to seriously study Anglo-Saxon sites,” says Young. “He really was a pioneer.” Scholars consider Hope-Taylor’s meticulous publication of the Yeavering excavation a landmark in Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Unfortunately, though he made several spectacular discoveries at Bamburgh, including the best-preserved Anglo-Saxon sword in Britain and a solid gold plaque depicting a stylized animal known as the “Bamburgh Beast,” he was not able to publish his results before his death in 2001. Young has a personal investment in Hope-Taylor’s work. He grew up visiting Bamburgh and credits the formative experience of exploring the castle as a boy with inspiring him to become an archaeologist. In 1996, he and his colleagues contacted the castle owners to request permission to follow up on Hope-Taylor’s excavations. “We didn’t know where he had dug,” says Young, “so we were hoping to use geophysics and small-scale excavation to determine that.” The owners gave their permission, and the small team began their work. Twenty years later, Young shakes his head and smiles at the memory. “We were thinking of it as a short project that we’d do on weekends among friends,” he says. But that short project quickly bloomed into a much bigger effort when it became apparent to the team that the richness of the site meant it would take years to understand it properly. They also became the unexpected heirs of Hope-Taylor’s considerable legacy.
While searching for office space, Young and the castle’s groundskeeper broke the locks on the small rooms built into the castle walls that had sat unopened for decades. What they found inside was a kind of time capsule of Hope-Taylor’s fieldwork. Still astonished by the discovery, Young shares pictures of the rooms that show they were filled with dust-covered boxes of bones, artifacts, and soil samples, all excavated by Hope-Taylor. A 1974 copy of the Daily Telegraph still resting on a chair helped establish the date of the last field season. “We’ve accidently inherited an enormous body of work at an extraordinary site,” says Young. Hope-Taylor’s students later found years’ worth of Bamburgh excavation notes, and even artifacts, such as a sword, in his apartment. Now, the Bamburgh team’s task is not only to understand their own excavations, but to synchronize their findings with the copious record Hope-Taylor left behind. University of Durham archaeologist and Anglo-Saxon expert Rosemary Cramp knew Hope-Taylor well and was glad to see archaeologists return to Bamburgh. “It really is a key site,” says Cramp, who visits the excavations but is not officially involved with the project. “High points like this are strongholds from prehistoric times onwards, but very few have the depth of Anglo-Saxon deposits that you have at Bamburgh. We still know so little about the early medieval period. There’s everything to find out, really.” Though a fortress has probably stood above the crag at Bamburgh since prehistoric times, little is known about the site before the Romans arrived. Ancient historians record that the Britons built a coastal fort at the site and that it was the stronghold of the Votadini, a tribe that lived beyond the northern frontier of the empire, but whose leaders probably depended on Roman power for their authority. “Hope-Taylor discovered Roman-era pottery at Bamburgh,” says Young. “That helps confirm that Britons living here were aligned with Rome. The Romans might have even been paying off warlords to help protect the frontier.” While the team has found stray Roman-era artifacts, such as pieces of glass, they have yet to dig as deep as Hope-Taylor did. For now, they are focused on the Anglo-Saxons. When the Romans abandoned Britain in the early fifth century, the Germanic Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes, collectively called Anglo-Saxons, took advantage of the power vacuum and sailed across the North Sea to settle in England. Much of what we know about the turbulent early Anglo-Saxon period comes from The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written by the Venerable Bede, the eighth-century monk known as the father of English history. A native of Northumbria, Bede left an especially rich (and some would say biased) account of the kingdom. “Bede often mentions Bamburgh as the kingdom’s ‘royal city,’” says Young. “That tells us that it was a high-status center.” The site first rose to prominence in 547, when an Angle warlord known as Ida the Flamebearer seized the Briton coastal fortress and founded a kingdom called Bernicia. His grandson Æthelfrith brought the neighboring Anglian realm of Deira under his dominion around 604, creating the unified kingdom of Northumbria. Æthelfrith renamed the citadel Bebbanburgh, or Bebba’s fortress, after one of his wives. For the next three centuries it played a central role in English history, with its throne often changing hands between warrior kings. Remarkably, an early archaeological find at Bamburgh allows scholars to visualize exactly what one of those thrones would have looked like.
In the late nineteenth century groundskeepers clearing foliage discovered intricately carved stone fragments. For more than a hundred years they were thought to be the remains of a standing cross. But when Rosemary Cramp reexamined the pieces, she identified them as the arm of a stone chair dating to around 800. Similar carved stone chairs have been found at Northumbrian monasteries, and are thought to be bishops’ thrones. Since Bamburgh was a secular site, such a throne would have been used by the Northumbrian kings themselves and likely played an important ceremonial role. “It’s an amazing artifact,” says Young. “These thrones were called gift-stools, and were central to a fundamental ritual during which a warrior would receive gifts from his lord in full view of the court, binding him to the king until death.” A replica of the throne now sits in the central courtyard at Bamburgh. Perhaps the most famous of the kings to have sat on the Northumbiran throne was Æthelfrith’s son St. Oswald, a warrior king of great renown who was known as “Whiteblade.” As Bede tells it, when Æthelfrith was killed in battle in 617 by a rival king, Oswald fled north to seek sanctuary with the Irish. After 17 years, he returned to the kingdom and retook the throne by force. He also brought with him Irish monks who converted pagan Anglo-Saxons and founded a monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, which became an important center of medieval Christianity. Oswald ruled from Bamburgh as the most powerful king in England for eight years, only to be killed in battle and have his corpse dismembered. Bede records that Oswald’s followers found his arm, which would not decompose. They brought this incorruptible arm to Bamburgh, where it was kept in a silver shrine. Oswald was later canonized and became the object of a cult that was venerated throughout Europe. When Young and his team conducted remote sensing at the castle’s twelfth-century chapel, they found that it was likely built on the remains of Bamburgh’s seventh-century church. “That was probably where Oswald’s arm was kept,” says Young. Another glimpse inside Bamburgh’s royal court came soon after Young’s project began, when a winter storm exposed early medieval burials outside the castle. The team excavated the site, known as the Bowl Hole cemetery, between 2001 and 2007, eventually recovering 91 skeletons. Durham University bioarchaeologist Charlotte Roberts led the team that studied the remains. They recently published their results: Most of the people buried in the cemetery were likely aristocratic members of the court. “They were mainly well-nourished and of high stature,” says Roberts, “though many had severe tooth decay that could have been brought on in part by high consumption of mead.” Roberts’ team also analyzed strontium isotope levels in the teeth, which can pinpoint where an individual spent his or her childhood. The results showed the people buried at the Bowl Hole cemetery were a surprisingly diverse group. “We found that relatively few locals were buried in the cemetery,” says Roberts. “Most of these people came from other regions of the British Isles.” Anglo-Saxon kings would often exchange children or close relatives as royal hostages to ensure that the terms of treaties were observed. Some of the individuals could have been staying at Bamburgh as just this kind of hostage. The team also found one man who came from the Outer Hebrides, near to where St. Oswald fled during his exile. Artifacts found with the burial and radiocarbon dating show that the man lived in the seventh century, around the same time as Oswald. Perhaps he accompanied the famous king back to Northumbria as part of his retinue. “That’s as close as archaeology can get us to the Oswald story,” says Young. A few of the people interred in the cemetery came from even farther afield. “Some of the strontium signatures show childhoods spent in Scandinavian countries, and this is centuries before the Viking era,” says Roberts. Others were from the southern Mediterranean or North Africa. “And it wasn’t just men,” she says, “but women from Scandinavia and southern Europe as well.” Whether the people lived permanently at Bamburgh or died there while visiting, possibly while on a pilgrimage or working there temporarily, is impossible to know. But clearly, at its height, Bamburgh was a cosmopolitan place, with people from across Britain and Europe gathering in the great hall where the Northumbrian kings held court. Young has even pinpointed just where those courtiers would have gathered. During a geophysical survey of the castle’s inner ward, the team discovered traces of a large royal mead hall. The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf describes a similar royal structure as a “timbered hall, splendid and ornamented with gold. The building in which a powerful man held court that was the foremost of halls under heaven.” Some scholars have suggested that the poem may have been composed in Northumbria. “It’s possible,” says Young, “that around 1,200 years ago, a poet recited Beowulf for the king in that great hall.”I came up with this one while in the room that shoots water out of a pipe at high speeds in order to make you clean. Yes, the super soaker chamber. Not much to really say aside from it was fun drawing Lucifer “kawaii“. What happens next in this comic is purely up to you. Does Luci find true love? Does his heart get broken in more ways than one? Will his high school teacher give him guidance in an inappropriate manner leading to mixed feelings and dishonor? Will Kenji and Lucifer truly ever be friends or remain bitter enemies over the loss of Mai?! Find out next time in High School of Perdition: Sign Zero X.
-Aaron A. Alvarez
Also comment on this comic for a chance to win an Obscure Gentlemen t-shirt.Crony capitalism, simply defined, is when government officials favor friends (cronies) over others; or when the rich and powerful use their wealth and influence to gain access to governmental officials and opportunities that are not available to the average citizen. In 1832 President Andrew Jackson struck down a crony cabal that controlled the Second Bank of the United States. When he killed the American central bank, Jackson terminated a remarkably unethical arrangement, approved by Congress, that gave state-chartered banks rights superior to those of ordinary citizens and exempted the Bank’s foreign shareholders from taxes. Jackson defined crony capitalism in his July 10, 1832 veto message to Congress:
Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress. By attempting to gratify their desires we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union.
Past and current corporate and financial titans such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos provide leading examples of crony capitalism—men who used personal relationships with politicians to enrich themselves and their businesses. The decidedly liberal Buffett, for example, reared as the son of a decidedly conservative congressman from Omaha, grew up in Washington’s Fairfax Hotel, where he learned firsthand how to work the political world to gain advantages in business.
But today perhaps the most visible and infuriating example of crony capitalism is the relationship between large banks and the federal government. Banks are, after all, government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, with access to public subsidies and protections that are not offered to truly private businesses. In credit terms, a normal business with three times as much debt as equity is generally considered investment grade, but a bank can run at 15:1 debt-to-equity leverage—not counting the oxymoron of “off-balance sheet” assets. The chief counterparty of the big banks in this loving crony capitalist embrace is the Federal Reserve System.
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When we think of crony capitalism and the big banks, the problem starts at the turn of the 20th century. Modern-day regulation of banks is an offshoot of the Progressive movement, which supposed that government could stamp out evil and prevent bad acts in markets and society. The New Deal and governmental actions during World War II institutionalized many regulatory functions and advanced the liberal cause of enlarging the corporate state, culminating in a permanent bureaucracy of regulators looking after the public interest. Private business now was clearly subordinate to the regulatory framework of the federal government, later known as the administrative state.
As regulation of banking and finance expanded, the largest institutions gradually captured the regulators and their political sponsors. Writing after the 2008 financial collapse, MIT professor Simon Johnson said of the largest financial institutions: “These banks again have unfettered access to the very top of the political decision making in the United States and, [this] reflects the fact [that] their status is completely undiminished, despite all the mistakes they made and all the damage they did to the rest of the economy.” Johnson argues that unless the largest banks are broken up, another major financial crisis is inevitable. That’s a view shared by a number of other analysts.
Prior to the Great Depression, most U.S. banks were private partnerships, and their officers and directors faced personal ruin in the event of bank failure. Many states sharply limited banks and actually required “double liability” for bank shareholders, meaning if the bank faced financial trouble its shareholders would have to match the par value of their investment with new cash. Owning a bank was a privilege and a grave responsibility to the community.
When banks began to convert to stock corporations, notes researcher and former Federal Reserve counsel Walker Todd, risk-taking behavior among bank officials changed dramatically; they took on more and more risk—and the public eventually was forced to bail them out in times of financial panic. When the government allowed banks to shift the risk of the institution from bank leaders’ personal net worth to a broad constituency of public owners, the largest banks effectively became wards of the state and ushered in what we know today as “too big to fail.” William Cohan wrote in Barron’s in July 2017:
Prior to 1970, the Wall Street partnership structure ensured that bankers had plenty of skin in the game—essentially their full net worth was on the line every day. Requiring that Wall Street’s top executives, bankers, and traders again have a significant portion of their wealth at risk would provide much-needed accountability and reinforce the soundness and safety of the financial system. It would also unleash the power of the U.S. economy.
An important part of “too big to fail” is the tendency of the Federal Reserve and other regulators to allow mergers between weak big banks and strong ones. Lost on regulators, it seems, is the reality that, when you combine a zombie bank with a healthy institution, the result is a bigger zombie bank. The refusal of regulators to wind-down large insolvent banks has caused the U.S. banking industry to evolve into a highly concentrated market with the top 100 banks out of more than 6,000 holding 90 percent of the balance-sheet assets and huge off-balance-sheet fiduciary businesses. Many of these large banks have low or negative risk-adjusted returns on capital, compared with small banks—what might be called Main Street banks, lacking access to Washington pooh-bahs—that tend to be more cautious, more profitable, and more stable in terms of equity returns. The most stable and consistently profitable U.S. banks are the super community banks that are important lenders to Main Street. They range between $1 and $10 billion in assets, and are the least benefited by crony capitalism.
This story of government-sponsored risk-taking actually stretches back to the Civil War, when federal support for and regulation of banks began with the National Bank Act of 1863. It expanded just prior to WWI with passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Then came President Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in 1932, and the formation of the Federal Home Loan Banks in 1932, and then passage of the 1933 Glass Steagall Acts (there is more than one) and legislation creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation the same year.
Interestingly, both Franklin Roosevelt and Virginia’s Democratic senator Carter Glass, a leading congressional proponent of bank regulation, opposed permanent federal insurance for deposits. But in those Great Depression days of the early 1930s the deposit insurance program was enormously popular with banks as well as with a fearful public. The Panic of 1907 and the Great Depression represented two stark episodes when downward pressure on prices caused economic decline intertwined with credit constriction. In both instances banks failed in droves while masses of Americans saw their savings wiped out.
After the bank holiday declared by FDR in March 1933, RFC chief Jesse Jones restructured the failed banks that could not qualify for the newly available FDIC insurance. As he notes in his memoir, Fifty Billion Dollars, he often warned bankers seeking assistance from the RFC that, for each dollar in new capital that came from the public, they must raise an equal amount in new private capital—or face prosecution and imprisonment. In the 1930s, and even as recently as the 1980s, the government was prepared to put failed bankers in jail.
Together with Leo Crowley, architect of the FDIC who later managed the wartime Lend-Lease program, Jones fundamentally restructured the U.S. economy in a highly efficient and transparent fashion. Under the program, the RFC nurtured failed banks back to health through bond-market funding. A big corollary, though, was a demand for tight fiscal discipline and accountability, enforced rigorously by the federal government. But this demand for discipline and accountability steadily eroded following the war as Depression-era mechanisms to limit bank risk-taking were slowly dismantled.
Similarly, Glass-Steagall forced the separation of commercial and investment banking, prohibiting banks from dealing in nongovernmental securities or investing in non-investment grade securities for themselves. The idea was that, as banks came under federal regulation, it was crucial that taxpayers be protected from irresponsible risk-taking by these institutions.
The last vestiges of the Glass-Steagall era laws regarding banking are seen today in the Bank Holding Company Act, which gives the Fed and other regulators control over who owns a bank. By limiting the ownership of banks, the Fed also protects these poorly performing monopolies from hostile takeovers. Large industrial companies such as Walmart, Amazon, Google, and Apple would all be candidates to acquire (and rationalize) large banks, but the Fed’s regulation protects the entrenched managers of poorly performing banks from market forces.
Going back to the 1980s, the Fed has enabled bad acts by the largest banks while protecting them from the wrath of investors. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1970s and trouble in the oil sector and with farm lending brought many large banks to the brink of insolvency as President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. “Not only was the thrift industry on the way to a huge taxpayer bailout, but nine out of the biggest nine banks in oil-centric Texas failed, along with many others, and the Farm Credit System, a government-backed lender, failed, too, and had its own government bailout,” notes Alex Pollock in a 2015 policy paper for the American Enterprise Institute.
The Third World debt crisis beginning in the 1970s left the largest banks virtually bankrupt, spurring the Fed to loosen the rules on new risk taking and disclosure to keep these institutions from failing. Then the Federal Reserve Board under Chairman Paul Volcker, sensitive to the foreign policy dimensions of the debt crisis, discouraged banks from selling defaulted loans to Latin debtor nations. The banks complied until the mid-1980s and delayed taking significant loan loss reserves on LDC exposures until after Volcker’s departure from the Fed in 1987.
The 1991 merger of Chemical Bank and Manufacturers Hanover illustrates the reluctance of regulators to impose discipline on large banks, which have a way of growing bigger when they fail to manage their credit risks. Chemical had been weakened by commercial real estate lending while Manny Hanny, as it was affectionately known, had extended imprudent loans to developing nations. Arguably neither bank was solvent at the time of the merger, but the Fed, FDIC, and New York State regulators approved the combination anyway, proving that the convenience of regulators is always paramount when it comes to managing big zombie banks. Today those two institutions are part of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
This example of regulatory laxity reflected a significant change in attitude among regulators that emerged through the 1980s. Increasingly, regulators even allowed large banks to engage in off-balance-sheet financial transactions to enhance profitability. These questionable transactions, whereby the banks pretended to “sell” assets to investors, ultimately led to the 2008 financial collapse and the eventual failures of such venerable institutions as Citigroup, Wachovia, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns & Co. and American International Group. The Fed also actively encouraged the creation of the market for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives for the same reason—namely to enhance the nominal profitability of large banks.
Why was this done? Because large banks tend to be far less profitable than smaller banks in nominal terms and are often value destroyers in terms of risk-adjusted returns on equity. Only by allowing large banks to cheat in terms of reporting their true assets—Citigroup, AIG, and Wachovia are just some examples—could the Fed and other regulators keep the largest banks afloat. So, while smaller banks are routinely subject to draconian discipline by the Fed and other regulators, the larger banks were essentially given “get out of jail free” cards allowing them to violate state and federal laws with impunity.
As James Grant wrote in Money of the Mind:
With the partial socialization of the banking business, a process materially and ironically advanced during the Reagan years, the element of speculation was not removed, but its costs were shifted. The public sector’s credit increasingly supplanted the private sector’s. Government guarantees—of bank deposits, residential mortgages, farm loans, student loans—became widespread, and thereby expanded the volume of borrowing. As the marginal debtor received the marginal loan, the extra car (or house, boat or corporation) was sold. All this worked to enlarge the national income.
One dirty secret of the Federal Reserve Board is that the large banks the agency has allowed to form over the past few decades are, in fact, too big to manage effectively and as a result often generate catastrophic operational errors such as the subprime mortgage bubble of the 2000s. Look at the series of operational errors and outright fraud committed by Wells Fargo in the account-opening scandals—errors that clearly suggest insufficient internal controls at the two-trillion-dollar institution (which does not include another couple trillion in fiduciary assets). Over the past several decades, if you count all of the fines paid and extraordinary losses reported by the top banks, these institutions are really not profitable—even in nominal terms. The Fed and other regulators have consistently bent and even broken traditional prudential rules regarding market structure to give advantages and even monopoly power to the largest banks in order to compensate for this fatal lack of profitability.
Looking at it historically, Paul Volcker is the father of the “too big to fail” doctrine. In 1982, Volcker tried to persuade then-FDIC Chairman William Isaac to bail out Penn Square Bank, a go-go oil lender located in a shopping mall in Oklahoma. Isaac famously responded that he would agree only if the Fed assumed half the cost. The Fed under Chairman Volcker, however, balked at providing an explicit subsidy to an insolvent bank.
The FDIC subsequently took over Penn Square, which was not a large bank but had engaged in massive sales of “participations” in energy loans with other banks. In its capacity as receiver, the FDIC repudiated the unperfected loan-participation sales by Penn Square, an action that led to the failures of several larger banks, including Seafirst (1982) and Continental Illinois (1984). Three other banks, Michigan National Bank, Northern Trust, and Chase Manhattan, were badly hurt by losses tied to loan participations from Penn Square. Eventually Michigan National Bank became part of Bank One, which along with Chase Manhattan was folded into J.P. Morgan. The assets of Seafirst and Continental Illinois eventually were sold to Bank of America.
Although the Penn Square failure occurred more than three decades ago and involved a relatively small bank, it provides an example of how interconnections between lenders can lead to wider financial contagion, especially when fraud is involved. Larger banks that buy and sell loan participations and asset-backed securities, for example, face greater risk than a community bank that does not traffic in securities. Often these securities sales are “incomplete,” which, according to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1925), “imputes fraud conclusively.” For bankers and regulators, burying such problems by merging good banks with bad is the path of least resistance.
In the early 1980s, as a result of the Fed’s attack on inflation under Fed Chairman Volcker, savings and loan institutions got into trouble because high interest rates put the entire industry under water, losing money on long-term, fixed-rate mortgages that had, by tax and regulatory preferences, become the dominant asset class of the thrift industry. As short-term interest rates rose, these S&Ls couldn’t cover the cost of this business model with the returns on the thrifts’ assets.
In a classic crony capitalism response to that crisis, Congress and the Reagan administration enacted a 1982 law to allow thrifts to “grow out” of their profound insolvency. Thrifts could expand without any effective limit in order to protect the government against any risk of loan defaults incurred as the thrifts’ deposit insurer. When President Reagan praised the law, saying it “finally freed the free enterprise system,” his crusty FDIC chairman, William Seidman, reportedly observed that he didn’t “see any of those thrift managers asking to be freed from government insurance of their deposits.”
The exuberant response of thrift managers and owners caused even bigger problems. The federal government’s thrift deposit insurer, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), started to forebear with respect to capital with weak banks. Insolvent institutions were permitted to generate bogus transactions that “manufactured” capital where none had previously existed and also to dismantle the prohibitions on fraudulent transfers of assets that dated back to the 1920s. The FDIC’s Seidman, after rescuing the government (to the extent that was possible), called the changes in asset sale rules and the phony accounting for thrifts in the 1980s “the biggest mistake in the history of government.”
In the 2008 financial crisis three decades later, short-term loans and participation “sales” among banks such as Citigroup, Countrywide, and Wachovia collapsed into a general run on liquidity. Uncertain as to whether a given institution was sound, investors ran away from these banks and frantically sought to reclaim collateral and transfer positions away from exposure to weaker institutions. This fear on the part of investors created a daisy chain of failure, a cascade of receding liquidity and defaults that started with non-bank mortgage lenders in 2007; accelerated the following year to large banks, broker dealers, and insurers; and ultimately, in 2009, caused the failure of so-called government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These institutions arguably had adequate capital, but the use of derivatives and off-balance-sheet financing generated investor uncertainty that ultimately caused failure.
One aspect of both debt issuance and lending that, even today, policymakers fail to understand is the degree to which structural issues and a lack of adequate disclosure can contribute to financial crises. In the 2008 calamity, for example, the structural elements of subprime mortgage and corporate debt, and derivatives such as collateralized loan and debt obligations, created a degree of opacity that made it impossible for investors to properly understand and assess the risk created by the largest banks. The fact that the Fed and other agencies were willing to allow large banks to traffic in these opaque, sometimes fraudulent financial products illustrates the degree to which banks have captured their public regulators.
Another illustration is the story of Patrick M. Parkinson. In October 2009, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and Fed governor Dan Tarullo promoted Parkinson to the position of director of the Division of Banking Supervision and Regulation. Parkinson formerly had worked as a senior official in the supervision and regulation function at the Fed, where he was known as a brilliant researcher and also a tireless advocate for bank participation in OTC derivatives and other forms of “financial innovation.” At the time of his promotion, the Wall Street Journal reported that Parkinson “recently took a leave from the Fed to work at the Treasury, where he was an architect of the Obama administration’s proposed overhaul of financial regulation. The administration’s financial-revamp plan, now pending in Congress, would give the Fed more authority over systematically important financial institutions and move consumer regulation to a separate agency.”
The Fed’s role in championing deregulation and, in particular, broader use of OTC derivatives, on the one hand, while seeking greater supervisory authority over |
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Old Norse religion has been classed as an ethnic religion,[22] and as a "non-doctrinal community religion". It varied across time, in different regions and locales, and according to social differences.[23] This variation is partly due to its transmission through oral culture rather than codified texts. For this reason, the archaeologists Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, and Catharina Raudvere stated that "pre-Christian Norse religion is not a uniform or stable category", while the scholar Karen Bek-Pedersen noted that the "Old Norse belief system should probably be conceived of in the plural, as several systems". The historian of religion Hilda Ellis Davidson stated that it would have ranged from manifestations of "complex symbolism" to "the simple folk-beliefs of the less sophisticated".
During the Viking Age, the Norse likely regarded themselves as a more or less unified entity through their shared Germanic language, Old Norse. The scholar of Scandinavian studies Thomas A. DuBois said Old Norse religion and other pre-Christian belief systems in Northern Europe must be viewed as "not as isolated, mutually exclusive language-bound entities, but as broad concepts shared across cultural and linguistic lines, conditioned by similar ecological factors and protracted economic and cultural ties". During this period, the Norse interacted closely with other ethno-cultural and linguistic groups, such as the Sámi, Balto-Finns, Anglo-Saxons, Greenlandic Inuit, and various speakers of Celtic and Slavic languages. Economic, marital, and religious exchange occurred between the Norse and many of these other groups. Enslaved individuals from the British Isles were common throughout the Nordic world during the Viking Age. Different elements of Old Norse religion had different origins and histories; some aspects may derive from deep into prehistory, others only emerging following the encounter with Christianity.
Sources [ edit ]
In Hilda Ellis Davidson's words, present-day knowledge of Old Norse religion contains "vast gaps", and we must be cautious and avoid "bas[ing] wild assumptions on isolated details".[33]
Old Norse textual sources [ edit ]
A few runic inscriptions with religious content survive from pagan Scandinavia, particularly asking Thor to hallow or protect a memorial stone;[34] carving his hammer on the stone also served this function.[35]
In contrast to the few runic fragments, a considerable body of literary and historical sources survive in Old Norse manuscripts using the Latin script, all of which were created after the conversion of Scandinavia, the majority in Iceland. Some of the poetic sources in particular, the Poetic Edda and skaldic poetry, may have been originally composed by heathens, and Hávamál contains both information on heathen mysticism[36] and what Ursula Dronke referred to as "a round-up of ritual obligations".[37] In addition there is information about pagan beliefs and practices in the sagas, which include both historical sagas such as Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla and the Landnámabók, recounting the settlement and early history of Iceland, and the so-called sagas of Icelanders concerning Icelandic individuals and groups; there are also more or less fantastical legendary sagas. Many skaldic verses are preserved in sagas. Of the originally heathen works, we cannot know what changes took place either during oral transmission or as a result of their being recorded by Christians;[38][39] the sagas of Icelanders, in particular, are now regarded by most scholars as more or less historical fiction rather than as detailed historical records.[40] A large amount of mythological poetry has undoubtedly been lost.[41]
One important written source is Snorri's Prose Edda, which incorporates a manual of Norse mythology for the use of poets in constructing kennings; it also includes numerous citations, some of them the only record of lost poems,[42] such as Þjóðólfr of Hvinir's Haustlǫng. Snorri's Prologue eumerises the Æsir as Trojans, deriving Æsir from Asia, and some scholars have suspected that many of the stories that we only have from him are also derived from Christian medieval culture.[43]
Other textual sources [ edit ]
Additional sources remain by non-Scandinavians writing in languages other than Old Norse. The earliest of these, Tacitus' Germania, dates to around 100 CE[44] and describes religious practices of several Germanic peoples, but has little coverage of Scandinavia. In the Middle Ages, several Christian commentators also wrote about Scandinavian paganism, mostly from a hostile perspective.[44] The best known of these are Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (History of the Bishops of Hamburg), written between 1066 and 1072, which includes an account of the temple at Uppsala,[45][46] and Saxo Grammaticus' 12th-century Gesta Danorum (History of the Danes), which includes versions of Norse myths and some material on pagan religious practices.[47][48] In addition, Muslim Arabs wrote accounts of Norse people they encountered, the best known of which is Ibn Fadlan's 10th-century Risala, an account of Volga Viking traders that includes a detailed description of a ship burial.[49]
Archaeological and toponymic evidence [ edit ]
bracteate from Funen interpreted as depicting Odin riding his 8 legged horse sleipnir
Since the literary evidence that represents Old Norse sources was recorded by Christians, archaeological evidence especially of cultic sites and burials is of great importance particularly as a source of information on Norse religion before the conversion.[50][51] Many aspects of material culture—including settlement locations, artefacts and buildings—may cast light on beliefs, and archaeological evidence regarding cult practices indicates chronological, geographic and class differences far greater than are suggested by the surviving texts.[52]
Place-names are an additional source of evidence. Theophoric place-names, including instances where a pair of deity names occur in close proximity, provide an indication of the importance of the cult of those deities in different areas, dating back to before our earliest written sources. The toponymic evidence shows considerable regional variation,[53][54] and some deities, such as Ullr and Hǫrn, occur more frequently than the surviving myths would lead us to expect,[53] whereas comparatively few Odin place-names occur.[55][54]
Some place-names contain elements indicating that they were sites of religious activity: those formed with -vé, -hörgr, and -hof, words for cult sites of various kinds,[56] and also likely those formed with -akr or -vin, words for "field", when coupled with the name of a deity. Magnus Olsen developed a typology of such place-names in Norway, from which he posited a development in pagan worship from groves and fields toward the use of temple buildings.[57]
Personal names are also a source of information on the popularity of certain deities; for example Thor's name was an element in the names of both men and women, particularly in Iceland.[58]
Historical development [ edit ]
Iron Age origins [ edit ]
Andrén described Old Norse religion as a "cultural patchwork" which emerged under a wide range of influences, both from earlier Scandinavian religions and elements introduced from elsewhere. It may have had links to Nordic Bronze Age: while the putatively solar-oriented belief system of Bronze Age Scandinavia is believed to have died out around 500 BCE, a number of Bronze Age motifs—such as the wheel cross—reappear in later Iron Age contexts. It is often regarded as having developed from earlier religious belief systems found among the Germanic Iron Age peoples. The Germanic languages likely emerged in the first millennium BCE in present-day northern Germany or Denmark, after which they spread; several of the deities in Old Norse religion have parallels among other Germanic societies. The Scandinavian Iron Age began around 500 to 400 BCE.
Archaeological evidence is particularly important for understanding these early periods. Accounts from this time were produced by Tacitus; according to the scholar Gabriel Turville-Petre, Tacitus' observations "help to explain" later Old Norse religion. Tacitus described the Germanic peoples as having a priestly caste, open-air sacred sites, and an emphasis on sacrifice (including human), augury, and fortune telling. Tacitus notes that the Germanic peoples were polytheistic and mentions some of their deities through perceived Roman equivalents.
Viking Age expansion [ edit ]
Óðinsberg, meaning 'Hill of Óðin' Roseberry Topping in Yorkshire, Northern England. After Scandinavian settlement in the area, the site became known by the Old Norse name, meaning 'Hill of Óðin'
During the Viking Age, Norse people left Scandinavia and settled elsewhere throughout Northwestern Europe. Some of these areas, such as Iceland, the Orkneys, Shetland, and the Faroe Islands, were hardly populated, whereas other areas, such as England, Scotland, the Western Isles, Isle of Man, and Ireland, were already heavily populated.
In the 870s, Norwegian settlers left their homeland and colonised Iceland, bringing their belief system with them.[67] Place-name evidence suggests that Thor was the most popular god on the island, although there are also saga accounts of devotés of Freyr in Iceland,[69] including a "priest of Freyr" in the later Hrafnkels saga.[70] There are no place-names connected to Odin on the island.[71] Unlike other Nordic societies, Iceland lacked a monarchy and thus a centralising authority which could enforce religious adherence; there were both pagan and Christian communities from the time of its first settlement.[73]
Scandinavian settlers brought Old Norse religion to Britain in the latter decades of the ninth century.[74] Several British place-names indicate possible cultic sites; for instance, Roseberry Topping in North Yorkshire was known as Othensberg in the twelfth century, a name deriving from the Old Norse Óðinsberg ("Hill of Óðin").[76] Several place-names also contain Old Norse references to mythological entities, such as alfr, skratii, and troll. The English church found itself in need of conducting a new conversion process to Christianise this incoming population.
Christianisation and decline [ edit ]
The Nordic world first encountered Christianity through its settlements in the (already Christian) British Isles and through trade contacts with the eastern Christians in Novgorod and Byzantium. By the time Christianity arrived in Scandinavia it was already the accepted religion across most of Europe. It is not well understood how the Christian institutions converted these Scandinavian settlers, in part due to a lack of textual descriptions of this conversion process equivalent to Bede's description of the earlier Anglo-Saxon conversion.[81] However, it appears that the Scandinavian migrants had converted to Christianity within the first few decades of their arrival.[further explanation needed] After Christian missionaries from the British Isles—including figures like St Willibrord, St Boniface, and Willehad—had travelled to parts of northern Europe in the eighth century,[83] Charlemagne pushed for Christianisation in Denmark, with Ebbo of Rheims, Halitgar of Cambrai, and Willeric of Bremen proselytizing in the kingdom during the ninth century. The Danish king Harald Klak converted (826), likely to secure his political alliance with Louis the Pious against his rivals for the throne. The Danish monarchy reverted to Old Norse religion under Horik II (854 – c. 867).
The Norwegian king Hákon the Good had converted to Christianity while in England. On returning to Norway, he kept his faith largely private but encouraged Christian priests to preach among the population; some pagans were angered and—according to Heimskringla—three churches built near Trondheim were burned down. His successor, Harald Greycloak, was also a Christian but similarly had little success in converting the Norwegian population to his religion. Haakon Sigurdsson later became the de facto ruler of Norway, and although he agreed to be baptised under pressure from the Danish king and allowed Christians to preach in the kingdom, he enthusiastically supported pagan sacrificial customs, asserting the superiority of the traditional deities and encouraging Christians to return to their veneration. His reign (975–995) saw the emergence of a "state paganism", an official ideology which bound together Norwegian identity with pagan identity and rallied support behind Haakon's leadership. Haakon was killed in 995 and Olaf Tryggvason, the next king, took power and enthusiastically promoted Christianity; he forced high-status Norwegians to convert, destroyed temples, and killed those he called'sorcerers'.[91] Sweden was the last Scandinavian country to officially convert; although little is known about the process of Christianisation, it is known that the Swedish kings had converted by the early 11th century and that the country was fully Christian by the early 12th.
Olaf Tryggvason sent a Saxon missionary, Þangbrandr, to Iceland. Many Icelanders were angered by Þangbrandr's proselytising, and he was outlawed after killing several poets who insulted him.[93] Animosity between Christians and pagans on the island grew, and at the Althing in 998 both sides blasphemed each other's gods. In an attempt to preserve unity, at the Althing in 999, an agreement was reached that the Icelandic law would be based on Christian principles, albeit with concessions to the pagan community. Private, albeit not public, pagan sacrifices and rites were to remain legal.[95]
Across Germanic Europe, conversion to Christianity was closely connected to social ties; mass conversion was the norm, rather than individual conversion. A primary motivation for kings converting was the desire for support from Christian rulers, whether as money, imperial sanction, or military support. Christian missionaries found it difficult convincing Norse people that the two belief systems were mutually exclusive;[97] the polytheistic nature of Old Norse religion allowed its practitioners to accept Jesus Christ as one god among many.[98] The encounter with Christianity could also stimulate new and innovative expressions of pagan culture, for instance through influencing various pagan myths.[99] As with other Germanic societies, syncretisation between incoming and traditional belief systems took place. For those living in isolated areas, pre-Christian beliefs likely survived longer, while others continued as survivals in folklore.
Post-Christian survivals [ edit ]
By the 12th century, Christianity was firmly established across Northwestern Europe. For two centuries, Scandinavian ecclesiastics continued to condemn paganism, although it is unclear whether it still constituted a viable alternative to Christian dominance. These writers often presented paganism as being based on deceit or delusion; some stated that the Old Norse gods had been humans falsely euhemerised as deities.
Old Norse mythological stories survived in oral culture for at least two centuries, to be recorded in the 13th century. How this mythology was passed down is unclear; it is possible that pockets of pagans retained their belief system throughout the 11th and 12th centuries, or that it had survived as a cultural artefact passed down by Christians who retained the stories while rejecting any literal belief in them. The historian Judith Jesch suggested that following Christianisation, there remained a "cultural paganism", the re-use of pre-Christian myth "in certain cultural and social contexts" that are officially Christian. For instance, Old Norse mythological themes and motifs appear in poetry composed for the court of Cnut the Great, an eleventh-century Christian Anglo-Scandinavian king. Saxo is the earliest medieval figure to take a revived interest in the pre-Christian beliefs of his ancestors, doing so not out of a desire to revive their faith but out of historical interest. Snorri was also part of this revived interest, examining pagan myths from his perspective as a cultural historian and mythographer. As a result, Norse mythology "long outlasted any worship of or belief in the gods it depicts".
Beliefs [ edit ]
Norse mythology, stories of the Norse deities, is preserved in Eddic poetry and in Snorri Sturluson's guide for skalds, the Poetic Edda. We also have depictions of some of these stories on picture stones in Gotland and in other visual record including some early Christian crosses, which attests to how widely known they were.[112] The myths were transmitted purely orally until the end of the period, and were subject to variation; one key poem, "Vǫluspá", is preserved in two variant versions in different manuscripts,[113] and Snorri's retelling of the myths sometimes varies from the other textual sources that are preserved.[114] There was no single authoritative version of a particular myth, and we must presume variation over time and from place to place, rather than "a single unified body of thought".[115][116] In particular, there may have been influences from interactions with other peoples, including northern Slavs, Finns, and Anglo-Saxons,[117] and Christian mythology exerted an increasing influence.[115][118]
Deities [ edit ]
Odin riding on his horse Sleipnir
Old Norse religion was polytheistic, with many anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, who express human emotions and in some cases are married and have children.[119][120] One god, Baldr, is said in the myths to have died. Archaeological evidence on worship of particular gods is sparse, although placenames may also indicate locations where they were venerated. For some gods, particularly Loki,[121][122][123] there is no evidence of worship; however, this may be changed by new archaeological discoveries. Regions, communities, and social classes likely varied in the gods they venerated more or at all.[124][125] There are also accounts in sagas of individuals who devoted themselves to a single deity,[126] described as a fulltrúi or vinr (confidant, friend) as seen in Egill Skallagrímsson's reference to his relationship with Odin in his "Sonatorrek", a tenth-century skaldic poem for example.[127] This practice has been interpreted as heathen past influenced by the Christian cult of the saints. Although our literary sources are all relatively late, there are also indications of change over time.
Norse mythological sources, particularly Snorri and "Vǫluspá", differentiate between two groups of deities, the Æsir and the Vanir, who fought a war during which the Vanir broke down the walls of the Æsir's stronghold, Asgard, and eventually made peace by means of a truce and the exchange of hostages. Some mythographers have suggested that this myth was based on recollection of a conflict in Scandinavia between adherents of different belief systems;[128][129] in Georges Dumézil's tripartite theory both the war and the division of the pantheon into two groups are related to Indo-European parallels, with the Vanir exemplifying the second "function", that of fertility and the cycle of life and death.[130][131][132]
Major deities among the Æsir include Thor (who is often referred to in literary texts as Asa-Thor), Odin and Týr. Very few Vanir are named in the sources: Njǫrðr, his son Freyr, and his daughter Freyja; according to Snorri all of these could be called Vanaguð (Vanir-god), and Freyja also Vanadís (Vanir-dís).[133] The status of Loki within the pantheon is problematic, and according to "Lokasenna" and "Vǫluspá" and Snorri's explanation, he is imprisoned beneath the earth until Ragnarok, when he will fight against the gods. As far back as 1889 Sophus Bugge suggested this was the inspiration for the myth of Lucifer.[134]
Some of the goddesses—Skaði, Rindr, Gerðr—are of giant origins.
The general Old Norse word for the goddesses is Ásynjur, which is properly the feminine of Æsir. An old word for goddess may be dís, which is preserved as the name of a group of female supernatural beings.[135]
Localised and ancestral deities [ edit ]
Ancestral deities were common among Finno-Ugric peoples, and remained a strong presence among the Finns and Sámi after Christianisation.[136] Ancestor veneration may have played a part in the private religious practices of Norse people in their farmsteads and villages;[137][138] in the 10th century, Norwegian pagans attempted to encourage the Christian king Haakon to take part in an offering to the gods by inviting him to drink a toast to the ancestors alongside a number of named deities.[137]
Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr and Irpa appear to have been personal or family goddesses venerated by Haakon Sigurdsson, a late pagan ruler of Norway.[139]
There are also likely to have been local and family fertility cults; we have one reported example from pagan Norway in the family cult of Vǫlsi, where some deity called Mǫrnir is invoked.[140][141]
Other beings [ edit ]
The norns are female figures who determine individuals' fate. Snorri describes them as a group of three, but he and other sources also allude to larger groups of norns who decide the fate of newborns.[142] It is uncertain whether they were worshipped.[143]
The vættir, spirits of the land, were thought to inhabit certain rocks, waterfalls, and trees, and offerings were made to them.[144] For many, they may have been more important in daily life than the gods.[145] Texts also mention various kinds of elves and dwarfs. Fylgjur, guardian spirits, generally female, were associated with individuals and families. Hamingjur, dísir and swanmaidens are female supernatural figures of uncertain stature within the belief system; the dísir may have functioned as tutelary goddesses.[146] Valkyries were associated with the myths concerning Odin, and also occur in heroic poetry such as the Helgi lays, where they are depicted as princesses who assist and marry heroes.[147][148]
Conflict with the jǫtnar, or giants, is a frequent motif in the mythology.[149] They are described as both the ancestors and sworn enemies of the gods.[150] Gods marry giantesses but giants' attempts to couple with goddesses are repulsed.[151] Most scholars believe the jǫtnar were not worshipped, although this has been questioned. The Eddic jǫtnar have parallels with their later folkloric counterparts, although unlike them they have much wisdom.[153]
Cosmology [ edit ]
Several accounts of the Old Norse cosmogony, or creation myth, appear in surviving textual sources, but there is no evidence that these were certainly produced in the pre-Christian period. It is possible that they were developed during the encounter with Christianity, as pagans sought to establish a creation myth complex enough to rival that of Christianity. According to the account in Völuspá, the universe was initially a void known as Ginnungagap. There then appeared a giant, Ymir, and after him the gods, who lifted the earth out of the sea. A different account is provided in Vafþrúðnismál, which describes the world being made from the components of Ymir's body: the earth from his flesh, the mountains from his bones, the sky from his skull, and the sea from his blood. Grímnismál also describes the world being fashioned from Ymir's corpse, although adds the detail that the giants emerged from a spring known as Élivágar.
In Snorri's Gylfaginning, it is again stated that the Old Norse cosmogony began with a belief in Ginnungagap, the void. From this emerged two realms, the icy, misty Niflheim and the fire-filled Muspell, the latter ruled over by fire-giant, Surtr. A river produced by these realms coagulated to form Ymir, while a cow known as Audumbla then appeared to provide him with milk. Audumbla licked a block of ice to free Buri, whose son Bor married a giantess named Bestla. Some of the features of this myth, such as the cow Audumbla, are of unclear provenance; Snorri does not specify where he obtained these details as he did for other parts of the myths, and it may be that these were his own personal inventions.
Völuspá portrays Yggdrasil as a giant ash tree. Grímnismál claims that the deities meet beneath Yggdrasil daily to pass judgement. It also claims that a serpent gnaws at its roots while a deer grazes from its higher branches; a squirrel runs between the two animals, exchanging messages. Grímnismál also claims that Yggdrasil has three roots; under one resides the goddess Hel, under another the frost-giants, and under the third humanity. Snorri also relates that Hel and the frost-giants live under two of the roots but places the gods, rather than humanity, under the third root. The term Yggr means "the terrifier" and is a synonym for Oðinn, while drasill was a poetic word for a horse; "Yggdrasil" thereby means "Oðinn's Steed". This idea of a cosmic tree has parallels with those from various other societies, and may reflect part of a common Indo-European heritage.
The Ragnarok story survives in its fullest exposition in Völuspá, although elements can also be seen in earlier poetry. The Ragnarok story suggests that the idea of an inescapable fate pervaded Norse world-views. There is much evidence that Völuspá was influenced by Christian belief, and it is also possible that the theme of conflict being followed by a better future—as reflected in the Ragnarok story—perhaps reflected the period of conflict between paganism and Christianity.
Afterlife [ edit ]
Norse religion had several fully developed ideas about death and the afterlife. Snorri refers to four realms which welcome the dead; although his descriptions reflect a likely Christian influence, the idea of multiple otherworlds is likely pre-Christian. Unlike Christianity, Old Norse religion does not appear to have adhered to the belief that moral concerns impacted an individual's afterlife destination.
Warriors who died in battle became the Einherjar and were taken to Oðinn's hall, Valhalla. There they waited until Ragnarok, when they would fight alongside the Æsir. According to the poem Grímnismál, Valhalla had 540 doors and that a wolf stood outside its western door, while an eagle flew overhead. In that poem, it is also claimed that a pig named Sæhrímnir is eaten every day and that a goat named Heiðrún stands atop the hall's roof producing an endless supply of mead. It is unclear how widespread a belief in Valhalla was in Norse society; it may have been a literary creation designed to meet the ruling class' aspirations, since the idea of deceased warriors owing military service to Oðinn parallels the social structure of which warriors and their lord. There is no archaeological evidence clearly alluding to a belief in Valhalla.
According to Snorri, while one half of the slain go to Valhalla, the other go to Frejya's hall, Fólkvangr, and that those who die from disease or old age go to a realm known as Hel;[176] it was here that Baldr went after his death. The concept of Hel as an afterlife location never appears in pagan-era skaldic poetry, where "Hel" always references to the eponymous goddess. Snorri also mentions the possibility of the dead reaching the hall of Brimir in Gimlé, or the hall of Sindri in the Niðafjöll Mountains.
Various sagas and the Eddaic poem Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar refer to the dead residing in their graves, where they remain conscious. In these thirteenth century sources, ghosts (Draugr) are capable of haunting the living. In both Laxdæla Saga and Eyrbyggja Saga, connections are drawn between pagan burials and hauntings.
In mythological accounts, the deity most closely associated with death is Oðinn. In particular, he is connected with death by hanging; this is apparent in Hávamál, a poem found in the Poetic Edda. In stanza 138 of Hávamál, Oðinn describes his "auto-sacrifice", in which he hangs himself on Yggdrasill, the world tree, for nine nights, in order to attain wisdom and magical powers. In the late Gautreks Saga, King Víkarr is hanged and then punctured by a spear; his executioner says "Now I give you to Oðinn".
Cultic practice [ edit ]
Textual accounts suggest a spectrum of rituals, from large public events to more frequent private and family rites, which would have been interwoven with daily life.[184][185] However, written sources are vague about Norse rituals, and many are invisible to us now even with the assistance of archaeology.[186][187] Sources mention some rituals addressed to particular deities, but understanding of the relationship between Old Norse ritual and myth remains speculative.[188]
Religious rituals [ edit ]
Sacrifice [ edit ]
Reconstruction of a food offering after a Viking Age blót
The primary religious ritual in Norse religion appears to have been sacrifice, or blót.[189] Many texts, both Old Norse and other, refer to sacrifices. The Saga of Hákon the Good in Heimskringla states that there were obligatory blóts, at which animals were slaughtered and their blood, called hlaut, sprinkled on the altars and the inside and outside walls of the temple, and ritual toasts were drunk during the ensuing sacrificial feast; the cups were passed over the fire and they and the food were consecrated with a ritual gesture by the chieftain; King Hákon, a Christian, was forced to participate but made the sign of the cross.[190] The description of the temple at Uppsala in Adam of Bremen's History includes an account of a festival every nine years at which nine males of every kind of animal were sacrificed and the bodies hung in the temple grove.[191] There may have been many methods of sacrifice: a number of textual accounts refer to the body or head of the slaughtered animal being hung on a pole or tree.[192] In addition to seasonal festivals, an animal blót could take place, for example, before duels, after the conclusion of business between traders, before sailing to ensure favourable winds, and at funerals.[193] Remains of animals from many species have been found in graves from the Old Norse period,[194][195] and Ibn Fadlan's account of a ship burial includes the sacrifice of a dog, draft animals, cows, a rooster and a hen as well as that of a servant girl.[196]
In the Eddic poem "Hyndluljóð", Freyja expresses appreciation for the many sacrifices of oxen made to her by her acolyte, Óttar.[197] In Hrafnkels saga, Hrafnkell is called Freysgoði for his many sacrifices to Freyr.[198][69] There may also be markers by which we can distinguish sacrifices to Odin,[199] who was associated with hanging,[200] and some texts particularly associate the ritual killing of a boar with sacrifices to Freyr;[200] but in general, archaeology is unable to identify the deity to whom a sacrifice was made.[199]
The texts frequently allude to human sacrifice. Temple wells in which people were sacrificially drowned are mentioned in Adam of Bremen's account of Uppsala[201] and in Icelandic sagas, where they are called blótkelda or blótgrǫf,[202] and Adam of Bremen also states that human victims were included among those hanging in the trees at Uppsala.[203] In Gautreks saga, people sacrifice themselves during a famine by jumping off cliffs,[204] and both the Historia Norwegiæ and Heimskringla refer to the willing death of King Dómaldi as a sacrifice after bad harvests.[205] Mentions of people being "sentenced to sacrifice" and of the "wrath of the gods" against criminals suggest a sacral meaning for the death penalty;[206] in Landnamabók the method of execution is given as having the back broken on a rock.[204] It is possible that some of the bog bodies recovered from peat bogs in northern Germany and Denmark and dated to the Iron Age were human sacrifices.[207] Such a practice may have been connected to the execution of criminals or of prisoners of war;[208] on the other hand, some textual mentions of a person being "offered" to a deity, such as a king offering his son, may refer to a non-sacrificial "dedication".[209]
Archaeological evidence supports Ibn Fadlan's report of funerary human sacrifice: in various cases, the burial of someone who died of natural causes is accompanied by another who died a violent death.[199][210] For example, at Birka a decapitated young man was placed atop an older man buried with weapons, and at Gerdrup, near Roskilde, a woman was buried alongside a man whose neck had been broken.[211] Many of the details of Ibn Fadlan's account are borne out by archaeology;[212][213][121] and it is possible that those elements which are not visible in the archaeological evidence—such as the sexual encounters—are also accurate.[213]
Deposition [ edit ]
Deposition of artefacts in wetlands was a practice in Scandinavia during many periods of prehistory.[214][215][216] In the early centuries of the Common Era, huge numbers of destroyed weapons were placed in wetlands: mostly spears and swords, but also shields, tools, and other equipment. Beginning in the 5th century, the nature of the wetland deposits changed; in Scandinavia, fibulae and bracteates were placed in or beside wetlands from the 5th to the mid-6th centuries, and again beginning in the late 8th century,[217] when weapons as well as jewellery, coins and tools again began to be deposited, the practice lasting until the early 11th century.[217] This practice extended to non-Scandinavian areas inhabited by Norse people; for example in Britain, a sword, tools, and the bones of cattle, horses and dogs were deposited under a jetty or bridge over the River Hull.[218] The precise purposes of such depositions are unclear.[citation needed]
It is harder to find ritualised deposits on dry land. However, at Lunda (meaning "grove") near Strängnäs in Södermanland, archaeological evidence has been found at a hill of presumably ritual activity from the 2nd century BCE until the 10th century CE, including deposition of unburnt beads, knives and arrowheads from the 7th to the 9th century.[219][216] Also during excavations at the church in Frösö, bones of bear, elk, red deer, pigs, cattle, and either sheep or goats were found surrounding a birch tree, having been deposited in the 9th or 10th century; the tree likely had sacrificial associations and perhaps represented the world tree.[219][220]
Rites of passage [ edit ]
A child was accepted into the family via a ritual of sprinkling with water (Old Norse ausa vatni) which is mentioned in two Eddic poems, "Rígsþula" and "Hávamál", and was afterwards given a name.[221] The child was frequently named after a dead relative, since there was a traditional belief in rebirth, particularly in the family.[222]
Old Norse sources also describe rituals for adoption (the Norwegian Gulaþing Law directs the adoptive father, followed by the adoptive child, then all other relatives, to step in turn into a specially made leather shoe) and blood brotherhood (a ritual standing on the bare earth under a specially cut strip of grass, called a jarðarmen).[223]
Weddings occur in Icelandic family sagas. The Old Norse word brúðhlaup has cognates in many other Germanic languages and means "bride run"; it has been suggested that this indicates a tradition of bride-stealing, but other scholars including Jan de Vries interpreted it as indicating a rite of passage conveying the bride from her birth family to that of her new husband.[224] The bride wore a linen veil or headdress; this is mentioned in the Eddic poem "Rígsþula".[225] Freyr and Thor are each associated with weddings in some literary sources.[226] In Adam of Bremen's account of the pagan temple at Uppsala, offerings are said to be made to Fricco (presumably Freyr) on the occasion of marriages,[191] and in the Eddic poem "Þrymskviða", Thor recovers his hammer when it is laid in his disguised lap in a ritual consecration of the marriage.[227][228] "Þrymskviða" also mentions the goddess Vár as consecrating marriages; Snorri Sturluson states in Gylfaginning that she hears the vows men and women make to each other, but her name probably means "beloved" rather than being etymologically connected to Old Norse várar, "vows".[229]
Burial of the dead is the Norse rite of passage about which we have most archaeological evidence.[230] There is considerable variation in burial practices, both spatially and chronologically, which suggests a lack of dogma about funerary rites.[230][231] Both cremations and inhumations are found throughout Scandinavia,[230][232] but in Viking Age Iceland there were inhumations but, with one possible exception, no cremations.[232] The dead are found buried in pits, wooden coffins or chambers, boats, or stone cists; cremated remains have been found next to the funeral pyre, buried in a pit, in a pot or keg, and scattered across the ground.[230] Most burials have been found in cemeteries, but solitary graves are not unknown.[230] Some grave sites were left unmarked, others memorialised with standing stones or burial mounds.[230]
The Oseberg ship contained the bodies of two women and was buried beneath an earthen mound.
Grave goods feature in both inhumation and cremation burials.[ |
noting that it was indispensable for all parties to respect that law. The proposed resolution would not help in finding a sustainable peace solution and Paraguay would thus abstain from voting.
Argentina, in an explanation of the vote after the vote, reaffirmed the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, and to an independent Palestinian State within the 1967 borders and in accordance with the peace negotiations. Argentina recognized Palestine. It was in favour of Israel’s right to live in security within its borders, but also of peoples’ right to self-determination. If a people was subjected to a foreign occupation then they had no right to self-determination. Argentina supported this resolution and hoped it would lead to an independent Palestinian State.
Ghana, speaking in an explanation of the vote after the vote, said that a mistake had been made in its voting decisions on two items, namely L.32 and L.34. The President of the Human Rights Council said that this would be reflected in the records of the meeting.
______________
For use of the information media; not an official recordGajendra Singh Shekhawat was elected as a lawmaker from Jodhpur in 2014.
A technology-savvy farmer and a role model for the rural community, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat has been made the Minister of State in the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet reshuffle today.The 49-year-old Lok Sabha member from Jodhpur is a prominent member of the Rajput community and is also known as the 'farmer who wore jeans'.Born in Rajasthan's Sikar on October 3, 1967, he was the national general secretary of the farmers' wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP Kisan Morcha. His inclusion in the Cabinet comes ahead of the Rajasthan Assembly elections due next year.Mr Shekhawat was the co-convener of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, the economic wing of the RSS, and the general secretary of 'Seema Jan Kalyan Samiti', an organisation dedicated to strengthen national security by developing border towns and villages. He was also instrumental in setting up 40 schools and four hostels along the Indo-Pak border.He started his political career as a student and rose through the party ranks after being elected as the president of student union of Jai Narain Vyas University in 1992 under the banner of Akhil Bhartiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP).Mr Shekhawat was elected as a lawmaker from Jodhpur in 2014 with a margin of 4,10,051 votes.Known for his simple lifestyle and amiable nature, he is popularly referred to as 'Gajju bana' by his followers.One of his major achievements as a lawmaker has been the expansion of the Jodhpur Airport, a demand that had continuously been raised from the last 18 years.As an MP, he actively participates in debates in Parliament and is a widely followed political leader on Quora (a popular Q&A blogging site). He has an MPhil and MA in Philosophy from Jai Narain Vyas University, Jodhpur. He was a sports enthusiast and played basketball at national and inter-university level. He was a Member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance and Chairperson of the Fellowship Committee. He was also a member of the All India Council of Sports and the President of Basketball India Players Association.Olympic bronze medalist Conor Dwyer's grandfather brought Harry Caray to Wrigley Field
On Monday night, American swimmer and Evanston, Ill., native Conor Dwyer etched his name into history for a second time: After winning gold as part of the men's 4x200-meter freestyle relay at the 2012 Olympics, the 27-year-old medaled again in Rio, taking home bronze in the individual 200-meter freestyle.
But while establishing yourself as one of the best swimmers in the world is nice and all, that's not the only reason the Windy City is proud of the Dwyer family. Conor didn't just grow up a Cubs fan, he grew up at Wrigley Field: His grandfather, Jim Dowdle, supervised the team while serving as an executive vice president at Tribune Co., which owned the Cubs at the time. As you might imagine, that came with some pretty sweet perks for Conor -- from hanging out in the locker room to getting some bubble gum from Sammy Sosa to coming home from London and throwing out a first pitch... with a gold medal around his neck:
Dowdle was one of the most influential executives in the modern history of the North Siders: He was the one who recommended Tribune buy the Cubs back in 1981, and he hired Andy MacPhail as team president and CEO -- who brought the team back to the NLCS for the first time in 15 years in 2003. Above all, though, Dowdle will be remembered for one simple reason: He's the man who brought Harry Caray to Wrigley.
When Dowdle first took over supervision of the Cubs in 1981, Caray was the brash crosstown rival, having called White Sox games for the last 10 years. But Dowdle gave him his best sales pitch, and convinced him to make the switch -- and the icon who launched 1,000 impressions was born.
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[Photo: Olek]Fresh off the high-profile crochet collaboration with Rickshaw Spidey, street artist Agata Olek continues to up her game. The latest feat is more in the vein of her Sao Paulo Alligator yarn work. This time, the Polish-born creative returned to her homeland to crochet something even more epic. An inactive three-car train with Px48 model Locomotive, stationed in the town of Lodz.
Over the course of two weeks, Olek and her four assistants (she calls them heroes) transformed the ordinary museum train into a psychedlic trip more befitting of Alice in Wonderland. The yarn bombing portion took a couple days, reaching completion over the weekend. It’ll remain in place until August 19. We just hope Olek considers crocheting a full train of subway cars when back in NYC.
What do you think of the final product?
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[Photo: Olek]And here is some fan video of the installation:Bitcoin Rand Paul Accepts Bitcoin for 2016 Campaign Donations
Editor’s Note: This article has been modified to correct an error in reporting. Previously, this article said that Jim Fulner was a “libertarian state senate candidate.” Fulner was actually a Libertarian Party candidate for US Senate. We apologize to Mr. Fulner for our mistake.
Bitcoin donations have been helping homeless people, Ebola patients, Edward Snowden, and hundreds of other causes. Now, bitcoin will be helping U.S. Senator Rand Paul fund his 2016 presidential campaign.
Also Read: Bitcoin OK for politics, with $100 limit
Rand Paul’s decision to accept bitcoin sets himself apart from the rest other politicians in the US. Besides a few state-level politicians, Paul is the first political candidate to accept bitcoin for campaign donations. The first-term senator does not have to worry about legal issues accepting bitcoin either; the Federal Elections Commission voted 6-0 in 2014 to allow Bitcoin donations to political committees.
Paul is not new to cryptocurrency. He has always advocated Bitcoin and has even made suggestions for how Bitcoin could be improved in order to gain a greater role in the financial world. In an interview with Fortune Magazine, Paul said the would like to see a Bitcoin-like currency backed by a basket of stocks — much like Hayek’s private paper money backed by a basket of commodities.
Bitcoin’s Poor Political Track Record
Despite Rand Paul’s exciting move to accept Bitcoin, the data collected about Bitcoin donations for political campaigns shows a poor record of success. After Jim Fulner, a Libertarian US senate candidate from Michigan, started accepting Bitcoin, he admitted that he received two Bitcoin donations that were each worth significantly less than $100. Similarly, Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) also admitted that his campaign only received slightly more than $2,000 in Bitcoin donations. Hovever, Polis blamed the FEC, which has set a $100 limit for donations.
This $100 limit was supported by FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub. The Democratic appointee said that the limit was important, as it assuaged the concerns of several commissioners concerning the risks of cryptocurrency. Additionally, Weintraub argued that the limit reduced the risk of foreigners using Bitcoin to illegally fund elections.
Will Rand Paul’s decision help Bitcoin? Let us know in the comments below!
Photo Source: thelibertarianrepublicNairobi: Hunger is likely to reach emergency levels in Ethiopia and the number in need of food aid will rise beyond the current 7.7 million, experts said, as drought has decimated livestock, rains have been erratic and aid is in short supply.
Prolonged drought, followed by floods, has pushed millions across East Africa into crisis, with 7 million in neighbouring Somalia also needing aid, the United Nations said as it grapples with the highest global hunger levels in decades.
“Despite enhanced rainfall at the end of April into early May over many areas of Ethiopia, food security outcomes are still expected to deteriorate,” the US-based Famine Early Warning Systems Network (Fewsnet) said on Wednesday.
Herders in southeastern Ethiopia will be worst hit over the next three months, it said, with hunger reaching the fourth “emergency” level on a five-phase scale, where the fifth level is famine.
“The current marginal improvements in pasture and water are likely to be depleted by early June, which will mean rangeland resources will rapidly decline, and subsequently livestock body conditions,” it said, with the next rains due in October.
The number of Ethiopians who need food aid surged to 7.7 million from 5.6 million between January and April.
This number is expected to increase in the second half of the year, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said this week.
“Increased funding is needed urgently, in particular to address immediate requirements for clean drinking water, much of which is being delivered long distances by truck as regular wells have dried up,” it said.
The Trump administration has proposed to drastically cut US funding for global health and food aid programmes amid opposition from Congress.France is ‘on the verge of a civil war’ which could be sparked by a mass sexual assault on women by migrants
He believes the situation is so tense and fragile that another major Islamist terror attack or mass migrant sexual assault could lead to a huge right-wing backlash.
Patrick Calvar, chief of the Directorate General of Internal Security, told members of the French parliamentary commission: ‘We are on the brink of civil war’.
According to French newspaper Le Figaro, he said: ‘This confrontation I think it will take place.
‘Even one or two attacks and it will happen. It therefore behooves us to anticipate and block all these groups.’
Yesterday a leaked report revealed a staggering 1,200 women were sexually abused in German cities during the New Year’s Eve celebrations.
The police document said detectives believe 2,000 men were involved across various cities but that the bulk of the crimes were committed in Cologne and Hamburg, where 600 and 400 sexual assaults on women were reported respectively.
France is on the verge of a ‘civil war’ which could be sparked by the mass sexual assault of women by migrants similar to the one seen in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, intelligence chief Patrick Calvar says.
Of the 2,000 perpetrators, only 120 have been identified, and about half of them were foreign nationals who had only recently arrived in Germany.
Eyewitnesses described the night of December 31, which saw many Arab and North African asylum seekers and immigrants gang rape and attack hundreds of women, as being akin to a war zone.
The warning from Mr Calvar follows similar concerns expressed by prominent police, army and security experts from across Europe.
Sexual assaults: Yesterday a leaked report revealed a staggering 1,200 women were sexually abused in German cities during the New Year’s Eve celebrations. The night of December 31 in Cologne is pictured In May the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, said Europe would face a ‘populist uprising’ if its governments did not take control of the migrant crisis. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was also told by security experts last October that middle class citizens in Germany were becoming ‘radicalised’ because of her open borders migrant policy. She was warned that it could lead to widespread disorder.
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Via: dailymail.co.uk
Read More:Wynton Rufer makes bid to coach the Phoenix SAM WORTHINGTON
PETER MEECHAM/Fairfax NZ WYNTON RUFER: The All Whites legend has put his name in the ring for the Wellington Phoenix job. Relevant offers
All Whites legend Wynton Rufer has applied for the vacant Wellington Phoenix coaching position.
The Oceania footballer of the 20th century told The Dominion Post he had thrown his hat in the ring to replace Ricki Herbert but would not comment on whether he had been interviewed or shortlisted.
The Phoenix hope to make an announcement by the end of the month but regardless of whether he got the gig, Rufer hoped to work with the A-League club in some capacity.
"I've always been a big fan of the Phoenix, I'm here for football and we've got to try and help each other," Rufer said.
That relationship has already been rekindled, with Rufer facilitating a two-week training stint for Louis Fenton and Tyler Boyd at Werder Bremen. The Phoenix youngsters fly out for Germany today and will also play in Rufer's WYNRS team at next month's Fifa Youth Cup.
"I've been talking to [Phoenix co-owner] Gareth Morgan for a while actually, about the boys coming. To sweeten the whole thing I said I'd get them a couple of weeks training at Werder Bremen. You could call it a trial because if they have a good showing, it's pretty obvious the club's going to come back and say ‘hey Wynton, we like what we saw, can we get to see them again or what's the contract situation?' "
Rufer said he had also facilitated Stuttgart's offer for young All Whites star Marco Rojas, who is bound for Europe after leaving Melbourne Victory.
Rufer said he had been involved in discussing a scenario where Rojas would sign with Stuttgart but then get loaned back to the Victory next season to continue his development.
Rufer was thrilled with the rise of former Phoenix winger Rojas, who was judged the A-League's player of the year at an awards ceremony on Monday.
But he believed he would have been better served delaying his move.
"He had a great season for sure but it's about consistency," Rufer said. "Marco got the player of the year award but if we're brutally honest, the final part of the season, he didn't play so well. But this is the first time he's played under the new coaching staff there, with Ange Postecoglou, who's really positive, so I think it's best for him to stay for another year."
- The Dominion PostHillary Clinton is acknowledging the difficulty of her loss in the presidential race for her supporters and urging them to persevere through the Donald Trump era.
In remarks that were equal parts pep talk and funeral dirge, Clinton encouraged her backers to “never, ever give up.”
“I know this isn’t easy. I know that over the past week a lot of people have asked themselves whether America is the country we thought it was,” Clinton said Wednesday night at the annual gala of the Children’s Defense Fund, the child advocacy organization where she started her legal career. “But please listen to me when I say this: America is worth it.”
She added: “It’s up to each and every one of us to keep working to make America better and stronger and fairer.”
Clinton never cited the president-elect by name in her remarks, making only an oblique reference to the controversial policies that fueled his rise to the White House.
Instead, she focused on the future, asking her backers to “stay engaged on every level.”
“We need you. America needs your energy,” she said.
Clinton’s surprising loss threw her party into a period of intense soul-searching, with an ascendant liberal wing blaming Clinton’s campaign for failing to embrace a more populist economic message. In private calls with donors and Democratic officials, Clinton has largely attributed her defeat to the decision by the FBI to re-examine her use of a private server as secretary of state.
In her remarks, Clinton offered no accounting for any failures she may have made during her presidential campaign, though she admitted that the past week hasn’t been easy.
“There have been a few times this past week when all I wanted to do was just to curl up with a good book or our dogs and never leave the house again,” she ruefully admitted.
She chose friendly ground to make her first public appearance since her emotional concession speech in New York City last Wednesday. Her first job out of law school in the 1970s was for Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman. She later became a staff attorney and chairman of the group’s board.
Throughout her campaign, she cited her work for the group as her “north star,” sparking her interest in standing up against injustice toward children and families.
The group, which helps disadvantaged children, tried to return some of the affection on Wednesday night.
“We love her and we appreciate all the hard work she has done and say it’s not going to be for naught,” said Edelman, in her introductory remarks. “We’re going to say that she is the people’s president.”
Still, in a sign of Clinton’s new life as a private citizen, the event lacked many of the trappings of her presidential campaign. Security was light and she traveled with only a handful of aides.
Sprinkled throughout the small theater where she addressed donors and supporters were a handful of empty seats.Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is set to be replaced by President Trump's nominee, Jay Powell. However, it might not be as much of a change as you think.
A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on Dec. 18, 2017.
Michael Douglass: Story No. 1: Jerome Powell as the new Fed chair.
Matt Frankel: This was not unexpected. President Trump did not renominate Janet Yellen, which set off a big wave of speculation -- is he going to nominate somebody more conservative or dovish, I guess you would say. But he nominated Jerome Powell, who's pretty much, it was his best choice for making a change without actually making a change, is the best way I could put it. Nothing really changed in terms of expectations. Before he was nominated, the markets expected three interest rate hikes in 2018, for example. They still expect that. Not much has changed, which is a good thing. If it's not broke, don't fix it. But this was President Trump's way of putting a little bit of a change at the Federal Reserve without actually making too much of a ruckus about it.
Douglass: Yes. Yellen and Powell, I think they can best be characterized as centrist and a little dovish. And by that what I mean is, doves tend to be very measured about raising interest rates, sometimes even want more fiscal stimulus, whereas the hawks tend to be more in favor of raising interest rates to keep up with American economic growth. So Yellen, and now Powell, have tended to say, yes, we're going to do some interest rate increases, but they're going to be very slow and very measured. We do not want to disrupt this economic recovery.
Frankel: Yeah, definitely. Basically, they don't want to add to any uncertainty that already exists. Between tax reform, things like North Korea, there are a lot of things that could cause volatility in 2018, but the Fed probably won't be one of them.
Douglass: Right. And when thinking about this story, that's probably the key investing takeaway: The Fed is not going to be contributing to volatility next year, as far as we can tell. Of course, no one can predict the future, etc. But we have no reason, based on Jerome Powell's history, to think that the Fed is going to be anything but a stabilizing force next year and in the years to come.Stargazy pie (sometimes called starrey gazey pie, stargazey pie and other variants) is a Cornish dish made of baked pilchards (or sardines), along with eggs and potatoes, covered with a pastry crust. Although there are a few variations with different fish being used, the unique feature of stargazy pie is fish heads (and sometimes tails) protruding through the crust, so that they appear to be gazing skyward.
The dish is traditionally held to have originated from the village of Mousehole in Cornwall and is traditionally eaten during the festival of Tom Bawcock's Eve to celebrate his heroic catch during a very stormy winter. According to the modern festival, which is combined with the Mousehole village illuminations, the entire catch was baked into a huge stargazy pie, encompassing seven types of fish and saving the village from starvation. The story of Bawcock was popularised by Antonia Barber's children's book The Mousehole Cat, which featured the stargazy pie. In 2007 contestant Mark Hix won the BBC's Great British Menu with a variant of the dish.
Description [ edit ]
A merry plaas you may believe
woz Mowsel pon Tom Bawcock's Eve.
To be theer then oo wudn wesh
To sup o sibm soorts o fesh!
Wen morgee brath ad cleard tha path
Comed lances for a fry,
An then us had a bet o scad
an starry gazee py.
Nex cumd fermaads, braa thustee jaads
As maad ar oozles dry,
An ling an haak, enough to maak
a raunen shark to sy!
A aech wed clunk as ealth wer drunk
En bumpers bremmen y,
An wen up caam Tom Bawcock's naam
We praesed un to tha sky.[1] Old Cornwall 1927
Stargazy pie is a pastry-based fish pie which, by tradition, is filled with whole pilchards. Critically, the pilchards must retain their heads, which then poke through the pastry top, appearing to gaze at the stars. The position of the fish allows the oil that is released during cooking to drain into the pie, adding a fuller flavour and ensuring the pie is moist.[2] The celebrity chef Rick Stein suggested also poking the pilchards' tails through the pie crust to give the effect of leaping through water.[3]
In spite of the fact that the British Food Trust describes the dish as being fun as well as amusing to children,[2] it has been listed in "Yuck! Disgusting things people eat", a lifestyle feature by the New York Daily News based upon the book by an American author, Neil Setchfield.[4][5] On Tom Bawcock's Eve it is served in The Ship Inn, the only pub in Mousehole, sometimes after a re-enactment of the legend.[6]
Origins [ edit ]
The pilchards must retain their heads
The pie originates from the fishing village of Mousehole in Cornwall. As with many parts of Cornish heritage, a legend has appeared about its origins. In this case, the pie is served to celebrate the bravery of Tom Bawcock, a local fisherman in the 16th century. The legend explains that one winter had been particularly stormy, meaning that none of the fishing boats had been able to leave the harbour. As Christmas approached, the villagers, who relied on fish as their primary source of food, were facing starvation.[7][better source needed]
On 23 December, Tom Bawcock decided to brave the storms and went out in his fishing boat. Despite the stormy weather and the difficult seas, he managed to catch enough fish to feed the entire village. The entire catch (including seven types of fish) was baked into a pie, which had the fish heads poking through to prove that there were fish inside. Ever since then, the Tom Bawcock's Eve festival is held on 23 December in Mousehole. The celebration and memorial to the efforts of Tom Bawcock sees the villagers parading a huge stargazy pie during the evening with a procession of handmade lanterns, before eating the pie itself.[7][8][9]
An older feast, held by the fishermen towards the end of December, included a pie cooked with different fish to represent the variety of catches the men hoped to achieve in the coming year. There is a possibility that Tom Bawcock's Eve is an evolution of this festival.[10] Since 1963, the festival has been run against the backdrop of the Mousehole village illuminations, where the entire harbour is lit up, along with many other displays.[11] One set of lights even represents the pie itself, showing fish heads and tails protruding from a pie dish underneath six stars.[12]
There was a rumour that the entire festival was a fabrication by the landlord of The Ship Inn in the 1950s. However, festivities had been recorded by Morton Nance, an author on the Cornish language, in 1927 in the magazine Old Cornwall. His description was regarding the festivities prior to 1900, though he doubted the reality of Tom Bawcock, suggesting it was in fact "Beau Coc". He also went on to confirm that the origins of the festival dated back to pre-Christian times, though it is unclear at what time the stargazy pie became part of the festivities. Morton Nance went on to restore the traditional song sung on Tom Bawcock's Eve, played to the local tune "wedding March".[13]
A legend surrounding stargazy pie, along with the other unusual pies of Cornwall, is that they were the reason that the Devil never came to Cornwall. In his book Popular romances of the west of England; or, The drolls, traditions, and superstitions of old Cornwall, a collection of Cornish traditions, Robert Hunt explains that the Devil crossed the River Tamar to Torpoint. The chapter, entitled "The Devil's Coits, etc", reasons that the Devil discovered the Cornish would put anything in a pie and decided to leave before they took a fancy to a "devilly" pie, returning to Devon.[14][15]
Recipes [ edit ]
Stargazy pie, with sardines looking skywards before it is baked in the oven
The original pie in the legend included sand eels, horse mackerel, pilchards, herring, dogfish and ling along with a seventh fish. In a traditional pie, the primary ingredient is the pilchard (sardine), although mackerel or herring is used as a substitute. Richard Stevenson, chef at The Ship Inn in Mousehole, suggests that any white fish will work for the filling, with pilchards or herring just added for the presentation. Prior to putting it in the pie the fish should be skinned and boned (except the head and tail) to make it easier to eat. Along with the fish, the other traditional ingredients are thickened milk, eggs and boiled potatoes.[16]
There are many recipe variations around the traditional ingredients, some of which include hard-boiled eggs, bacon, onion, mustard or white wine. Other alternatives to the main fish can be crayfish and rabbit or mutton. The stargazy pie is always topped with a pastry lid, generally shortcrust but sometimes puff pastry, through which the fish heads and sometimes tails protrude.[16]
For presentation, one suggestion is that the pilchards be arranged with their tails toward the centre of the pie and their heads poking up through the crust around the edge. As it includes potatoes and pastry, the pie can be served on its own or with crusty bread, sometimes with vegetables. Other suggested accompaniments are Cornish Yarg cheese, rhubarb chutney, poached eggs or a slice of lemon.[16][17]
In popular culture [ edit ]
The children's book The Mousehole Cat by Antonia Barber is inspired by Tom Bawcock's Eve. It is the story of Tom Bawcock and his loyal black and white cat, Mowzer, setting sail to catch the fish. When the boat hits the storm, it is represented by a giant "Storm-Cat", allowing Mowzer to eventually save the day by soothing the storm with her purring. This purring becomes a song and while the Storm-Cat is resting Tom is able to haul in his catch and return to the village. When they arrive back at the village, the entire catch is baked into a "Star-Gazy" pie, on which the villagers feast.
The main course of the second series of the Great British Menu was won by Mark Hix, head chef at The Ivy in London, with a variation on stargazy pie,[18] which combined rabbit and crayfish for the filling, poking some crayfish through the pie crust. Hix had previously created a mutton and crayfish for a festival aimed at increasing the use of the meat, and it was served at his London restaurants for a time.[19]
American rock band The Silver Seas (under their previous name The Bees U.S.) released an album called Starry Gazey Pie in 2004; the album and title track referred to a recipe in a cookbook which band member Daniel Tashian remembered from his childhood.[20]
The 2004 film Ladies in Lavender, starring Dame Judi Dench, Dame Maggie Smith, Daniel Brühl, Natascha McElhone and Miriam Margolyes, includes a scene where stargazy pie is prepared and served.[21]
See also [ edit ]Second Life, the online world popular in the noughties where people could create digital versions of themselves. Flickr/Linden Lab Estonia is one of the most digitally advanced nations in the world, with digital public services, online voting, blockchain-based healthcare records, and paperless cabinet meetings in government since 2000.
But its most radical project is e-residency — letting people from around the world become digital residents of Estonia online.
"The question is how can we increase the customer base in Estonia because if you want to be a richer country you need more customers and we don't get those customers," Taavi Kotka, Estonia's chief information officer, tells Business Insider.
He adds: "Immigration is basically nothing here. It's so far north people don't want to be here physically. The only way to increase the population was the add them as digital ones."
Estonia's 1.3 million people each have an identity card with a unique identifier that allows them to access over 1,000 public services, like healthcare and paying taxes online, and private sector digital services that use the same system.
Key identifying data such as signatures are stored in the system alongside the unique number, giving you a unique online identifier you can use to sign documents online and basically verify you are who you say you are online.
"It's called CaaS," Kotka says. "There's SaaS [software as a service ]. We're country as a service. That's the ambition. It started about a year ago and we're at about 10,000 users at the moment. So in startup terms, that's quite significant."
Kotka comes from the world of startups. The entrepreneur and software developer came to government in 2013 after 6 years as CEO of Nortal, one of the largest software development companies in the Baltics.
While people may sign up for e-residency to get access to the public services, the idea is they then might go on to set up an Estonian company online. Estonian companies working with e-residents and their businesses then get a boost.
"You can still work from Bali or wherever as long as you have internet," Kotka says. He highlights Estonian company Leapin.eu, which helps you set up a micro company online.
"You go to the webpage, you put the name in, you put your bank details and you press create company and you are up and running. You log in with your digital ID. Because that's the thing, we always have to know who's behind the computer."
For now, e-residency is in its infancy.
Kotka says: "We haven't advertised it a lot because we are still missing some elements. For example, currently, it's illegal to open a bank account in Estonia long distance, from a money laundering point of view. Now they are changing that. It's still as difficult to get a bank account, you have to talk to the bank on the phone and prove you have means, but you don't have to travel to Estonia anymore. When this is done, there will be a campaign about it."
'It's impossible to properly govern because they don't have proper data'
It's also just one of Kotka's many projects. Kotka is in charge of making sure all the digital services offered by the government are joined up and coming up with new ways to use technology in government.
"I think the most interesting thing I'm doing at the moment is future prediction modeling," Kotka says. "For governments, it's basically impossible to properly govern the country because they don't have proper data. They have some marker level statistics — unemployment, GDP, trade. But it's behind, you get last year's report.
"But in Estonia, we started to ask companies to give us more data. The reason is we wanted to get rid of fraud. Currently, all the companies in Estonia are declaring their B2B deals. If I'm a company and you're a company and I buy something off you and it's more than €1,000, we both have to declare it.
Estonia's CIO Taavi Kotka. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins "In this way, the government has a huge database. We actually know how the economy is doing. For example, there's an 8% probability that if we don't do anything we could lose 5,000 jobs in Eastern Estonia in the Chemical industry in the next 6 months." [Update: Kotka asked us to clarify that this is just a theoretical example, not a real life problem.]
"Or we can start giving risk profiles to local government and say you are in zone red right now, if you want to get into zone yellow you need to attract 600 businesses or something.
"I can tell which businesses are going down and give them advice. Of course it's probability, it's not 100%, but it's way better than what we have at the moment."
Estonia and the UK are both part of the D5 alliance, a group of digitally-advanced countries that share knowledge about government adoption of technology. Estonia is far more advanced that Britain — how can we catch up?
"Your government has officially said it will never start issuing numbers to people — social security numbers or whatever," he says. "When I hear this I think, OK, then digital society [will] never happen in the UK."
When I hear this I think, OK, then digital society never happens in the UK.
A 2006 act in the UK introduced national identity in Britain but the act was repealed in 2010 after opposition from privacy campaigners.
"It's an engineering thing, it's not a question about privacy or anything else. If you don't put unique identifiers on people you can't connect data."
Kotka, who also advises the European Commission on its digital society initiative, is unencumbered by such political issues in Estonia. He says: "In Estonia and all of Scandinavia, people have seen and felt the benefits of IT. It gives them more trust in the solutions."
He adds: "I have been like a kid in a candy store. I have lots of investment money and full political support."What the Federal Reserve Is Doing to Solve the Credit Crunch. This Is Getting Little Publicity.
Feb. 18, 2008
The FED is deflating.
I define the noun deflation as "a decrease in the money supply." When the FED deflates, this refers to a decrease in the monetary base.
The monetary base reversed in recent days. It is headed lower.
The crisis began on August 11. If we compare the adjusted monetary base on August 15 with the most recent figure, February 13, it is down by 0.4% on an annual basis.
This is incredible. With all talk about the FED inflating in order to reduce the FedFunds rate, in fact it has sold T-bills and other assets, net, thereby reducing the monetary base.
Look at the chart for M1. It does not precisely reflect the monetary base, but it comes close. The figure for February 18, 2008 is below the figure for the first week of January, 2007. There was a spike upward in August. Then it fell back in late August, bounced around, but headed generally lower. It fell like a stone in the first week of January.
Note: I have written a detailed report on M1 as the most reliable monetary indicator of price inflation over the following year. Click here.
This is confirmed by a report released last week by the New York FED, Domestic Open Market Operations During 2007. Chart 9 on page 16 tells the story.
The FED has been deflating!
This is not what the public is being told by the financial media, including the "hard money" media.
Then why is the FedFunds rate in the 3% range? Because the T-bill rate is at 2.2%. Short rates are falling because there is a move to safety. It is the fear of recession, not the FED's non-existent policy of inflation, that is driving the credit markets.
Why is the FED deflating? There is no public explanation. I don't think the general investing public knows that the FED is deflating. So, the FED offers no explanation.
My guess: fear of a falling dollar internationally. If it is not this, then I do not understand the policy.
Those who expect near-term price inflation to continue at 3% or higher will be disappointed.
Those who think that the precious metals are rising because of a looming threat of price inflation in the United States are mistaken.
All is not what is seems. But, then again, it rarely is.
Do not be stampeded by warnings of imminent price inflation. Those warnings will be valid one of these days, or years, but not in 2008.
Pay no attention to the little bearded man behind the curtain, who told the Senate Banking Committee on February 14, "At present, my baseline outlook involves a period of sluggish growth, followed by a somewhat stronger pace of growth starting later this year as the effects of monetary and fiscal stimulus begin to be felt." There has been no monetary |
here was the real feat. They joined forces last winter — Gulari looking for a new crew, Chafee a new skipper — and only a week before Olympic qualifying began in Miami.
Buy Photo Bora Gulari, a 2001 graduate of Michigan, calls the Bayview Yacht Club in Detroit his home base. This week, that base is Rio de Janeiro. (Photo: Virginia Lozano, The Detroit News)
“But we just pushed each other,” said Chafee, whose late grandfather was once Secretary of the Navy. “We kept saying, ‘No, we can do this.’”
And once they had, they were off and racing around Europe and back and forth between the U.S. and Rio, where they’ve spent nearly two months getting used to the conditions — and each other.
“The most important part of being a good team when you’re on the boat is working well together, effective communication and not taking things personally,” said Gulari, who races out of the Bayview Yacht Club on the Detroit River. “It’s obviously a very intense situation and being able to roll with things and just keep trying is an important thing. And it takes dedication. There’s a lot of hours, a lot of travel.”
Olympics worth cost
A lot of money, too. When not on the water, much of Gulari’s time the past several months has been spent on logistics, from coaches to tow boats and fundraising. He says this Olympic year has cost about $200,000, far more than his days of Moth racing, “when I would have to literally be burning money to break $30,000 in a year.”
It’s a far cry from his early days of racing on a shoestring budget. Gulari gave the Olympic Trials a shot in 2004, and after the Moth World Championships opened up more opportunities — he’d tried that class on a whim after watching a YouTube video — he even spent some time on America’s Cup crews.
But he’d always harbored Olympic hopes, and when his mentor and friend Charlie McKee, U.S. Sailing’s high performance director, suggested the Nacra 17 as a new challenge, he went for it. Now that he’s here, he’s glad he did.
“It all comes down to being able to represent my country — I take so much pride in that,” said Gulari, who marched in last week’s Opening Ceremony. “Everyone was chanting “U-S-A!” The flags were flying. It was electric. It was awesome. That was the coolest experience of my life.”
So cool, in fact, that he’s already talking about doing it again — at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics — even before his first race in Rio.
“It’s funny how life works out,” Gulari said. “But I’ve already told the guys that luckily I’m pretty fit and I don’t have a lot of constraints on my life, so I’m pretty sure I’ll give it another go. This is just getting my feet wet in the game again.”
He’s been doing that his whole life, really.
john.niyo@detroitnews.com
twitter.com/JohnNiyoThe Boy Scouts of America on Thursday said that they had denied a gay California teen Eagle Scout honors because he had not lived up to the principle of “duty to God” with his sexual orientation.
The Scoutmaster for Troop 212 in Moraga decided that Ryan Andresen was “no longer eligible for membership in Scouting” after they learned he was gay, even though he had completed all of his requirements for Eagle Scout, including building a “tolerance wall” to honor those that had been bullied like himself.
“I want everyone to know that [the Eagle award] should be based on accomplishment, not your sexual orientation,” Ryan Andresen’s mother, Karen, told NBC News. “Ryan entered Scouts when he was six years old and in no way knew what he was.”
“I think right now the scoutmaster is sending Ryan the message that he’s not a valued human being and I want Ryan to know that he is valued … and that people care about him,” she added.
Karen Andresen said that the Eagle Scout decision was “a total shock” because the scoutmaster was aware that her son had come out in July and had said nothing.
The Boy Scouts of America have a longstanding policy of banning gay leaders and Scouts.
“[Ryan] notified his unit leadership and Eagle Scout Counselor that he does not agree to Scouting’s principle of ‘Duty to God’ and does not meet Scouting’s membership standard on sexual orientation,” Boy Scouts spokesperson Deron Smith explained to NBC News in a statement. “While the BSA did not proactively ask for this information, based on his statements and after discussion with his family he is being informed that he is no longer eligible for membership in Scouting.”
Karen Andresen created a Change.org petition calling on the Boy Scouts to award Ryan with the Eagle Scout honor that he earned. The petition had received over 132,000 signatures by Friday morning.
Watch this video from KGO, broadcast Oct. 4, 2012.
(h/t: Towelroad)Sarah Michelle Gellar wants to know where the TV female superheros are.
The "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" veteran stopped by HuffPost Live and said it's "always time" and "important" for there to be a female hero on television.
When "Buffy" was on, the TV landscape was ripe with female heroes on shows like "Alias" and "Xena: Warrior Princess."
"I'm seeing it almost more in the younger shows... Clearly, I watch a lot of young children's programming more so [because she has two young children]. But even 'Sophia the First'... they're doing it for younger generations... I think it's always time."
Gellar -- who spent seven seasons fighting vampires, demons and saving the world as Buffy Summer on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- said the workload was intense. "It was really hard," Gellar said. "I was 18 years old when we started... Vampires come out at night so you're working these crazy hours when everyone else is sleeping and it was physical. I was constantly getting injured."
Gellar said because her character was in every scene, she sometimes would hit a wall of exhaustion. To catch a break, the writers turned Buffy into a rat in the Season 2 episode "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."
"One time, literally, they turned me into a rat so I could get a break. I was like, 'Really? The most creative writing on television and that's how we're giving me a break?' she said. "But it was sort of like that was who the show was and it was an incredibly ambitious project to do."SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea declared on Sunday it could test-launch an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at any time from any location set by leader Kim Jong Un, saying a hostile U.S. policy was to blame for its arms development.
Kim said on Jan. 1 that his nuclear-capable country was close to test-launching an ICBM.
“The ICBM will be launched anytime and anywhere determined by the supreme headquarters of the DPRK,” an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official KCNA news agency, using the acronym for the country’s name.
The North is formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter said on Sunday that North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities and ballistic missile defence programs constituted a “serious threat” to the United States and that it was prepared to shoot down a North Korean missile launch or test.
“We only would shoot them down... if it was threatening, that is if it were coming toward our territory or the territory of our friends and allies,” Carter said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.
The United States said on Jan. 5 that North Korea had demonstrated a “qualitative” improvement in its nuclear and missile capabilities after an unprecedented level of tests last year.
North Korea has been testing rocket engines and heat-shields for an ICBM while developing the technology to guide a missile after re-entry into the atmosphere following a liftoff, experts have said.
FILE PHOTO: A new engine for an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is tested at a test site at Sohae Space Center in Cholsan County, North Pyongan province in North Korea in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on April 9, 2016. KCNA/via REUTERS/File Photo
While Pyongyang is close to a test, it is likely to take some years to perfect the weapon, according to the experts.
Once fully developed, a North Korean ICBM could threaten the continental United States, which is around 9,000 km (5,500 miles) from the North. ICBMs have a minimum range of about 5,500 km (3,400 miles), but some are designed to travel 10,000 km (6,200 miles) or farther.
On Monday, South Korean defence ministry spokesman Moon Sang-gyun called North Korea’s statement a “provocative announcement” and told a regular news briefing that Pyongyang would face stronger sanctions if it were to launch an ICBM. Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee said there were no signs of any launch preparations.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump responded to Kim’s comments on an ICBM test by declaring in a tweet last week: “It won’t happen!”
Asked for comment on Sunday, the White House referred to Jan. 3 comments by White House press secretary Josh Earnest in which he said the U.S. military believed it could protect against the threat emanating from North Korea.
In that briefing, Earnest also touted the defensive measures the United States had taken to guard against the threat, such as anti-ballistic missile facilities that had been installed around the Pacific region and diplomatic pressure to discourage North Korea from pursuing its nuclear program.
A U.S. State Department spokesman said last week that the United States did not believe that North Korea was capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.
North Korea has been under U.N. sanctions since 2006 over its nuclear and ballistic missile tests. The sanctions were tightened last month after Pyongyang conducted its fifth and largest nuclear test on Sept. 9.
Slideshow (3 Images)
“The U.S. is wholly to blame for pushing the DPRK to have developed ICBM as it has desperately resorted to anachronistic policy hostile toward the DPRK for decades to encroach upon its sovereignty and vital rights,” KCNA quoted the spokesman as saying.
“Anyone who wants to deal with the DPRK would be well advised to secure a new way of thinking after having clear understanding of it,” the spokesman said, according to KCNA.
Here is an interactive guide to North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes produced by the Reuters graphics team.(tmsnrt.rs/2inl1WO)Any 30 day sample of the baseball season will have a good amount of variation. The only thing, I believe, that doesn’t vary is Mike Trout being the best. That remains a constant no matter how you slice and dice numbers. Let’s take a look at a few of the big jumps in numbers over the last 30 days and try to determine what is real improvement or simply normal variation.
Aaron Altherr has swung himself to a.465 wOBA over the last 30 days, largely due to the 7 home runs he’s hit in that time. He took a bit of time to earn himself full playing time but now that he is here he’s been hitting third in the Phillies lineup. This hot streak is definitely intriguing and there aren’t any huge red flags about his game. I’d say the only concerning item is that his launch angle is well below the ideal range. This doesn’t mean he’s automatically bad but just that he’s not THIS good. Dave Cameron has commented a couple times about Altherr’s similarities to Mitch Haniger, solid power, some speed, good fielder, good plate discipline, and overall a good-not-great player. I’m buying the breakout with the caveat that he’s probably a true.340-.360 wOBA type hitter.
One player you may not have looked into yet is Chris Taylor. He’s been good for a.419 wOBA over the past 30 days. I can’t say I’m all that familiar with Taylor but I can’t exactly completely write him off given his performance and the team he plays for, which is the Dodgers if you weren’t sure. He does have a 35% hard hit rate on the season. He should be losing his full time job shortly as Logan Forsythe is set to come off the DL this coming weekend, but I think it’s worth knowing what he has to offer as he’s bound to find playing time as a utility player. The batted ball profile doesn’t scream power with a GB% at 50%, but the plate discipline is solid. He’s likely best suited as a utility player and has simply been hot over the past 30 days.
Keon Broxton is rocking a.372 wOBA with 3 home runs and 7 stolen bases in the last 30 days. I’ve seen tweets and articles all over the place about him breaking out and judging by his tools, I can understand it. But what we also have over the last 30 days is a strikeout rate of 37.5%. Now I know he’s prone to miss on a few swings but that’s shutdown, go-back-to-the-minors level strikeouts. Unless you field like Kevin Kiermaier or hit the ball as far as Joey Gallo, you’re not going to hold a job. That’s not to say that’s where he’s headed but that is the range his K% is in right now. The hard hit % has come up recently, back to what got people excited in 2016, but there’s been drops in FB% and his contact rate sits at 63.8% on the year. The plate discipline is going to be prohibitive here to any type of sustained success. I’m not buying this mini hot stretch but enjoy it while it lasts.
Josh Bell is enjoying a wOBA of.404 over the last 30 days. I’m tempted to believe in this improvement as his xwOBA is at.385 but I’m not entirely convinced. Bell is young and has shown a strong BB% over 10 for his time in the majors, which is encouraging long term. For the time being we can see a ground ball rate at 54% and fly ball rate at 27% over the last 30 days. That leads me to the incredibly unsustainable 47% HR/FB%. That means he actually hasn’t been hitting the ball ideally for home runs and yet has stumbled into a bunch. The hard hit rate hasn’t even been special at 30%. So it’s not as much of a fakeout as Broxton but I’m still not going to be starting him in any lineups yet or jump to grab him off the waiver wire. Great player for the long term but not much to offer at this time.
Justin Smoak. We need to talk about this. wOBA at.393 but he’s only hitting.245 against righties! Don’t believe it. He’s just MASHED the lefties he’s faced to the tune of a.527 wOBA but he cannot survive based on just that success. He hits the ball hard and in the right spot and has showed improve bat to ball ability this year bumping the contact % up to 81% but I refuse to buy it. My guess is he won’t sustain the success against lefties, because who could, and he will return to his old self, or a slightly improved version. Scott White at CBS recently commented on the fantasy baseball podcast that Smoak is being more aggressive early in counts and that has led him to this success. That may be true but I can’t buy it.
AdvertisementsCity Hall has been "standing still" instead of taking advantage of opportunities that would improve most residents' lives, former Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor said Tuesday as she tried to convince voters she deserves a second shot at the city's top office.
"I'm troubled by the inability to lead at City Hall," Taylor, a Democrat, said during a speech at the Tulsa Press Club. "Politics and partisanship do not belong" in city government.
Taylor criticized the budget delivered to city councilors last week by the current mayor, Republican Dewey Bartlett.
Coming in at around $711 million, the budget is the largest in the city's history and far more than the $566 million budget Taylor delivered in her last year in office. During that time, the country was still reeling from a recession and operating funds for the city of 400,000 were scarce.
"What we see is a new dynamic: doing less with more, not doing more with less," said Taylor, who also criticized Bartlett's proposed budget as "borrowing from Tulsa's future."
Bartlett's campaign manager, Dan Patten, refuted those claims, saying Bartlett rescued a city that was in financial turmoil.
"When he took office, Tulsa was in pretty bad shape," Patten said. "Bartlett went to work, made tough decisions and now Tulsa's doing much better and we're moving forward."
The election is June 11.
Since leaving office in early 2010 — citing a disdain for party politics and personal agendas — Taylor has completed a fellowship at Harvard University, practiced law and served as an education adviser to former Gov. Brad Henry.
Until she entered the campaign for mayor, some had considered her a potential candidate for Congress or governor, or the presidency at the University of Tulsa.
Taylor said she wanted a second shot because she missed "the interaction with citizens and the ability to make a difference in people's lives."
Taylor's credited with restoring downtown and delivering the city's downtown arena, improving public safety and fixing streets during her one term as mayor before her abrupt exit from politics.
Copyright The Associated PressMiranda Biletski says she has been obsessed with the Olympics for as long as she can remember.
The recent action in Rio de Janeiro was no exception.
The only difference was that this time around she was in the final stretch of preparing for her own experience in Rio, where she’s set to represent Canada in wheelchair rugby at the Paralympics.
“I’m a bit of an Olympic junkie,” the 27-year-old Queen City product says with a smile.
“We were in the middle of a training camp at the time, but we would have it up on computers up until about two minutes before our court time, with our whole team watching.
“It was a lot of fun.”
Now, Biletski’s squad is set to compete and hopefully have a lot more fun in Brazil — with the added motivation of having watched their Team Canada peers already compete earlier this summer.
A favourite memory from Brazil so far, Biletski says, is watching Humboldt product Brianne Theisen-Eaton’s come-from-behind, bronze-medal showing in the heptathlon — the first combined events women’s medal in Canadian Olympic history.
“It definitely motivates me,” Biletski says. “To see Canadian athletes — especially athletes from Saskatchewan — doing well, it’s always a huge motivating factor.”
That being said, Biletski doesn’t seem to be short on motivation. She has made her share of sacrifices to get to this point.
Two years ago, Biletski — a self-described homebody — packed her bags and relocated to Victoria, B.C., to take her training to the next level.
“I miss my family, but seven of the 12 athletes on our team all live out in B.C., so that was something that I had to do to get that extra edge,” Biletski says.
Still, Biletski has often questioned whether or not her sacrifices have been worth it.
“Being a high-performance athlete is bit of a selfish job, so you give up a lot of stuff,” she says. “I’ve missed friends’ weddings. My cousin just had a baby two months ago.
“There’s a lot of stuff you miss out on, which is tough, but at the end of the day I have a very supportive network of people around me who understand and support me.”
Will Biletski’s sacrifices seem worthwhile once the action kicks off in Brazil?
“I think so, yeah,” she says. “Getting to represent your country, especially at the Olympics, really is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and at the end of the day I think it’s all worth it.
“It was a no-brainer to go.”
Biletski is hoping to clear customs with a medal around her neck — gold, ideally. But with that being said, she’s looking forward to more than just the competition in Rio.
“This is my first multi-sport games, so that’s definitely exciting,” Biletski says. “We’re in the last five days, so I don’t think we’ll get to see a lot. But I’m really just looking forward to being in the village and hanging out with athletes from different sports and different countries.”
Along with Biletski, the list of Paralympians from Saskatchewan consists of Nik Goncin (men’s wheelchair basketball) and Morgan Bird (swimming), both of Regina, and five competitors from Saskatoon — Erica Gavel (women’s wheelchair basketball), Ilana Dupont (athletics), Logan Campbell (sailing), Samantha Ryan (swimming) and Shawna Ryan (cycling).
The Paralympics are to run from Sept. 7 to 18.Critics are assailing Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon’s decision to deploy armed National Guard troops to Ferguson — for the looming grand jury decision of whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of unarmed Michael Brown — as an act of provocation.
“This is why it’s a really bad idea. It’s almost egging them on, telling protesters before hand that troops will be there,” said Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the CATO institute. “If this comes down with no charges, they are going to feel a double injustice against them.”
Protesters are already planning to shut down roads in Clayton following the jury’s decision, and are hoping to attract more people from outside of Ferguson to participate in civil disobedience.
Since 2001, the National Guard has been deployed in Missouri 32 times.
Although the Guard is normally used for natural disaster relief, it is not uncommon for a governor to deploy troops for crowd control, but such cases have led to disaster in the past, most famously the shooting of several students at Kent State University in Ohio in May 1970.
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush federalized all 10,000 National Guard troops to control rioting an looting in Los Angeles following the release of a videotape showing two white police officers beating a black man, Rodney King. Over the next six days, 53 people were killed and over 2,000 injured in the “Rodney King riots.”
This is the second time that the National Guard has been sent to assist local police in Ferguson following the shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson.
Mr. Burrus warned that when troops march in with an expectation that protesting will become violent, it almost certainly will turn ugly in response to law enforcement behavior.
“People are increasingly realizing that its the response of the police officers that creates the crowd atmosphere,” he said, arguing that by focusing on protecting police rather than citizens, the National Guard would only antagonize protesters that are already feeling threatened by law enforcement.
“The paramount concern has become officer safety, not to protect and serve the community,” Mr. Burrus said, adding that it would be counterproductive to use a military force to combat rioters who are protesting police militarization.
“The way you address a crowd in Fallujah should be very different than the way you address a crowd in Ferguson. But that’s not necessarily the case,” Mr. Burrus added.
But John Malcolm, director at the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, argued that the use of military equipment was more problematic than the presence of military troops in Ferguson.
He speculated that if National Guard troops were to come in to Ferguson with riot gear and heavy machinery before the need for such hardware arises it would take a potentially inflammatory situation and turn it in to a time bomb.
“But having people who have faced real danger and can act more appropriately in a measured response is not a bad thing,” Mr. Malcolm added.
Gov. Jay Nixon also declared a state of emergency on Monday but gave no indication of how many troops would be headed for Ferguson or when the grand jury’s decision would be announced.
“My hope and expectation is that peace will prevail,” Mr. Nixon said, according to the Associated Press. “But we have a responsibility – I have a responsibility – to plan for any contingencies that might arise.”
National Guard troops will not be posted at the front lines, but will be used in a secondary role to support the Highway Patrol and to “protect life and property,” Mr. Nixon said.
“The way we view this, the Guard is not going to be confronting the protesters and will not be on the front line interacting directly with demonstrators,” St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay told the Associated Press.
“If that’s the case, if the guard is never used in that regard, they should be commended,” Mr. Burrus said.
Mr. Malcolm added that, while he hoped cooler heads prevailed, it was wise to keep the National Guard on alert.
“I think the danger of not preparing in this kind of way would be greater than the danger of being prepared in this kind of way.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.SRO Motorsport Group’s world-renowned Balance of Performance regulations will be used around the globe again, from the Blancpain GT Series to Pirelli World Challenge and the new-for-2017 Blancpain GT Series Asia.
How does the process work, what sets SRO apart from others, and why does it matter so much to modern-day customer GT racing? Here, the promoter reveals some of the history and secrets behind the science.
Background: the birth of GT3 and BoP
SRO Motorsports Group has run and promoted domestic, regional and world GT championships and series for the past 25 years.
It is internationally recognized as the sport’s leading authority on both the GT3 and GT4 categories it originally created and continues to administer around the globe.
However, that expertise wasn’t gained overnight. Instead, it has been learnt the hard way during a quarter-century of competition. Throughout that time it has shaped modern-day GT racing, the cornerstone of which remains SRO’s Balance of Performance regulations.
“We created GT3 at the end of 2005 with the aim of developing customer GT racing using everything SRO and the FIA had learnt over the previous decade,” says SRO founder and CEO Stephane Ratel.
“The GT1 and GT2 categories we promoted had their place at the time, but one-make championships organized by individual manufacturers were also popular.
“The key was bringing cars together in a way that would allow different models and engineering concepts to race equally in a cost-effective way without sparking a development war, which inevitably drives up the price of competing and deters customers.
“Manufacturers and teams never want to lose an advantage but they understood that we would have to level the playing field by balancing their cars in order to create stability and for the business model to work long-term.”
Cars contesting the FIA GT3 European Championship’s debut season in 2006 were very different to those now racing around the world in various GT3 series.
But, crucially, manufacturers embraced the concept, and continue to do so 10 years on – now in GT4 as well as GT3 – thanks to the Balance of Performance regulations pioneered by SRO and the FIA.
Maintaining the balance of power
Balancing the performance of numerous production-based supercars originally designed to different specifications and using different engines so they achieve approximately the same lap times on a wide variety of circuits is a game SRO has been playing for more than a decade.
The growing popularity of GT3 and GT4 has seen ever more manufacturers from all over the world join both categories’ ranks in recent years.
To maintain parity each new model or update – be it to engine/powertrain, aerodynamics or chassis – must be assessed in similar conditions to that of its rivals.
Therefore, twice a year, SRO holds a compulsory test at its permanent Race Centre base at Circuit Paul Ricard in southern France where each car is scrutinized and driven by the same professional racing drivers. The data gathered forms the basis of each car’s BoP settings, which can be altered from one circuit to the next depending on their characteristics.
The man overseeing this unenviable task, both at the Paul Ricard tests and then for each of SRO’s championships throughout the year, is the organization’s technical director, Claude Surmont.
“It’s a lot of work but entirely necessary if we’re to achieve the accurate results required to properly balance the cars,” he says.
“Manufacturers, teams and drivers have to trust our BoP – we impose it on them so it’s very easy to blame a poor performance on what they’ve been given by us. It’s a never-ending process because there are always new updates to assess, and usually one or two new models a year.”
So how does Claude and his team keep everyone happy?
“We have a lot of areas to consider but start with those that have the biggest impact on lap time: power, torque, weight and aerodynamics,” he said.
“We look at the car’s original homologation files, what we’ve learnt from the test sessions and also data gathered on the engine dyno. Everything is then added to our in-house simulation software, which creates four separate BoP figures for each car. The type of circuit they race on decides which is used at any given time.
“It’s impossible to devise the perfect equation. But, through experience and interpretation, we’re able to calculate fairly accurate numbers, to the point that we’ll know if someone is running incorrect BoP settings.
“Ultimately, we’re aiming for each car to be capable of lapping within 0.3 seconds of its rivals on any sort of circuit configuration.”
SRO isn’t the only championship organizer to balance the performance of its cars. Others around the world use their own BoP settings, albeit with a few crucial differences.
“All of the cars are designed to a set of common regulations, which are known parameters; they don’t change,” Surmont said. “But the track data we gather is very important because no-one really knows how a car will behave until it’s being driven hard on the circuit.
“Some other championships that use their own BoP rely on the teams to supply that information, which often leads to accusations of sandbagging and skewed numbers.
“That can’t happen with SRO’s GT3 and GT4 BoP because we have two drivers working for us in a controlled environment. Every car is assessed using the same tires, fuel mixture and engine settings. It all comes back to creating a level playing field so that no-one has an unfair advantage.
“Furthermore, instead of collecting data from a specific series – the performance level of which could be affected by its drivers’ and teams’ abilities – SRO examines samples from a large number of championships and events around the world.
“These range from the Bathurst 12 Hours in Australia to the Pirelli World Challenge in America, and the Sepang 12 Hours in Asia to Europe’s Blancpain GT Series and British GT Championship.
“The data collected from cars running with so many drivers and teams on so many circuits allows us to extract the true performance of each model.”
With more than 15 manufacturers now producing GT3 cars globally there’s a lot of pressure on SRO to make the correct BoP calculations. And figures from last season’s Blancpain GT Series – where 11 different brands were represented – suggest Claude and his team are doing just that.
For instance, last year’s Endurance Cup opener at Monza saw the first 30 cars – comprising 10 different models – lap within a second of each other in qualifying, while an average of six manufacturers and 15 cars qualified within a second of pole at the first six Blancpain GT Series events.
Such small differences ensure that drivers remain the most important element in the partnership between man and machine. That’s a rare occurrence in a sport often dominated by the equipment rather than individual.Summary: A new study reports that certain brain regions interact more closely, while others are less engaged, in people with higher intelligence.
Source: Goethe University.
Differences in intelligence have so far mostly been attributed to differences in specific brain regions. However, are smart people’s brains also wired differently to those of less intelligent persons? A new study published by researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany) supports this assumption. In intelligent persons, certain brain regions are more strongly involved in the flow of information between brain regions, while other brain regions are less engaged.
Understanding the foundations of human thought is fascinating for scientists and laypersons alike. Differences in cognitive abilities – and the resulting differences for example in academic success and professional careers – are attributed to a considerable degree to individual differences in intelligence. A study just published in “Scientific Reports” shows that these differences go hand in hand with differences in the patterns of integration among functional modules of the brain. Kirsten Hilger, Christian Fiebach and Ulrike Basten from the Department of Psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt combined functional MRI brain scans from over 300 persons with modern graph theoretical network analysis methods to investigate the neurobiological basis of human intelligence.
Already in 2015, the same research group published a meta-study in the journal “Intelligence”, in which they identified brain regions – among them the prefrontal cortex – activation changes of which are reliably associated with individual differences in intelligence. Until recently, however, it was not possible to examine how such ‘intelligence regions’ in the human brain are functionally interconnected.
Earlier this year, the research team reported that in more intelligent persons two brain regions involved in the cognitive processing of task-relevant information (i.e., the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex) are connected more efficiently to the rest of the brain (2017, “Intelligence”). Another brain region, the junction area between temporal and parietal cortex that has been related to the shielding of thoughts against irrelevant information, is less strongly connected to the rest of the brain network. “The different topological embedding of these regions into the brain network could make it easier for smarter persons to differentiate between important and irrelevant information – which would be advantageous for many cognitive challenges,” proposes Ulrike Basten, the study’s principle investigator.
In their current study, the researchers take into account that the brain is functionally organized into modules. “This is similar to a social network which consists of multiple sub-networks (e.g., families or circles of friends). Within these sub-networks or modules, the members of one family are more strongly interconnected than they are with people from other families or circles of friends. Our brain is functionally organized in a very similar way: There are sub-networks of brain regions – modules – that are more strongly interconnected among themselves while they have weaker connections to brain regions from other modules. In our study, we examined whether the role of specific brain regions for communication within and among brain modules varies with individual differences in intelligence, i.e., whether a specific brain region supports the information exchange within their own ‘family’ more than information exchange with other ‘families’, and how this relates to individual differences in intelligence.”
The study shows that in more intelligent persons certain brain regions are clearly more strongly involved in the exchange of information between different sub-networks of the brain in order for important information to be communicated quickly and efficiently. On the other hand, the research team also identified brain regions that are more strongly ‘de-coupled’ from the rest of the network in more intelligent people. This may result in better protection against distracting and irrelevant inputs. “We assume that network properties we have found in more intelligent persons help us to focus mentally and to ignore or suppress irrelevant, potentially distracting inputs,” says Basten. The causes of these associations remain an open question at present. “It is possible that due to their biological predispositions, some individuals develop brain networks that favor intelligent behaviors or more challenging cognitive tasks. However, it is equally as likely that the frequent use of the brain for cognitively challenging tasks may positively influence the development of brain networks. Given what we currently know about intelligence, an interplay of both processes seems most likely.”
About this neuroscience research article
Source: Ulrike Baste – Goethe University
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Full open access research for “Intelligence is associated with the modular structure of intrinsic brain networks” by Kirsten Hilger, Matthias Ekman, Christian J. Fiebach & Ulrike Basten in Scientific Reports. Published online November 23 2017 doi:10.1038/s41598-017-15795-7
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Chicago Goethe University “Smarter People Have Better Connected Brains.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 22 November 2017.
<http://neurosciencenews.com/intelligence-brain-connection-8013/>. Goethe University (2017, November 22). Smarter People Have Better Connected Brains. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved November 22, 2017 from http://neurosciencenews.com/intelligence-brain-connection-8013/ Goethe University “Smarter People Have Better Connected Brains.” http://neurosciencenews.com/intelligence-brain-connection-8013/ (accessed November 22, 2017).
Abstract
Intelligence is associated with the modular structure of intrinsic brain networks
General intelligence is a psychological construct that captures in a single metric the overall level of behavioural and cognitive performance in an individual. While previous research has attempted to localise intelligence in circumscribed brain regions, more recent work focuses on functional interactions between regions. However, even though brain networks are characterised by substantial modularity, it is unclear whether and how the brain’s modular organisation is associated with general intelligence. Modelling subject-specific brain network graphs from functional MRI resting-state data (N = 309), we found that intelligence was not associated with global modularity features (e.g., number or size of modules) or the whole-brain proportions of different node types (e.g., connector hubs or provincial hubs). In contrast, we observed characteristic associations between intelligence and node-specific measures of within- and between-module connectivity, particularly in frontal and parietal brain regions that have previously been linked to intelligence. We propose that the connectivity profile of these regions may shape intelligence-relevant aspects of information processing. Our data demonstrate that not only region-specific differences in brain structure and function, but also the network-topological embedding of fronto-parietal as well as other cortical and subcortical brain regions is related to individual differences in higher cognitive abilities, i.e., intelligence.
“Intelligence is associated with the modular structure of intrinsic brain networks” by Kirsten Hilger, Matthias Ekman, Christian |
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